When Rico was little, I had a brief fling with homeopathy. He was teething and I was at the end of my tether. To be honest, I didn’t even really know what homeopathy was. I had this, like, totally vague idea that it was, you know, a kind of very expensive herbal medicine which wasn’t scientifically proven to work and plus I was best friends with an esoteric girl. You know how persuasive esoteric girl best friends can be. I can remember spooning expensive shit down this throat and thinking to myself: will this work? Probably not. But it’s not doing him any harm either… God, I must be a good mum, to spend this much money on something which probably won’t work. A sense of calm and peace and stuff like that came over me. And Rico stopped crying, for the first time in YEARS, and then I felt an ever bigger sense of calm and peace and stuff like that coming over me.
And then I read an article in Spiegel, explaining exactly what homeopathy actually was. Let me just explain, in case any of you aren’t exactly sure. Homeopathy is a load of fucking bullshit. You take a teeny-weeny tiny mini-mini bit of bollocks and you mix it with water and you coat it in sugar and you put a stupid snazzy label on the tube. It works, according to homeopaths, because water can remember stuff. The molecules in the actual water can actually remember stuff. They can remember that they were, in the past, actually surrounded by a load of molecules that would’ve maybe cured your illness. And then they get to work, sighing nostalgically to themselves as they think about yesteryear…..
“Erm, Katja,” I said, ever-so-politely to my esoteric friend. “Homeopathy can’t work, you know. You know how it’s meant to work? The water molecules are meant to, like, remember stuff.”
“And? How do you know that water molecules can’t remember stuff?”
“It’s just a feeling I’ve got,” I said, sullenly, before adding: “Anyways, if water molecules can remember stuff, then we should just drink our own wee, you know. Because the wee would remember that it used to be homeopathic medicine. And then we’d save ourselves €7.50 a tube.”
You know what she said to that? She said: “Maybe, Jacinta, maybe that’s not such a bad idea after all.” I mean, for fuck’s sake.
But the people who believe in homeopathy, they’re not so bad, are they. They’re just like the middle-class German housewife version of your American friend who’s always wittering on about how she thinks she got raped by aliens on her fourteenth birthday. We’re open-minded people, we don’t mind a few nutjobs in our Freundeskreis, that makes dinner parties more exciting. But doctors. Proper actual doctors, who’ve been to medical school and everything. Actual DOCTORS. Proper doctors who prescribe this shit! They’re either stupid, mental or lying and you should avoid them like the plague. Specially since they haven’t invented a homeopathic remedy for the plague yet.
