9 Times The Media Tried To Scare Us With Bad Science

In an absolutely shameless display of emotionally manipulative, anti-intellectual bandwagon jumping, The Daily Mail (why are we not surprised) threw their hats into the Ebola ring in 2014 with the headline "Homoeopathy CAN cure Ebola".

The article goes on to describe the plight of four homoeopaths who were "upset" when people started laughing at them for insisting that they could cure Ebola with homoeopathy. The poor things.

The homoeopaths have since lashed back at the scientific community, claiming that, had WHO only approved the use of homoeopathy, countless lives could have been saved.

For anyone who is unaware, homoeopathy is based on the principle of taking active "natural" ingredients and diluting them until they are effectively water. This isn't an exaggeration, even a low dose of a homoeopathic remedy could have a 1:1,000,000,000,000 ratio of active ingredients to water. The idea is that the more you dilute something, the more potent it becomes.

Needless to say, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this works. Any effect of homoeopathic remedies has never been found to be anything other than a placebo effect.

Despite this, the tone of the Daily Mail article was one of shock and disappointment that the scientific community were so "narrow-minded" in their unwillingness to allow homoeopaths to treat Ebola victims. They claimed that they should have focussed on homoeopathic remedies whilst everybody else was wasting their time "trying to develop immunisations".

The whole article is an exercise in scaremongering and finger-pointing. It is, at very best, an example of the terrible state of science reporting and, at worse, a dangerous bit of manipulation that is only worsening the problem of people not seeking proper medical help when they need it.

Oh, and let's not forget the time the BBC reported that a woman had cured her cancer with homeopathy. Jesus.