8 Fake Medical Products People Pay Real Money For

There's no harm in tricking kids with the placebo effect. The placebo effect is awesome, and "being able to trick kids" is the No. 1 compensation for having them. But you're meant to convince them that a toy has the power to defeat imaginary monsters. The recommended dosage of No More Monsters is three pills per peaceful night's sleep. That's not a placebo, that's addiction training wheels. They're teaching children that pills make the scary things go away. That only works if you're Pac-Man. That kid's going to grow up into a pharmacological pachinko machine.

I've experimented with homeopathy before ...

lukemckinney.org
My conclusions.

... and I didn't think anything could make me hate it more. So, congratulations homeopathy, you finally achieved something. Because playing pretend with your kids isn't meant to extend to their medical care. Look at this kid:

Hyland's 4Kids

That's not medical treatment, that's "doped up to the eyeballs while mommy's shows are on." This is for people who want to drug their children and this is the only thing the pharmacy will sell them. Those 125 pills should be 124 vitamin supplements and one tracking device for Child Protective Services.

Owner of homeopathic pharmacy Ainsworths, Pinkus sold sugar pills labeled "Pertussis Vaccine." Pertussis is also known as whooping cough and "Jesus, that thing that killed 13 babies in the U.K. the previous year." Pinkus was trying to beat Skeletor for Most Medically Impossible Evil Jerk. He insisted that the sugar pills had text warning that they weren't real medicine. Because, as we all know, medicine doesn't always come with a bunch of small text ignored by busy parents.

BBC
Dementors don't use this much dangerous magic on kids.

In the conversation with the BBC reporter's "concerned parent," he admits that homeopathy has absolutely no supporting evidence but implies greedy conspiracies in the medical industry. He also wrote that if a child took both, the homeopathic remedy would "offset the side effects" of the vaccine. So he's using both homeopathy and anti-vaxxing scaremongering. That sentence contains so many outdated medical horrors his fingers should have fallen off while typing it.

If pure goodness exists in this world, it exists in dog form. But homeopathy is all about ruining the few parts of nature that don't want to infect or replace us. And enabling the rest.

CafePress
Just after licking her own ass, she's wondering what the hell YOU'RE doing.

Behold the lengths to which homeopaths must go to find someone who'll agree with them. And the dog doesn't agree -- it's just too nice to complain (also: can't read). But show a dog a bowl of food and a bowl of water and it'll be able to tell the difference. Even though random atomic motion of the atmosphere means that water now contains more of the food than a standard homeopathic solution. Dogs lick their own assholes and understand better clinical procedure than homeopaths.

Even in Amazon's image the product is clearly Photoshopped. They won't risk keeping even one of these in the warehouse in case it brain damages all the Singing Sea Bass. And that "MADE IN THE USA" tag isn't patriotism. That's because every time they tried to order dog homeopathy T-shirts from China the factory insisted that there must have been a translation error.

The last time a homeopath got an X-ray, they started drinking diluted toothpaste to cure the skeleton monster. High-energy radiation hasn't hit this much magic since Iron Man attacked Doctor Strange. But that battle obeyed more laws of physics. And had significantly better art than the lead-lined brown paper bags these people are selling:

Organeekinc via Amazon

The picture says you'll only get one bag, but the page text says you'll get three. Forget physics, this person doesn't even understand numbers. Proven by how they're charging $54 for children's art so bad it repels refrigerator magnets. Imagine choosing that art out of anything in the world. (WARNING: Do not imagine being this stupid. It involves shutting down so much of your brain you won't be able to come back.)

Those aren't art, they're abstract representations of the concept of wrongness, the Etsy equivalent of that 10,000-year nuclear waste storage site designed to warn any living thing to keep away even after all our society's scientific knowledge is forgotten. Though here it's just because the idiot is ignoring it.

That said, I want every homeopath in the world to use these wallets. Please, homeopaths, try bringing vials and powders through airports in lead-lined containers. That'll be awesome.

