Homeopathy meets Serendipity
I've been meaning to write this for a while. A few months back, I had an ear infection. Rather than go to the doctor, I decided I'd tough it out, at least until the pain drove me mad. In an attempt to get it to go away, I went to the Walgreens and bought the only thing they had for earaches that didn't require a prescription.
It turned out that the above-mentioned remedy was a bottle of homeopathic eardrops. I admit I was skeptical at first, but I figured I'd give it a whirl, right? I suppose it worked marginally well. I felt a little better immediately after I had put the drops in my ear, but the effect faded after about 15 minutes. I doubt it accelerated my convalescence any, but of course I can't say for certain.
I flipped the box over to read the ingredients; pulsatilla, chamomilla, belladonna, lycopodium, all well-known poisons in high doses, as well as sulfur (spelled sulphur...cute) and calcium carbonate were listed as the active ingredients. Whatever. The ingredients themselves aren't that important to the story. What is important is that next to each of them was the tag '30C HPUS.' It turns out that HPUS simply indicates membership of the ingredient in the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States. The 30C was a little more interesting. I found out in my online meanderings that homeopathic ingredients are measured with a number and an index (X, C, or M), the index being the roman numeral for the power of ten and the number being the power which that power of ten is raised to. Did you get all that? So 30C corresponds to 100 raised to the 30th power, or 1060. This number indicates the dilution factor for the ingredient in the mixture. So for those of you keeping count, I had a solution with 1 part in 1060 (that's a one followed by sixty zeros) of each of my active ingredients.
Let's step back a sec for those of us who haven't taken the time to fully appreciate scientific notation in all its splendor. We all learn in high school chemistry that a mole is roughly 1020 molecules, give or take trillions and trillions of trillions. Let's say the manufacturer starts with a mole of ingredient before dilution and let's further assume that I put a mole of the final product into my ear (somewhat unreasonable: a capful of mouthwash contains about a mole of material--I can't imagine putting that much into my ear, but whatever, it's easy on the math). With a dilution factor of 1060, this means that 10-60 moles of ingredient enter my ear. Taking into account that there are (very) roughly 1020 molecules in a mole, we have 10-40 molecules of the stuff in my ear now. Or to put it in more prosaic terms, there's a 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance that there's even a single molecule of active ingredient in my ear. Did you get that? There's a 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999% chance that NO active ingredient went into my ear (you'll have to check my math; I think those add to 100%). Those who adhere to the homeopathic philosophy will tell you that the remedies actually get stronger with successive dilutions, which is one of the reasons that I fear science is not being taught well enough in schools. But that's another discussion for another time. I'd say 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the population would probably agree with me when I assert that the active ingredients probably do nothing. I would advise the other 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of you never to vote or get behind the wheel of a car again. Please. For everyone's sake.
But I can legitimately say that I did feel better after I used those eardrops, if only for a short time. So what gives? Placebo effect isn't likely, since I wasn't really expecting it to do anything anyway, and since they still worked even after I had done all this research. After a little more poking around online, I had come up with what I thought was a pretty decent hypothesis. In my haste to determine what, if any, analgesic activity was coming from the active ingredients, I had overlooked the inactive ingredients--all the filler material that made up oh, I don't know, about 100% of what I bought: citric acid, ultrapure water, sodium benzoate, and glycerine. I had determined that I was suffering from a bout of otitis externa (swimmer's ear, though I haven't been swimming in I can't tell you how long). Essentially, it's an inflammation of the outer ear canal (inside the ear but outside the eardrum) brought on, in my case, by an infection of some kind. Proven home remedies include keeping the ear clean and dry, acidifying the environment to slow bacterial growth, and purging the ear of wax. Glycerine is lipophilic and is effective at dissolving substances like earwax, and citric acid serves to acidify the ear. The water flushes all these nasties out, and sodium benzoate is a well-known food preservative valued for its bacteriostatic properties. Quite a cocktail.
So apparently, it was the inactive ingredients doing all the work in this homeopathic wonder tonic. My riveting chemical whodunit had come to a surprising denouement. As an interesting little side note, after I found out that drying out the ear canal helped, I went into my lab and stuck a pipet hooked to a dry nitrogen line into my ear and blew on it for a bit. It relieved my pain for about 15 minutes at a time. I've been told that olive oil and vinegar work wonders as well. I imagine you'd have to boil them first, to avoid the risk of introducing even more bacteria into your ear.
Long story short, I spent $7.99 plus tax on a 10 mL bottle of oil and lemon juice. I still have it.