8 Totally Batsh*t Things People Actually Believe

3. Homeopathy

For some reason, homeopathy has managed to sneak into the public consciousness under the guise of a legitimate, if slightly new-agey, medicine. Thanks to all of the purposefully complicated-sounding terminology that goes with it, a lot of people don't seem to realise that it's basically the equivalent of a magic fairy spell.

You might occasionally hear woo-mongers talking about "memory theory", "nanopharmacology" and "ultramolecular dilutions". Sounds pretty scientific but, actually, behind all the fancy sounding words, most homeopathic solutions are literally just water. The way to make a homeopathic remedy is to take an active ingredient (and when I say "active ingredient" that can mean a bit of onion juice), dilute it in water, subject it to the very technical process of "vigorous shaking", dilute it again and keep going until you're left with loads of little bottles of water that you can flog for a tenner each.

Seriously. The idea behind it is that water has "memory", and the water can "remember" the active ingredients that were once in it, despite the finished product containing exactly 0% of said ingredient. Oh, and the more diluted the solution, the stronger it is. Apparently.

A lot of this is based on a fuzzy 18th century madcap theory and a single experiment by a guy called Louis Rey who observed slight anomalies in heavy water going through a phase transition. The results have so far not been reproduced, nor have any other factors such as contamination been ruled out. But the homeopaths, true to form, have leapt on it and used it as a basis for their claims that a non-existent molecule of elderflower can cure leprosy, which is not something that would be implied by the experiment even if it turned out to be accurate.

The fact that people aren't dropping dead from drinking tap water, which has come into contact with countless particles of poo and poison and dinosaur wee and all sorts, is telling enough. Somehow it seems to "forget" all of that stuff. The reality is that homeopathy just simply doesn't work. Countless studies and meta-analyses have found time and again that it doesn't work. No amount of "nanopharmacology" woo is going to change the fact that it has literally never been proven to work.