The New Hotness

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.