A remedy against pseudoscience

I've got a medication for you to take.  Here are the ingredients:

• nux vomica -- the seed of the plant Strychnos nux-vomica, the natural source of strychnine.
• belladonna -- Atropa belladonna, also called deadly nightshade.
• hydrastis -- another toxic plant, Hydrastis canadensis, better known as goldenseal.
• kali bichromicum -- chemists call it potassium dichromate, and it's carcinogenic and causes contact dermatitis.
• ephedra vulgaris -- an extract of the plant of the same name, which contains the dangerous stimulant ephedrine.
• histaminum hydrochloricum -- the organic compound produced by the human body in response to an allergic reaction, which is responsible for much of the misery of allergies and colds.  (Thus -- antihistamines.)

If by this point you're getting worried that anyone would suggest ingesting any of these, much less a combination of all six, fear not: the manufacturer takes them, dissolves them in water, then dilutes the combined solution by a factor of ten, six times in a row.  By this time, what's left has one millionth the concentration of the original.  And in fact, the advertisement for this "remedy" reassuringly tells prospective customers that it "contains no ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or alkaloids."

So, for twenty-five bucks, you too can purchase a spray bottle filled with a liquid containing no active ingredients whatsoever.

Oh, and I didn't tell you what it's supposed to cure; snoring.  It's called "SnoreStop," and you're supposed to squirt it up your nose.

People in the know (and certainly regular readers of Skeptophilia) will recognize this as a prime example of the pseudoscientific horseshit known as homeopathy, which -- for some reason -- is still a lucrative business.  You can find homeopathic "remedies" on pharmacy shelves pretty much everywhere; they come in liquid and tablet form, and are recognizable by the presence of a number like "10x" on the label (that's the dilution factor; 10x would be diluted to one part in ten billion).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dr. Moumita Sahana, Homeopathy globules, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But what sets apart SnoreStop from even the common run of homeopathic "remedies" -- which aren't going to cure anything, but at least won't make you sicker -- is that SnoreStop nasal spray has been found to contain potentially dangerous numbers of pathogens, including yeasts, molds, and bacteria like Providencia rettgeri, which can cause pneumonia and bacterial meningitis.

The company that produces SnoreStop, Green Pharmaceuticals, was notified of this back in 2022, but did nothing to fix the problem; in fact, why this comes up now is it just came to light that instead of destroying the contaminated lots, they simply relabeled, repackaged, and sold them.  They've also been charged by the FDA for selling an unlicensed and unregulated drug designed to treat a specific disorder, without going through the approval process.  (I guess they forgot to put the "This product is not intended to treat or cure any disorder, disease, or ailment" disclaimer on the package, which seems to be some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for these charlatans.)

The problem is, even if SnoreStop is taken off the market -- even if Green Pharmaceuticals goes out of business -- it's only the tip of the iceberg.  Homeopathy scams people for millions of dollars yearly.  And despite my previous statement that at least most of these "remedies" don't make you sicker, there is real harm done, when people refuse conventional (i.e. effective) medical treatment for illnesses in favor of homeopathy and magical thinking.  (There's good evidence that computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs significantly hastened his death from cancer by foregoing medical treatment for "alternative medicine.")

I know, caveat emptor and all that sort of thing.  People are gonna make ill-informed decisions, and you can't legislate away stupidity.  But what the producers of homeopathic remedies are doing -- as well as homeopathic "doctors" -- is deliberately misleading sick people into risking their health by taking a thoroughly discredited pseudoscientific concoction that relies on nonsense like water molecules having a "memory."

The only remedy against pseudoscience is science.  Learn some -- preferably before you need to make decisions regarding your health.

Just remember what the inimitable Tim Minchin said, in his wonderful diatribe against alternative medicine called Storm: "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

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