I like Carey Price. He’s become the heart of the Montreal Canadiens. Carey is an excellent goaltender with a lot of gumption. But something he doesn’t have is a scientific background. That of course is par for the course for most athletes. But Carey is now set to become the spokesperson for Oscillococcinum, a homeopathic product that claims to treat the common cold as well as the flu. Don’t do it Carey! This is not a valid claim and homeopathy, simply put, is bunk. Let me provide something to back up my claim. Something that homeopaths are not familiar with. It’s called “evidence.”
Let’s start by making some Oscillococcinum. Take the carcass of a duck and place 35 grams of its liver and 15 grams of its heart in a one liter bottle filled with a solution of pancreatic juice and glucose. Wait forty days until the liver and heart have disintegrated and then dilute the solution to 100 liters. Then take one liter of this solution and dilute it again to 100 liters. Repeat this dilution process another 199 times, shaking the solution in a specific fashion each time. Then take a small pellet of milk sugar and moisten it with the resulting solution. Package the pellets in a box labeled as “Oscillococcinum” and market it to consumers who wish to prevent or treat the flu homeopathically. First of all, let’s understand what homeopathy is. Unlike what many believe, it is not the generalized treatment of disease with natural substances. Homeopathy was the brainchild of Samuel Hahnemann (1775-1843), a German physician who introduced the idea that “like cures like.” A substance that causes symptoms of illness in a healthy person, he maintained, will cure a sick person who suffers from the same symptoms. But to affect the cure, Hahnemann argued, the substance has to be repeatedly diluted and thumped against a leather pillow after each dilution. The greater the dilution, the more powerful the remedy! (Hmmm...can you die from an overdose if you forget to take the remedy? Just a thought). An extreme dilution of an extract of cantharid beetles, for example, was to be an effective treatment for urinary tract infections because a concentrated extract caused a burning sensation in the urethra. Hahnemann carried out numerous such “provings” on his family and friends and came up with a “Materia Medica,” or compendium of homeopathic substances to use in the treatment of disease. But he did not come up with Oscillococcinum.
That invention came from Dr. Joseph Roy, a French physician who served in the French army during World War I. It was during that war that the Spanish flu took the world by storm, eventually killing about thirty million people, 50,000 or so in Canada. Roy naturally took a great interest in the flu and sought to solve its mysterious cause by examining the blood of victims under the microscope. He described seeing tiny microbes that darted or “oscillated” quickly back and forth. He named these “oscillococci” and claimed that they were also to be found in the blood of patients suffering from diseases as diverse as cancer, tuberculosis and gonorrhea. This “universal germ” as he called it, was responsible for many illnesses! If these oscillococci were causing the symptoms of disease, Roy concluded, then a homeopathic solution of the same should be curative.
Actually, this doesn’t even make sense within the tenets of homeopathy which would require a demonstration that oscillococci can cause symptoms in a healthy person. No such effect has ever been shown, which comes as no surprise given that nobody else has ever seen Roy’s oscillococci. To this day we do not know what Roy actually saw through his primitive microscope, but whatever it was, he also observed it in the liver of the muscovy duck. Appropriately diluted, Roy therefore claimed, this duck liver would work against cancer, syphilis, scabies and of course the flu. The other claims have fallen by the wayside.