It costs $27 for the addition of a tiny amount of chemical that won't affect the liquid contents. It's the most homeopathic mug ever made. But boring, because if you drink anything but water out of an "I love homeopathy" mug, you're a hypocrite. And dead, because U.S. drinking water is allowed to contain one part per hundred million of arsenic, which technically counts as homeopathic suicide.

I don't know if scribbling "homeopathy" on the side of a fluid container counts as sorcery, or simply begging the universe to listen to you. The Joker had smarter plans for the public water supply.

It's good practice to check on the graves of people famous for developing insane medical procedures, but this photo doesn't even show if the soil has been disturbed. It's OK though. If there's any mad experimenter whose concoctions I'm sure didn't resurrect them from the dead, it's Hahnemann.

Mary Evans via Amazon
Yeah, he looked really healthy.

You can also buy a 252-piece jigsaw of the same image. I hope that if anyone buys it, Amazon only sends one piece in a box of packing peanuts.

Behold, the RADIONICS MACHINE HOMEOPATHY HEALING REMEDY VIBRATIONS ORGONE CHI ENERGY GENERATOR. Those capitals are their doing, not mine. I don't think I could add anything, real or imaginary, to the abilities this machine already claims.

via Gumtree
A perfect mixing board for the sound of your body collapsing.

That thing channels more imaginary energies than a proton pack. It costs over $400. You'd be better off spending the money on Ghostbusters cosplay and waving that at your doctor, because at least then they'd think you were an awesome idiot. A "potentizer" turns water into medicine by shaking it. All this time your washing machine has been armoring you in +5 T-Shirts of Healing. The device offers an array of knobs for fine-tuning each sample. They can be set to any value between 0 and 10 and are based on more fiction than IMDb ratings. But then, putting huge numbers of numbers between the sample and anything real is homeopathy's core process. It's a child's activity center, except kids gets knobs that look different, do things, and make the user smarter.

TongRo Images/TongRo Images/G
The homeopathic version is one block and a cube the size of the universe.

Besides, we all know that the only functioning "Chi Energy Generator" was Bruce Lee. And since orgone is sexual energy, an Orgone Chi Energy Generator would be Bruce Lee with his shirt off.

A key element of homeopathy is "succussing," striking the container of water off another surface a precise number of times before throwing most of it away. The way every homeopathy guide gives a different precise number probably isn't important. Hahnemann succussed by thumping vials of water off his medical textbooks. I repeat: He tried to get medicine out of textbooks by blunt impact trauma. Which he repeated. Sixty more times. You couldn't be worse at medicine without selling the secrets of antibiotics to single-celled organisms.

tetmc/iStock/Getty Images
And they feel better dealing with lifeforms on their mental level.

Homeopathy isn't even sorcery, because eating ground-up dried frog can have real medical effects on you. People say it's their choice as to what treatment they receive, but this choice allows greedy scumbags to sabotage real science for a profit. Because homeopaths don't spend anything on real medical research. They get to spend it all on advertising. They have to undermine real progress to exist, they target the dying and desperate, and with the resurgence of previously eliminated diseases this kind of anti-medical advertising is killing people.

A two-step solution for these scamming solutions:
1. Replace the word "alternative" with "magic" in a sarcastic voice. "Ooh, some magic medicine."
2. We use homeopathy as a real medicine. Specifically, we use it as a tracer dye, to find and highlight the parts of the species that aren't working properly and try to fix them. Or at least prevent them from voting.

Enjoy even more lethal antiscience with The Terrifying Scientific Implications of Mario. Or experience even crueler fictional hazards with The 5 Most Brutally Unfair Deaths in Gaming History.

Inoculate yourself against more mind-melting bullshit with 6 Ways a Creationist Textbook Sabotaged Science and 7 Ridiculous Things People Believe About the God Particle.

Luke has a website, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.