The FDA Steps It Up

It's 3d6 of bullshit damage.

Homeopathy is magic.

Like, seriously. The tenets on which this "medical" "modality" are based are straight-up prescientific grimoire shit. The basic foundation, "like cures like," is the kind of nonsense thinking behind voodoo dolls: something that is like a thing is the thing itself, therefore it can affect the thing. (Or something.)

With voodoo dolls, the idea is to poke the doll and thus cause pain to the person. In homeopathy, the idea is that if you have insomnia, you need caffeine. Because it causes wakefulness, therefore it can also cure it.

Yes, seriously.

But see, you have to dilute it in water by approximately 100,000x (also seriously) while simultaneously shaking it in just the right way and beating the solution against just the right kind of horsehide (also also seriously) to make it work. By the time you're done, the water "remembers" the effect of the magical substance you put in it, even though it's diluted to the point where there's not even a single molecule of it left.

See? Fucking magic. And, well, every single well designed scientific trial of homeopathy has shown that, surprise surprise, it does absolutely fucking nothing.

And yet the FDA treats homeopathic "remedies" as legit medications. Until, hopefully, now.

That's right, after asking for public input in 2015, the FDA has finally announced their intent to actually start doing their fucking jobs and regulating homeopathy, instead of letting it do basically whatever it wants.

See, in some 1938 legislation, homeopathy was snuck through as medication because of a Congressman who was a practicing homeopath. That's why instead of saying, like other pseudo-medical nonsense, "This product is not intended to diagnose, cure, or treat any disease," homeopathic stuff has the active ingredient and dosage just like aspirin or things that, like, work.

For most of the 80 years since that happened, the FDA mostly ignored it because it was such a small market it wasn't worth their limited resources. But now homeopathy is a 3 billion dollar a year industry, and the regulations are so lax that, essentially, anyone can fill a pill with anything and call it homeopathy and market it OTC without any testing.

The FDA finally picked up on that, and claims that they're going to start taking a closer look at homeopathy, focusing on:

• products with reported safety concerns;

• products that contain or claim to contain ingredients associated with potentially significant safety concerns;

• products for routes of administration other than oral and topical;

• products intended to be used for the prevention or treatment of serious and/or life-threatening diseases and conditions;

• products for vulnerable populations; and

• products that do not meet standards of quality, strength or purity as required under the law.

Let's take that point by point, shall we?

• products with reported safety concerns; 

• There have been cases of homeopathic remedies that were contaminated with heavy metals (not the cool kind) because the manufacturing process is crap. And of course at this very moment we can't find the links to the reports, but here's this one covering a wonderful defense of heavy metal contaminants!

• products that contain or claim to contain ingredients associated with potentially significant safety concerns; 

• If you're poisoned, homeopathy will cure you with more poison!

• products for routes of administration other than oral and topical; 

• No homeopathic suppositories. Got it. No magic in our butts.

• products intended to be used for the prevention or treatment of serious and/or life-threatening diseases and conditions; 

• Well, the homeopaths have that shit on lockdown.

• products for vulnerable populations; and 

• Like people who can't afford real medicine?

• products that do not meet standards of quality, strength or purity as required under the law.

• Even if we just go by strength, that is literally all of homeopathy, by definition.

This could be great! They could begin actually cracking down on one of the most insidious (and definitely the most transparently nonsense) medical pseudosciences in the world.

They could also just put this out there to placate people who give a damn about medicine being, like, verified by well designed scientific tests, but then not do anything with it.

Likely their actual approach will be somewhere in between. But you can affect their opinion! They're asking for comments on their new enforcement guidelines regarding magical thinking water dropped haphazardly onto sugar pills. Go, children. Tell them to stop giving utter bullshit a free pass.

Seriously, it's not even good magic, like in a Brandon Sanderson novel. It's, like, the worst zeroth level cantrip. It's Daze. Wait, no Mending. Yeah, it's definitely Mending.

I mostly just light up this here stick and I do better magic.