Homeopathy Explained
Snake Oil For Sale!
By J.S.Armour, Feb 15, 2024, with edits and updates April 27, 2024. First published on Substack Jan 14, 2025.
(inspired by the article “Illusion of Delusion” by Dr. Joe Schwarcz, McGill University, 2017, Office for Science and Society.
Hey can you check this out for me?
A few weeks ago, a friend wanted me to check this “medicine” out for her. She was told it works wonders for people with bipolar spectrum disorder. This product’s name is “Brillia” It happens to be homeopathic and includes three active ingredients, Lapine 12C, Lapine 30C and Lapine 200C”.
You can check this product for yourself, here. But! Be forewarned - this is a sales trap… they WANT you to buy their stuff. And they will say anything to convince you it works. https://discoverbrillia.com/pages/supplement-facts
First let’s be clear and get straight to the point of this article:
This product is nonsense.
IMHO as well as countless other science skeptics’ science-based opinions and any truthful review of homeopathic mixtures.
The three ingredients, “Lapine12C, Lapine30C, and Lapine 200C” are not three distinct different chemicals. They are actually homeopathic shorthand for the dilution rate of the exact same ingredient (or chemical, molecule, compound, what have you). This ingredient is allegedly Lapine S-100B immune globulin; this is an antibody which is claimed to work against a protein that causes symptoms including anxiety and hyperactivity. In other words, they are conflating immunology with hocus-pocus.
What does this really mean?
When the concentration of the so-claimed active ingredient “alpine” is calculated using these numbers, it turns out that there is nothing of these ingredients left in the water or pill that is being administered as a “medicine”.
The company advises,
“it is very important to choose the right dosage of Brillia to make sure there is enough active ingredient in the system to show results”.
YET , I am going to show you that there is actually NO ingredient called Lapine in this product, much less “enough” ingredient in even a single bottle to do any good. It is interesting to note that they also claim “it has no side effects”. They show a table of a Brillia vs Placebo test. An amazingly there were no “statistically significant” side effects. Of COURSE not. That’s because there is no active ingredient in the product so how on earth could there be side effects! It’s water. Plain and simple.
I do not know how they can get away with making this appear as if there were three distinct ingredients.
They are not. They are the same.
It would be like listing the sodium from added salt on your 40 oz family-size ketchup bottle like this:
Tomato, sugar, sodium 1g, sodium 3g, sodium 6g.
What? Three kinds of sodium? No. There is NO difference between these three sodiums. Sodium is Sodium. Salt is Salt. No matter how you break it up. This label is the same thing as a label that lists simply, and honestly, 10 grams sodium in a family-size bottle of ketchup. Period. The FDA demands this honesty. But FDA does not regulate homeopathy or any product with snake oil for that matter.
This is the first way they are intentionally misleading you (or should we just get down to brass tacks and say they are outright lying to you!).
Simple math calculations show that homeopathic products with dilution of 200C do not contain a single molecule of the supposed Ingredient.
Now let’s get a bit technical.
• The Homeopathic meaning of the ingredients with letters and number:
The letter after a number “C” means “dilution”. A single “C”, as in “Lapine 1C” represents a single dilution of 1 to 100, (1 part ingredient, 100 parts water).
Lapine 12C means the Lapine was diluted with this method 12 times; 30C repeats it 30 times; and 200C means repeating it 200 times. I’ll explain in a bit how this works.
This also means, the three separately listed ingredients, Lapine 12C, 30C and 200C are actually the SAME ingredient, just with different amounts of water added. This literally makes NO sense to list them as separate ingredients. Except to mislead YOU into thinking that this product is so special and refined it has THREE different ingredients. The ingredient Lapine does NOT change; only the amount of water.
• Meaning based on the Math:
When you read the ingredients and try to figure out what they mea, remember, an ingreidient with a number and the letter “C” means a single dilution. 12C does not mean 1 out of 12, or about 8%. 30C does not mean 1/30th. 200C does NOT mean 1 part per 200.
The mathematics of dilution is pretty overwhelming!
200C can be written with regular math symbols as “1 part to 100200 parts” (i.e., 100 to the power of 200; or 100^200).
“At the declared homeopathic dose of 200C, the total mass of pills that would have to be consumed to encounter a single molecule of the original substance would be billions of times greater than the mass of the Earth.” — Joe Schwarcz PhD, McGill University, 20 Mar 2017.
(Now that’s a large pill to swallow!)
Remember, each dilution represented by a “C” is 1 to 100. 1C is 1 part ingredient (Lapine) and 100 parts pure clean water. One Percent.
So let’s make some Brillia shall we?
The “medicine” Brillia, claims it has an ingredient called Lapine S-100 immune globulin, which they list on the label as “Lapine”.
To mix up a bottle of this Brillia stuff, the homeopathic compounding pharmacist would take ONE liter of the pure Lapine antibody and add ONE HUNDRED liters of pure clean water and mix it well. The resultant mixture is 1 part Lapine per 100 parts water. Let’s call this Mix #1 or as they call it, 1C. This is a 1% concentration.
Remember the ketchup ingredient label? It turns out ketchup is about 1% sodium. This is important to remember.
