218 Comments

No, that one just gives you Alzheimer's.

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I strongly regret pushing play.

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The help is called Disqus.

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"The use of words to express a meaning other than their lit-er-al in-ten-tions! Now that! Is! I-rony!"

"a healthy degree of skepticism about the limits of science in understanding health and disease.”

You keep using that word 'skepticism.' I do not think it means what you think it means.

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So Landau-Halpern says that, after kids get chicken pox and measles, there are "developmental spurts" . Gee, could that be that the kids are sicker than shit and, when they get better, they GET BETTER?

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Must be related to the phenomenon whereby every nut, bolt, and screw you acquire over time is immeditately abandoned, never to be used again, by all manufacturers of all products on the planet.

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Time to post this image again...

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My sister trained in London back in the 60s and was taught that to find burrs you run the needle tip over gauze so see if it caught. She also had to see the washed bandages were sterile and make sure they were rolled properly. Then there was bedpan duty and the sluice room ...

Mind you my mother who trained in the late 30's early 40's reckoned that her daughter had it easy. Grandmother, mother and sister together could be a bit like Monty Python's 3 Yorkshiremen sketch.

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Yup, and I have had many family in the medical profession and also counted physicists, biologists and chemists among my friends and acquaintances. All have regarded homeopathy as nothing more than an attempt to do magic. There is nothing to support the outrageous claims of homeopaths.

Do you know how classical homeopathic remedies are made?

First find a substance that simulates a symptom of your illness, so if vomiting is a symptom nux vomica (or strychnine if you work from the chemical) is the medicine of choice; this is the doctrine of similarity. If the substance is water soluble then take 1 measure and dissolve it in 100 measures of water. You then succuss this by shaking vigorously vertically 2 times and then striking against a padded board with the same vertical motion this is called potentisation (or dynamisation). This succussion is a magical process making the solution more powerful. There are automated techniques but they are just as irrational in their operation.

You then take one measure of the solution and add another 100 measures of solvent, succuss and repeat, usually a minimum of 12 times (12C). At this time any measure of the homeopathic "remedy" has only a 60% chance of having one molecule of the original ingredient.

Modern homeopaths will claim that the solvent has a memory and claim some long debunked research from Russia backs them up. Other homeopaths, having seen a program on the Discovery Channel about quantum physics, claim that the phenomenon of entanglement explains the magic - which (of course) it does not. Now the homeopathic flu remedy has to have a dilution of 200C where you would require several UNIVERSES full of water to have even 1 molecule of the original compound.

Could you please explain how this magical process works?

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"a healthy degree of skepticism about the limits of science in understanding health and disease"

First sentence I've ever seen that flies beyond axiomatically incorrect, refuses to stop at oxymoron and lands directly at universe-destroying paradox.

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"I was going to start telling people I went to De Vry"I know this shit with U of T is bad, but that was low.

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That's pretty silly. I liked my ex-wife's cure for the common cold -- chicken soup and a blow job.

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why do your words fail? Because I have accurately described how homeopaths rely upon magic to produce their so-called remedies, or because you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about?

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both with well known medicinal properties

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metallica, and def leppard were ok. i suppose i mostly listened to 70's music. led zeppelin, and black sabbath. disco was an abomination i have yet to explain.

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