Mallori: Welcome to YourHCG.com support chat, an encrypted chat tool. Did you have any questions I could answer for you or would you like to place an order?
Nichole: Do you label your products “has not been demonstrated to be effective adjunctive therapy in the treatment of obesity. There is no substantial evidence that it increases weight loss beyond that resulting from caloric restriction.” as you are required to do by law?
Or are you exempt from that because you dilute your product until no active ingredients are left?

(chat session ended)

Yeah, so I’m late for Homeopathy Awareness Week. I contributed eventually.

(from http://www.yourhcg.com/)

It’s a homeopathic “sublingual drop” that you have to take 6 times/day and it’ll make you lose an average of 1-2 lbs./day! Also, they give you a nifty diet plan! Where you only consume 500 calories/day! But no, it’s the water drops under your tongue that are causing the weight loss. Not the fact that you’re only getting 1/4 of your daily calorie needs.

They keep advertising at me through Pandora. I guess they’re trying to convince me to get the premium account.

What would be a good way to deal with John Benneth? I really can’t think of any appriopriate reaction, since every reaction would acknowledge that John Benneth is somehow making a point.

You are right. This is a parody on itself. And a bit sad actually – how do people end up like John Benneth? Its a shame that no reaction could help him understand the absurdity of his ramblings.

Too kinky for my taste, but whatever.

She goes on to describe a homeopathic remedy as though it is meant to match the patient’s personality, not his symptoms. She’s invented a kind of homeo-astrology.

Is there anything sadder than someone getting their own woo wrong? Well, probably.

I wish I could somehow do justice to Werner’s direct comparison of homeopathic remedy preparation to the creation and deployment of atomic bombs. But that is beyond mortal power.

Due to the lack of coherence of her speech, she’s not simply building a simile or even a metaphor; she actually makes a convoluted, circular description of the creation of an A-bomb (“you put all the chemicals into this… bomb”), describes dropping it on a neighbor’s house in retaliation for his dog pooping on her lawn, and says “That’s homeopathy.” She doesn’t bother to explain exactly what represents what in the analogy. Without intending to, she says that homeopathy is literally atomic weaponry.

“That’s what we do with homeopathy. We take substances and pulverize them, just like the bomb, and we put them in solution, and we succuss it just like the bomb — we threw the bomb.” (strong succussing hand gesture).

(As with the Einstawkings, even the time sequence makes no sense; a bomb is thrown before it “pulverizes”. I’m pretty dang sure that if this video were someone’s first exposure to the notion of homeopathy, she would think it involved physically “succussing” and perhaps combusting human beings, if she even managed to grasp any of it, which I barely do.)

“We take these little white pellets and sprinkle them with the solution. Guess what we have just made?”

I… I don’t know… I’m so confused, and scared… is the answer “weapons-grade plutonium”? Are you threatening us?

“An energetic substance, to be used when we choose to use it.”

I knew it! Please, please have mercy.

She declares that the total mass of the universe is “really” the size of a bowling ball (if you subtract all the space between all the subatomic particles, I guess — might not be so crazy, that bit). Following from that, she points out that the mass of any human (along the same lines) would be infinitesimal. She says (regarding E = MC^2) “So you can almost cross out the mass. The formula ends up being: energy equals the speed of light.”

Even if it was somehow reasonable to just remove M from the equation (instead of dividing both sides by it), how the heck did C squared become C? Well, here’s how it all makes sense…

“When Hahnemann died, scientists didn’t fall in his camp; the pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit well together. So God in his infinite wisdom sent him another Einstein called Stephen Hawkings.”

This is a Heisenberg situation of beyond-parody-ness. If you figure out what part of it means, the rest of it gets away from you, and vice versa. While I might have misrecorded some of that, she absolutely does say “Hawkings”. Again and again. I’m trying to figure out some clever joke about there being two Stephen Hawkings, but my brain is simply fried.

But while the mind is caught up with that bit, we still have the time-travel madness. In response to Hahnemann’s death in 1843, God — having forgotten that Einstein has yet to be born — sends “him” (not too clear who) “another Einstein.” And it’s also someone who has yet to be born, Stephen Hawking.

This is the why of Poe’s Law.

I was thinking the sermon scene in David Byrne’s True Stories. Benneth would have been a natural for the preacher.

I finally watched that Benneth video. If you remember the Simpsons ep where Krusty runs the “Worker and Parasite” cartoon and exclaims “What the hell was that?!” after…yeah. That pretty much sums up my impression.

I mean…the wind…the occasional (frog?) sound effect, the occasional bit of audio processing (of many varieties) used to emphasize certain words, the random video twitches… This is the video equivalent of the classic crackpot rant email with the constantly-shifting fonts, sizes, colors, etc.

To reiterate, remember, it’s SERIAL dilution.

Even if we accepted your premise that you couldn’t dilute beyond less than one molecule, what do you get if you drink half a bottle of remedy diluted to the point that the bottle contains exactly one molecule of remedy? Either one or zero molecules of remedy.

What do you get when you bottle the contents of a vat that has been diluted to the point the entire vat contains only one molecule of remedy? One bottle that contains an actual molecule of remedy and a bunch of bottles with no molecules of remedy; most likely probability for any given bottle purchased: no molecule.

Q.E.D.