Mike Adams the Health Ranger on the 10:23 campaign against homeopathy

As a skeptic, I’ve been waiting for this day for quite a long time. These days, no debate on health or science is complete without a contribution from the sparkling brain of Mike “Health Ranger” Adams. Today, Mike Adams has shared his thoughts on the 10:23 campaign against homeopathy, and my, is it a barnstorming rant of epic lunacy!

Like the homeopath (or ‘homeopathist’ according to 5live) interviewed with Michael Marshall on the BBC, Mike Adams doesn’t get the point of the 10:23 overdose. Convential medicines do something, and work at a recommended dose. If you take to much, you go over that dose and it can be harmful, hence ‘overdose’. However, with homeopathy there is nothing to ‘dose’ on in the first place, making an ‘overdose’ impossible. This is simply because there is nothing in it!

Anyway, Adams argues that we skeptics aren’t ‘sophisticated’ enough to understand the underlying mechanisms of homeopathy. Sadly, us skeptics require evidence to believe things and don’t follow the Mike Adam’s philosophy of ‘making shit up as we go along’. With this in mind, reading his attempts to grasp physics and chemistry are usually as funny as watching James Delingpole wrestle with the concept of peer review:

But homeopathy isn’t a chemical. It’s a resonance. A vibration, or a harmony. It’s the restructuring of water to resonate with the particular energy of a plant or substance. We can get into the physics of it in a subsequent article, but for now it’s easy to recognize that even from a conventional physics point of view, liquid water has tremendous energy, and it’s constantly in motion, not just at the molecular level but also at the level of its subatomic particles and so-called “orbiting electrons” which aren’t even orbiting in the first place. Electrons are vibrations and not physical objects.

Of course, there is no evidence that homeopathic preparations are ‘resonating’ or ‘vibrating’ any more than sugar pills or water, and even if they did, what effect would that have? His understanding of what an electron is gets worse:

For now, they’ve all convinced themselves that electrons are — get this — tiny “particles” flying around atomic nuclei and tremendous speeds which just happen to stay in their little orbits like little perpetual motion machines (which they say are impossible), until all of a sudden, these electron “particles” inexplicably leap to a higher or lower orbit without occupying the space in-between those orbits at any moment. Yep, magic teleporting particles! That’s the “scientific” explanation of these folks. No wonder so many of them are magicians: Believing their explanations requires that you believe in particle magic!

Amazing! Note how Mike Adams tries to justify homeopathy by invoking ‘resonances’, but massively misunderstands and rejects understood notions of electron behavior. Do we have an ‘electron denier’ on our hands?

Following on from this, Mike reveals that he has his own version of the 10:23 challenge: we should all overdose on real medicine. Although he’s oblivious to the fact that this would prove the point of the overdose, he comes up with my favourite line in the article:

What really drives the skeptics crazy is that no matter how hard they try, they just can’t seem to kill themselves. To be so out of touch with the beautiful, loving and holographic nature of the universe around us is to retreat to a self-loathing worldview that can only be resolved through self destruction.

Let’s ignore the fact that we skeptics aren’t trying to kill ourselves, and look at his description of the universe. How does Mike Adams accept the ‘holographic principle’ of the universe when he doesn’t believe in electrons?

For the rest of the article, Adams bashes out the same tired old canards about chemotherapy killing people, acquiring repeat business (of course, no one ever visits a homeopath more than once), and that vaccines lower IQ. His final words on homeopathy and the 10:23 campaign is this sober thought:

So if you’re looking for safe medicine, definitely take a look at homeopathic remedies. They so safe that even the critics can’t overdose on them… but you have to admit the attempt makes for great entertainment.

Ah, ‘safety’. Yes, homeopathy is safe, in the same way that sitting on a comfy sofa is safe. Unfortunately for homeopathy, the comfy sofa is just as effective in treating disease.

He ends the article by revealing that the nonsense on naturalnews.com is about to be raised by another power. None other than one of twitter’s rudest members, Dana Ullman is joining their ranks! Rejoice!