This ought to cure what ails me:
Actually, with the advice & consent of my health-care provider (back in the day, we called them “doctors”), I’m titrating melatonin doses to see whether it has any effect on my wake-up-and-toss-and-turn. The pharmacology seems dubious, at best, but the stuff doesn’t appear to have any amusing side effects.
We’re both well aware that you can’t run a blinded experiment on yourself and that the placebo effect confounds null results.
I picked up some 10 mg melatonin in donkey-choking Size 00 capsules, then (lacking a balance with sub-0.1 mg resolution) cut it down using the drug-addict razor-blade-on-glass trick. I can easily do power-of-two divisions, cross-check by eyeballing the capsule fill, and assume the resulting accuracy will be Good Enough.
Useful ratios to get 8 cut-down capsules, starting with the indicated number of 10 mg capsules:
- 1.25 mg = 1 x 10 mg/8
- 2.5 mg = 2 x 10 mg/8
- 3.75 mg = 3 x 10 mg/8
- 5.0 mg = 4 x 10 mg/8
- 6.25 mg = 5 x 10 mg/8
- 7.5 mg = 6 x 10 mg/8
- 8.75 mg = 7 x 10 mg/8
In principle, those capsules are US-made, kosher, halal, and blah blah blah. They’re a third the price of the local health-food store’s offerings: Size 00, Size 0, and Size 2 (out of stock) capsules. I hope that a bag of 500 isn’t a lifetime supply…
A capsule size chart, swiped directly from one of the eBay suppliers, so I can find it again:
Cutting 10 mg retail capsules down to 5 mg shows there’s about 320 mg of powder inside: 5 mg requires 1 + 1/8 Size 4 capsules.
If you’re interested in debating homeopathy, do it somewhere else; it has no physical or clinical basis.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
12 responses to “Maximum-Strength Homeopathic Medicine”
But, but, but, Homeopathy is So Home! Much Pathy! Wow! As the comedian Tim Minchin says, “You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine!”
Ain’t it amazing how folks want tight control of everything except all the “natural” not-quite-drugs, the ones that can’t do anything harmful because they don’t come from Big Pharma? [sigh]
Since you mentioned homeopathy, I can’t help mentioning the story about Portland discarding 35 million gallons of water because someone (maybe) peed in it. http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/04/draining-reservoir-after-urination-incident-shows-tenuous-grasp-of-science/
Sound pretty close to a maximum strength dilution, too…
What can I say? Portlandia ain’t just a TV show… #smh
[Ed: fixed that for ya]
That sounds like the perfect homeopathic remedy for any urine-consumption-caused maladies. What I really wonder is, what do people think birds do over water reservoirs?
I’m still rolling the phrase “maximum-strength homeopathic medicine” around in my head. It keeps colliding with ‘jumbo shrimp’ somehow.
I’m sure those “mainframe on a chip” folks work just down the hall.
In the Chicago area, there’s the “5th 3rd bank”. Went along with the male Marina (last of the summer wine) lookalike clerk at the pharmacy in rural Michigan. The latter derailed my speech center completely, tho the former comes close.
Speaking of banks, a long time ago my buddy Duggles (from NJ) told me of the Long Branch branch of the Red Bank Bank. The obvious search reveals the song…
There’s a small town out this way called Kelly’s Ford. I told my friend Kelly she should open a Ford dealership there, for Kelly’s Kelly’s Ford Ford.
You have always been very close to the spirit of the thing…