10:23 Followup with Boots

I've been following up on my overdose of Silicea by trying to find out exactly what is in the pills I took and how they are made. I've sent the following to Boots and my local trading standards office, who both politely sent me to the MHRA - the UK body that regulates medicines and healthcare products. I'm now sending off some FOI requests to them, and a simillar enquiry to Nelsons, who actually hold the authorisation to market the product.

I recently purchased a Boots branded 'Silicea C30 Homeopathic Remedy', expecting it to contain only sugar pills which had been laced with water forced to memorise the presence of silica after repeated dilutions. I did not expect there to be any silica in this product, though. I have since done deeper research into methods of homeopathic production, and believe that the pills provided do not meet the description on the label.

Initially I expected this product to contain no Silica as it would eventually be diluted so far as to be effectively not present and brought it under this impression. A homeopathic dilution of C30 implies that only 1 part in 10^60 could remain (10 with 60 zeros after it). I now know that even the most advanced water purification techniques cannot produce water with absolutely no silica in and that as a result it is unlikely that this product contains Silica at the C30 dilution level, but instead probably contains Silica at around the C4 or C5 dilution levels, plus extra Silica on the pills leached from the glass in which they are contained.

I believe this product is mislabeled. Please let me know what you will be doing about this.

Ten to the Twenty-Three

I spent this Saturday overdosing on untested medicines. Not actual medicine, of course, in fact, nothing worse than a handful of sugar pressed into medical looking shapes and bottled up with specious claims to cure serious symptoms. Why? Well, along with the Sceptics in the Pub this mass overdose was organised to highlight the support Boots, a high street chemist, tacitly gives to the physically impossible claims of homeopaths.

Being made of nothing but sugar, these pills are entirely harmless, but the credibility that Boots and other high street chemists lend to these cures acts to confuse the public about the effectiveness of the tested and proven remedies available elsewhere in their shops. By promoting, even passively, these sham treatments, they are misdirecting their customers towards products which will not work, and allowing two very different standards of truth to be applied.

Using a homeopathic concoction to treat a bruise (which will heal itself given a little time) won't cause anyone any harm and will make Boots a little money. Elsewhere in the health system homeopathic practitioners push these impossible archaic ideas as cures for serious conditions where not receiving the proper, proven, treatment drastically decreases the quality of life of suffering people.

These non-treatments are not even labelled with suitable warnings, and in the Boots Reading Oracle branch at least are displayed prominently on the aisle where people queue to reach the counter where genuine prescriptions are dispensed. This can only add to the potential for the public to confuse a homeopathic remedy with real medicines.

Boots, and other licensed pharmacies, should restrict themselves to selling products which make claims of effectiveness that can be tested. They are given special rights by the government to act on the front line of healthcare, and are rightly seen by the public as a trusted source of information on medications. We should not let them endorse products as health treatments when there is no scientific basis for this.

Update: le canard noir has some parallel thoughts.

Silicea C30

This Saturday I'll be heading to Oxford to overdose on homeopathic medicines as part of the 1032 campaign with the Oxford Sceptics in the Pub. The non-potion I brought yesterday and will be enjoying soon is marketed by Boots as Silicea C30 (it's not listed on their website). What do the homeopaths claim is in there, and what's really in there?

Silicea is a slightly made up name for what the rest of us call Silica, chemically SiO2, the most abundant compound on (well, in) the Earth. It turns up as sand, quartz, flint and other rocks and gems. Eating those would be harmless so long as they weren't too sharp. It's also used in silica gel as a desiccant, for instance packed in with new trainers, which you wouldn't want to swallow as there's often other stuff in there with the silica. You can obtain food grade silica gel, without the extra chemicals, and eat that, with no toxic effects (in fact it's available as a dietary supplement). The one thing you shouldn't do is grind up sand or quartz very fine and breath it in, as the teeny particles will stick to the walls of your lungs and irritate them for the rest of your life.

According to the homeopaths, though, whatever contact silica once had with the solution that was dripped onto the pills has been long washed away by 30 repeated 100:1 dilutions. This, they say, only makes it more powerful. As an aside, even if you buy the top of the range Millipore Milli-Q ultrapure water supplies you're specified to have no better than 3 ug / L of silica, or a concentration (by mass) of 3e-9. In homeopathic terms this is only a C4.5 dilution, so anyone advertising or selling something at C30 is clearly doing something misleading.

By the internal logic of homeopathy you treat a symptom with an overdilute solution of something that causes the same symptom. To me it seems that high doses of silica do nothing, so this C30 dilution of it should do nothing only better. According to http://abchomeopathy.com/r.php/Sil (which you really don't need to read), though, Silicea is active against a huge list of things, including, to my amusement, impaired thinking. So there you go.

What's really in there? Little balls of fructose and glucose. A double dose of woo, if you will.

(Flint from the Wikimedia commons.)