No Guinea Pigs Were Harmed in the Making of this Post

I had an assignment this semester where we were asked to record a three-minute science presentation. Most people made nifty science shows for school children. I created my own sedatives and road-tested them on a pet guinea pig.

 

Homeopathy is like the Jersey Shore of pseudoscience: so outrageously, obviously awful that it seems hardly worth criticising. I have friends who feel the same way about the anti-vaccine movement, believing that it's only a fringe group of tin-hat-wearing sociopaths with a phobia of needles. But they're wrong. There are so many of these people, and they are very loud. 

Their brains were removed as part of a conspiracy
involving  Monsanto and the Illuminati.

They're loud enough to get homeopathy paid for by the NHS in the UK, and by private health insurers here in Australia. They're loud enough that they can influence large numbers of people to reconsider vaccinating their children, leading to outbreaks of deadly and preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough. They're loud enough that you can't go into a pharmacy any more without being faced with a wall of nonsense magic remedies.

Yes, homeopathic hospitals are actually a thing that exists in the UK.

In wandering the scientifically-illiterate cesspools of the internet whilst researching this video, I became so incredibly frustrated that I created this bingo card/drinking game to try to eke some humour out of the situation:

If you're going to play this as a drinking game,
I suggest using a homeopathic dilution of alcohol.

The point where someone's belief system can be summarised by "IT'S ALL A GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY PAID FOR BIG PHARMA/BIG AGRICULTURE/BIG BUSINESS/BIG BIRD" is the point where you should stop trying to have a conversation, and hope that they get lost in the woods whilst communing with the Earth Life Force or whatever. 

I don't care about the loud people. You can't reason with them and they're not worth my time, or yours. But I do care about their kids and their pets and the random people on their Facebook friends list who see constant spam posts about chemtrails and have that tiny niggling seed of doubt planted in the back of their mind.  I hope that their kids get a good enough education to realise that Googling "ZOMG CHEMICALS IN MY EVERYTHING" doesn't count as research. I hope they don't treat their sick pets with Bach flower remedies.

I hope that one day I'll have enough posts here that whenever a reasonably intelligent acquaintance mumbles something about toxic MSG, you can just point them in this direction, and I'll provide a plain English explanation with some helpful links and a semi-relevant Chemistry Cat meme. That's really the motivation behind this whole project: trying to provide a counterpoint to all the fake science that's out there.

If you're seeing "PERMEATE FREE" or "ALUMINIUM FREE" or "GMO FREE" plastered on half the items in your supermarket, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that there might be something wrong with things that do contain permeate/aluminium/GMOs. But there's a big difference between being a person who wonders if they should find out more about these marketing ploys, versus being a person who screams "SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM ALUMINIUM, OH GOSH, WHAT AM I GOING TO MAKE MY FOIL HATS OUT OF NOW?!" I'm writing for the first group of people. (And also for people who like links to slightly ridiculous YouTube videos.)

One last thing: I graduate next year. I sure hope Scary Evil Scientists get paid as much as conspiracy theorists think we do, because I would really like a Maserati.