My favourite homeopathic remedy is one I found on the shelf of a perfectly mainstream chemist shop about 10 years ago. "Nat. Mur. 10X" it said in very official looking lettering on the bottle.
Let's break down what that means: "Nat. Mur." is short for Natrium (Latin for Sodium) Murium (Chloride). Sodium chloride, otherwise known as common table salt.
Now what does that "10X" mean? Basically, that someone in a "laboratory" somewhere has taken some salt water, diluted it 1 in 10 into fresh water, and shaken the crap out of it while thinking hard at it (this is called "succussion" and is supposed to imprint the practicioner's "intentions" onto the "tincture". It's very serious business, yo.). Then they've taken some of *that* and repeated the process, a total of ten times. If you're good with maths, you'll quickly work out that's a 1 in 10 billion dilution of table salt. Then a drop or two of that is dripped onto a sugar pill and allowed to evaporate, and 50 such pills are bundled into a bottle and flogged off for $7.50... amusingly, as a treatment for dehydration.
The silliest part is that homeopaths believe that 10X is a relatively "weak" tincture, and to get a really strong one you have to repeat the succussion process many more times to *really* tell that water who's boss. So a really *strong* tincture would be 100C: 1 in 100, 100 times over. That's... well, let's just say that in order to find even a single molecule of "active" ingredient in your final tincture, you'd need a mass of water that would collapse into a black hole under its own gravity.
The upshot: homeopathy is very, very silly - the modern equivalent of witchcraft or alchemy, just dressed up in a cheap suit. If you know someone with cancer or any other serious disease and you convince them to replace real treatment with homeopathy, you're effectively helping the disease kill them.
