ActivitiesFoodMagicSkepticism

Homeopathic Lemonade + Activity Book

I'm delighted to announce that all of us here at Mad Art Lab are putting together an old-school acitvity book! Think paper dolls, word searches, connect the dots, and kitchen experiments, but with more skepticism and alcohol. We'll be posting various activities as we develop them; here is an example of something I'm contributing:

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Feeling a little chilly? Homeopathy can help! The principles of homeopathy tell us that minute traces of something refreshing, like lemonade, diluted over and over again in water and shaken a certain way should have you warm and cozy in no time. It’s like magic!*

What you’ll need:

  • 16 ounce glass
  • Spoon
  •  3 ounces fresh lemon juice
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 10 ounces water
  • Eyedropper
  • 30 vials, with stoppers, each containing 99 drops of water
  • Ice cubes

 

  1. Combine the lemon juice, sugar, and water in the glass and stir vigorously with the spoon until the sugar is dissolved. You’ve made lemonade!
  2. Using the eyedropper, draw up some of your lemonade, and then add a single drop to the first vial. Set the glass of lemonade aside.
  3. Stopper the first vial and shake to incorporate the drop of lemonade. Then, succus the vial 10 times to activate it (see Figure 1):

    Figure 1. Succussion

      a. Hold the vial firmly in your right hand with your thumb over the stopper.

      b. Shake it with 10 powerful downward strokes of the arm, letting each stroke terminate in a jerk by striking the closed right hand on the open palm of the left hand.

  4. Remove the stopper. Using the eye dropper, draw up some of the solution from the first vial, and then add a single drop to the second vial.
  5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 with the remaining vials.
  6. That’s it! The 30th vial now contains a 30C dilution of lemonade. This means that 1 in 10^−60 drops will be lemonade. In other words, you would need to drink a quantity of this solution 10 billion times greater than the volume of the Earth in order to consume a single molecule of lemonade.
  7. Uncork the final vial and consume the homeopathic preparation to relieve your chills.
  8. If drinking 100 drops of well-shaken water didn’t make you feel warmer, go put on a sweater.
  9. Retrieve your lemonade. Add a few ice cubes and enjoy.

*Seriously. You would need magic for this to actually work.

 

 

All artwork by the amazing Brian G!

Anne S

Anne Sauer is an atheist with an appetite for science, good food, and making connections between the two. She is currently pursuing her MBA in Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. Her favorite foods are salted caramel ice cream and chicken tikka masala. You can find her on twitter @aynsavoy.

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5 Comments

  1. Awesome! I love that it's done in a satirical way, yet it's just like what homeopaths would have really come up with. How big of a book is being planned?

  2. Thanks!
     
    Re: size of the book, we're not positive yet, though I think we'll have to decide sooner than later as it will affect certain things we want to include…

  3. We actually had someone at SkeptiCal who believed in Homeopathy. She also appeared to be an antivaxxer, go figure.

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