3) Homeopathy

Homeopathy involves diluting a compound (useful or otherwise) in so much water that there is literally no trace of the compound left behind at all. Peddlers of homeopathic medicines claim that despite there being no active ingredient in their products at all they are still effective. According to them the water molecules have “remembered” it.

That’s right folks, homeopaths think water has memory. Now, science hasn’t discovered everything yet, so maybe water memory will be at the tip of the next scientific frontier. But, even if this is the case, how come the water only remembers the one compound that the homeopath wants it to? Why doesn’t it remember the bacteria or urine that is guaranteed to have been involved along the way?

4) Acupuncture

Sticking some tiny pins in your skin does bugger all. When acupuncture first started there were 360 acupuncture points to line up with the days of the year. Now there’s 2000. So basically your entire body is a living medical pin board. They’re making this stuff up as they go along.

Again, plenty of people swear by the efficacy of acupuncture, but you can’t trust humans to report accurately on whether they feel better or not. If someone expects to feel better they will, the good old placebo effect (more on that next) means that self reporting is basically useless for working out what’s actually going on.

The only way to find out if acupuncture works or not is to conduct proper scientific experiments. Have these experiments been done? Yes Sir, they surely have and none of them show that acupuncture works significantly compared to a proper placebo or control group. None of them.

If you search online you can find “experiments” carried out by acupuncture believers that unsurprisingly prove its benefits, but these experiments are never conducted on large numbers of people and don’t have proper controls. A scientific experiment without a reliable control isn’t a scientific experiment at all.