Homeopathy

Here's a link to How Homeopathy works. The comic is funny, but the author - Hector Lowe - describes his inspiration for the comic in the comments section below it. Effing Priceless! Here are the relevant bits without further editing:

So this might seem to make very little sense at all. Fair enough, it’s sort of supposed to. But this did actually happen to me at work – A guy came in to buy some homeopathic tablets, and was quite insistent that I not let them touch the large tub of ice-cream that he was also purchasing. Assuming that it had something to do with astronomically minute quantities of poison that such remedies are reputed to contain (they don’t, by the by – it is entirely water,) I assured him that there was no threat of contamination.

He then proceeded to explain to me, as a primary school teacher would an infant, that homeopathy works due to molecular vibration. Being a mere layman, I will try to explain this process to the best of my limited ability. The water molecules vibrate with the same resonance as the poisons that give them their efficacy. This in turn causes human molecules to vibrate upon ingestion, curing one’s ills. Close contact with the tub of ice-cream will cause the vibrations to shift to the new medium, resulting in an ineffective medicine.

He fucking believed this.

I asked him politely why such problems didn’t occur when simply handling the box, as the human hand also contains molecules. Or why havoc did not arise when different remedies are stored on the shelves next to one another (as they are in our store). To this he had no answer. Perhaps ice-cream is the only fluid capable of destabilising the molecular rhythm. Perhaps it is the kryptonite of homeopathic medicines.

Bottom line: if you think that homeopathic medicine is even slightly credible, you’re a fucking idiot and you need to help yourself to a god-damn chemistry book.