Can you really overdose on nothing? About 300 people overdosed on whole bottles of nothing in different varieties at the same time last Jan 30 in Britain. As they predicted, well, nothing happened. But why go through all that trouble? What is this “nothing” anyway?
It was all over science news and the one title that grabbed me was “Overdosing on Nothing” on the New Scientist online dated Jan. 29, 2010. The target was homeopathy. This seems like a scientific term that also sounds like it cares about your health with “pathy” added in there. But in truth, it is a multimillion-dollar industry that runs on water and sugar.
Homeopathy was brewed in the head of Samuel Hahnemann in the 1800s and up to now, scientists have absolutely no clue what sparked his kind of misguided imagination. He just asserted out of his fancy that an illness could be cured by its cause as long as you dilute it with lots of water and sugar. The most common homeopathic medicine cited is diluted coffee which homeopaths prescribe for insomnia. Now, read what follows slowly as this is where we find out how this something turns into nothing. In chemistry, anything that you dilute past a certain proportion becomes, chemically speaking, “nothing.” This limit is called the Avogadro limit (the equation is 6.022 X 10 23). At the dilutions required in homeopathic remedies, they even go way past this limit. That is why the Overdose on Nothing that happened en masse on Jan. 30 was called “10.23 There’s Nothing in It.” Let’s put it this way, finding a coffee molecule in a homeopathic solution that claims to have it is like finding an honest politician. It is virtually undetectable.
Here in our country, we see all sorts of products (food, food supplements, vitamins, etc.) that claim all sorts of powers from giving you or your children additional IQ points, boosting memory, to promoting overall health through some kind of alkalinity or some overpriced “ionizing” bracelets that energize you and repel diseases. In other words, they strongly encourage you to pay for their products because they will make you smart, beautiful and disease-free. They do this with the most famous of celebrities or the prettiest of faces as if those celebrities were the ones who painstakingly worked on the formulation of these substances and validated it with their hard-earned scientific experience. Most often now, commercials for these products have motion graphics of neat stuff that look like molecules smiling their way into your cells and fixing them. These products claim to go where no molecule has gone before, and yet, at the end of their million-peso AVPs, they will give you the coup de grace, the last blow to your intelligence, in the most unnoticeable font or voice-over: “No approved therapeutic claims” or NATC for short.
Whoa, pills to make you smart, beautiful and disease-free! They are like the pharmacological version of Imelda’s speeches on the true, the good and the beautiful. But just for kicks, here are some basic facts which you should first swallow before you take any of these NATC products.
• Science has not yet found any one substance that can directly give you additional IQ points. You have to live with what you have and work your way up.
• Science has not yet come up with a pill that can boost memory but there are proven powerful measures: reading and exercise.
• There is no bracelet, wand or kind of water that can repel diseases. You do not need these accessories because you already have a built-in defense system called your immune system. There are natural and pharmacological ways to boost your immune system but none of them includes wands, bracelets or overpriced H2O.
In many local shows day and night, hosts ask hard questions of politicians or embarrassing questions of celebrities but when it comes to NATC products, they get tongue-tied and accept these claims wholesale. It is no excuse that these hosts are not scientists. The only requirement to see through these claims is that the hosts are able to think clearly. And besides, they can always ask scientists. At the very least, they should always present an independent science expert’s view of the product and let the audience think for themselves.
You may all ask, what’s the harm of taking these products which are nothing anyway? You will be surprised at how much harm “nothing” could cause. First, it has been shown that people who choose to take these products treat them as substitute for medically approved drugs and techniques. Second, you waste time on these things when you should really be taking what is safe and proven. Third, if for some reason you react to these NATC substances, then you cannot go after these companies because, well, they have no approved therapeutic claims and they told you so (even if they did so in a narration that ran for a millisecond, written in four-point font or in a voice that is as soft as a grain of salt landing on your scrambled egg). Lastly, these people know that they do not have the science to back up their claims and they do not care.
If the NATC products turn out to work for you, it does not mean it will work for another. Your case, precious as it is to you, does not mean it is good enough to be generally recommended for that condition it claims to cure. It takes more than your testimony and those of your fellow believers to make a drug safe and effective for a certain condition to be dispensed for all. That is the difference between a story and clinical trial with carefully measured variables over long periods of time. It is the clinical trial that has the rigor to come up with the evidence for what it really claims. The health of one person cannot hang by the thread of a mere story of another. Paraphrasing Mark Twain; you should not treat hearsay as medical advice or you may get sick or even die of a misprint.
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