Dr. Angelo Amadeus preferred a bowl of warm stoicism for breakfast, along with two slices of matter-of-fact bread. He also preferred his logic hardboiled (unlike some who like theirs scrambled). His steely grey eyes had no truck with claptrap cures and new-age quackery. A shudder ran down his spine and a chill up his nose each time someone mentioned the words “alternative therapy.” His white overcoat was, in fact, a custom-made, anti-metaphysical armour that came in handy during his periodic jousts with grown men who had old-lady ideas about health and science. His starched white coat was stained, however, by the hocking and sputtering of hippy paladins who squatted on the dung heap of pseudoscience and crowed to the world the salubrious effects of treating cancer with shark cartilage and healing schizophrenia with bee wax.
Dr. Angelo Amadeus had had his fair share of eyeball-to-eyeballs with the therapeutic misadventurers of the world who took a buccaneer’s approach to health care. He wasn’t one to blink first, and he could out-gaze the most stolidly stupid and exasperatingly airy-fairy of the new-age quacks. On the high seas of good health, Dr. Angelo Amadeus saw himself as the noble captain of the armada, forever at war with the alternative therapy pirates who sought to loot, maim, and pillage all the hard work done by traditional medical science.
Dr. Angelo Amadeus’s chief nemesis was that king of quacks, that paragon of pretence and humbug, that mountebank in doctor’s clothing, that arch-swindler, crimping knave, and flim-flam impostor: the practitioner of homeopathy.
Dr. Angelo Amadeus ground his teeth into grist of rage at the mere mention of that hocus-pocus practice. Grapes of wrath dangled before his gaze at the sight of mother tinctures. His eyes flashed forest fires, his blood boiled a witch’s cauldron, and his bile shot up like a jack-in-the-box every time someone tried to practice homeopathy in his clinic.
Dr. Angelo Amadeus’s problem was with the fact that the final cure was so diluted that not a single molecule from the original mother tincture remained in the final solution. Patients were essentially ingesting plain water (and paying through their noses for the privilege). Some cures are so diluted that you would find only one molecule of the original mother tincture out of 10400 molecules (ten followed by four hundred zeroes). In other words, the dilution of the so called homeopathic cure is so great that even if you took the number of all the molecules in the known universe, you still wouldn’t find a single molecule of the original mother tincture.
This was the mind-boggling, spirit-crushing, knee-wobbling extent of people’s desperation and gullibility. And this is what drove Dr. Angelo Amadeus up the wall to bang his head in incredulity against the ceiling.
When he asked people why how they believed homeopathy worked even though it their tinctures were so dilute, they’d reply “because water has memory.”
“Ah well,” he’d counter, “in that case, the next time you have a headache, slip an Aspirin into the Pacific Ocean and have a sip of briny water from the Arabian Sea and that should cure your headache.”