Because we need to get ingredients that are 12C, 30C and 200C, the homeopath would next take one liter of Mix #1 (which is 1% just like our sodium in ketchup) and dilute THAT with 100 liters of pure clean water, mix it up again. Now the homeopath has 1 part Lapine per 10,000 parts water. Let’s call this dilution Mix #2 (2C). This is amazingly small. It is a Lapine concentration of one hundredth of a single %, which is written 0.01%.
Getting back to the Ketchup that had 1% sodium, 1 g per 100 grams ketchup. To make ketchup out of fresh tomatoes you need to add salt. This is because a 500 gram large plain fresh tomato has only about .09 grams of sodium, or .002% sodium. This is so little that it is listed by the FDA as having ZERO% sodium. THAT is how small we’re getting.
Then, since Mix 2 is not even close to 12 or 30 or 200, the pharmacist keeps diluting. They dilute a liter of #2 with 100 liters of water and they get 1 part per 1,000,000 (Mix #3); then, they do it again, 100,000,000 (Mix #4), then again, 1 part per 10,000,000,000 (Mix #5, aka 5C) - YES that’s 10 billion with a ‘b’!). And we are NOT YET even close Mix 13 (13C). Remember 1C is 1%. 5C is now 0.000000001%. Dang!
Remember - we have to do this 195 MORE TIMES until we do get to 200C! That is how Dr. Schwarcz can say “billions times greater than the mass of earth”! ugh. crazy huh?
Think of it also like this - IF the homeopath didn’t pull a liter out of each batch, but added water instead, they would dilute the first 1 liter of Lapine with 100 L of water and end up with 101 Liters of “1C”.
They will need to add 10,000 Liters of pure water to one Liter of Lapine to make a 2C dilution!
To make the “5C” dilution the homeopath will have a mixture with 10 billion liters of PURE WATER and only ONE Liter of the Lapine ingredient.
How big is 10 billion liters?
• 10 Billion liters of water can provide 1,372,900 people with 20 liters of water per day for at least 10 years. The entire population of Columbus, Ohio for 10 years.
But that doesn’t do the scale of 10 Billion liters any justice.
How about, 4000 Olympic swimming pools!
An Olympic size pool is 50m by 25m. And the depth is something like 2m on average. The pool has about 2.5 million liters of water!
• Math: The volume is 50m x 25m x 2m = 2,500 cubic meters = 2.5 million L of water. Note: A cubic meter is 1,000 liters (a cube with 10cm per side has a volume of 1 liter).
• 4000 swimming pools is the amount of water needed to get a 5C dilution when starting with only 1 liter of Lapine.
• To get to 200C, we need to do this 195 more times.
Each time you dilute this mystical medicine you add two more zeros to the volume of water and add NOTHING to the one gallon of snake oil you started with.
This process adds NOTHING to the one gallon of snake oil you started with.
Nothing.
By the time you get to only 12 dilutions (12C) - which is the ingredient called Lapine 12C on the label and is the “most” concentrated of the three ingredients in this bottle of nothingness (remember, this stuff also has a 30 C and 200C ingredient), you would have mixed one gallon of snake oil with
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water.
That is “1 SEPTILLION” gallons of water added to one liter of Lapine. We are still only at 12C.
1 SEPTILLION
And once more, the homeopath pharmacists just keep diluting to get from 12C all the way to 200C (which are both misleadingly listed as “different” ingredients in this product). They will need to dilute the “mixture” another 188 times!
That will give us the number 1 with 400 zeros after it.
Four. Hundred. Zeros.
For fun, the number called googol is 10 to the 100th power, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The final number for the dilution in this “medicine” is 1 part Lapine in 4 googols of water.
Just how diluted are these homeopathic ingredients?
• 12C is like putting a pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic Oceans.
• 30C is a single molecule in a container 30 million times the size of Earth. (Stephen Barrett, M.D.)
• 40C is about one molecule in the observable universe, note that there are about 10^80 atoms in the entire universe. (Robert L. Park, 2008)
• 200C requires 10320 of our universes to contain one molecule. (10^320) (Robert L. Park, 2008)
And there are even homeopathic ingredients with the Roman numeral M, which is a 1,000C dilution - Holy Caesar!
Additional information:
Homeopathy: scientifically implausible, Joe Schwarcz, PhD, 2022. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-pseudoscience/homeopathy-scientifically-implausible
Homeopathy: Delusion through Dilution, Joe Schwarcz, PhD, March 20, 2017.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/homeopathy/homeopathy-delusion-through-dilution
Sense of Scale and Water Remembering, by By NICK RADCLIFFE visiting professor of Maths at the University of Edinburgh, February 26, 2021. https://www.customerinsightleader.com/others/1-billion-gallons-of-water-remembering-a-sense-of-scale/
“Will You Still Use Homeopathy When You Learn What It Is?”
http://thinkingispower.com/will-you-still-use-homeopathy-when-you-learn-what-it-is/
Review of Homeopathy: McGill Office for Science and Society supports a class action lawsuit launched against Boiron Laboratories and Shoppers Drug Mart for marketing Oscillococcinum, a homeopathic medication advertised as a remedy for colds and the flu. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/homeopathy/homeopathy-delusion-through-dilution
Googol https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/googol-and-googolplex
Wikipedia - lists more than six legitimate sources, including articles by Stephen Barrett, M.D. P. Andrews (1990), and Robert L. Park, 2008, for the math calculations and analogies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions#Analogies