As the start of school rolls around, you might be interested in picking up some easy money to help with fall shopping. Here's a story about a million-dollar challenge, payable to anyone who can prove that some very common medical quackery has any basis in fact. I'll tell you how you can win the million, but be warned that the odds are that what you'll probably win is a great school science project.
Lots of folks believe in homeopathy, a 200-year-old system of alternative "medicine," based on the idea that you can treat disease with incredibly watered-down solutions. Start with an agent which, if undiluted, would produce symptoms similar to the symptoms of the disease. Then mix with lots and lots and lots of water and shake vigorously to dissolve.
For example, one might dilute pepper with so much water that there's no pepper left in the solution and use this to treat a fever. (Pepper makes you feel hot, sort of like a fever. Get it?) Silly as it sounds, you can find homeopathic "doctors" in Washington, piles of homeopathic remedies sold in drug stores, and even a few advocates of homeopathy at our institutions of higher education—especially at Seattle-based Bastyr University, but with a sprinkling at our public universities as well.
The science of chemistry tells us that at very high dilutions, there aren't any molecules left of the diluted substance. In other words, homeopathy is quackery. Of course if you believe a treatment will make you feel better, you probably will feel better.
This is the scientifically well-documented "placebo effect." Homeopathic remedies aren't any better than sugar pills, but they aren't any worse either. And you should also know that some products labeled "homeopathic" really aren't because they include strong doses of non-homeopathic substances. Dilute a speck of pepper in a large amount of 24-year-old scotch and you'll be feeling pretty good (until the next morning), but it's not because of the pepper.
Back to the million dollars. All you need do to win is prove that homeopathy isn't complete quackery. You needn't even show it cures anything. Specifically, just demonstrate that you can reliably tell the difference between a high-dilution homeopathic remedy and the same solution without the homeopathic ingredient. You can use a science lab. You can have help from your friends. Heck, if think it'll help you tell one sample from another you can use a Ouija board.
The million-dollar prize is offered by the famed magician and MacArthur genius-prize winner, James Randi. (Isn't it great when people who put their money where there mouth is.) What makes winning hard is that the people at Randi's foundation (www.randi.org) won't let you cheat by hiding a mark of some sort on one of the samples. Magicians are in the business of tricking the rest of us in the interest of fun. Since they know the tricks, they know how to catch people using tricks while pretending to be scientists. In the decades that the Randi Challenge has stood, no one has come close to winning.
But maybe you're sure that homeopathy works. For a million bucks, why not apply for the challenge? You can read the details at Randi's web site. Or if you like, I'll help you apply -- with one proviso: nothing is confidential. Your name, how the test goes, etc., may show up in this space.
I'd love to be able to report back to you that a homeopathy advocate at one of Washington's colleges or universities has agreed to try for the million in a public test, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen. There's probably more to be gained from some of our kids testing homeopathic dilutions for school science fairs. The kids probably know more science than the homeopathy advocates anyhow.