A couple of hours back, I took 10 pills of the homeopathic sleeping “medicine” called Viasedal, markeded in Norway by Norges NaturmedisinSentral AS (Norwegian Nature medicine sentral inc).

these 10 oddly tasting little things constitutes a 500% dose of sleeping pills, yet I’m unsurprisingly very much awake, and will of course stay that way until midnight or so.

What is homeopathy?

To sum it up, homeopathy is the belief that what makes you sick, also makes you well. But only if you take it in ridiculously tiny doses.
Example: You’re having trouble sleeping, and since caffeine makes you NOT sleep, quite logically a tiny amount of caffeine will make you sleep.

The way you make homeopathic “medicine” is to mix 1 part caffeine with 99 parts water. Then you take out 1 part of this new mixture and put that in 99 parts of water, then that part into another 99 parts of water, and so on, and so on..

This is when homeopathy gets really fun, the more dilute (less of the active ingredient) you have, the stronger the “medicine” is.. Yes that totally makes sense. The strongest homeopathic medicine is actually so dilute that it crosses the a limit in chemistry known as Avogadro’s number, which means that not even a single molecule of the original substance is present in the concoction you are making. So you eventually end up with very expensive water.

The homeopaths say this makes perfect sense because water has magical properties unknown to science, and that “remembers” the stuff it was in contact with. The inventor (Samuel Hahnemann) called this a spirit-like healing force. Hopefully the water won’t remember all the fish poop and pollution it came into contact with while in the ocean.

Samuel "numbnuts" Hahnemann

Of course this is all bullshit, it’s completely asinine, defies even the smallest  amount of common sense, contradicts hundreds of years of research into chemistry and physics, and have been tested by science countless times, showing that taking homeopathic medicine does in no way differ from drinking water (pun intended).

Viasedal

The vial of Viasedal i got contained 50 pills, each weighing aproximately 0.35 grams.

And the contents of this so called medicine is:

• Calcarea phosphorica (or as normal people call it: Calcium phosphate, the stuff you get from milk).
• Ignatia Amara (the plant Strychnos ignatia) Believed by homeopaths to help with Hysteria.
• Arnica montana (wow, I’ve actually seen this plant outside lots of time without knowing it was magical)
• Nux vomica (better know as the Strychnine tree, highly poisonous, at least if taken in non-homeopathic doses).
• Jalapa (plant to help with colic and diarrhea) not sure what they’re supposed to do for sleep though.
• Kalium carbonicum (or what scientists might call Potassium carbonate, or old school baking powder)

Now all of these are present in extremely small amounts, lets’ start with the calcium one. which says “D5″. in homeopathy this means 10% 5 times.

So in a 0.35 gram pill there should be 3.5 microgram of calcium. which is 0.003% of the daily recommended calcium intake.

The other ingredients are listed at 4C, this means 1% 4 times (in other words, 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of X)

In other words, each pill should have 3.5 nanograms* (1 nanogram is one billionth of a gram) of the ingredients listed above.

To put that in perspective, if you ate 857* of these pills, the ingredients would in mass equal a single grain of sand.

The pill also consists of 0.000000005%* active ingredients (the ingredients above).

UPDATE:
*I finally got the amount of active ingredients in each pill from the supplier/producer:
Even though each pill weigh 0.35 gram, less than 0.035 grams is actually the diluted calcium “medicine”, the rest is just mostly inert pill material. So all numbers above are 10 times as high as they should, which means you would need 8570 of these pills to make up a grain of sand in active ingredients. each pill has 0.35 nanograms of the ingredient.

Why??

Why am I wasting my time eating “medicine” that obviously does not work?
Just trying to do my part, showing people that it does not work!

The belief in homeopathy actually kills people by preventing them from getting real medicine. Luckily homeopathy is not very wide spread in Norway, but some pharmacies like “Apotek Løven” at Byhaven in Trondheim promotes this crap

I’ll be eating the rest of my 40 pills on February 5th, as part of the 10:23 campaign, a UK based initiative (where Homeopathy is widely used). So along with thousands of other skeptical, scientifically minded people all over the world, I’ll be eating a bunch of placebo pills.

“Homeopathy, there’s nothing in it”