Transcript
music
“Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.
carrie poppy
Hello! Welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie! the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, claims of the paranormal. No, no, no, no, no. We take part ourselves.
ross blocher
Yep. When they make the claims, we show up so you don’t have to. I’m Ross Blocher.
carrie
And I’m Carrie Poppy. And today we are here to tell you about our new careers as homeopaths who can…
ross
Uh—
carrie
…treat…heal…you were gonna say, “heal.”
ross
No, I don’t know what I was gonna say. [Carrie laughs.] COVID-19—
carrie
COVID-19—
ross
Yeah.
carrie
—symptoms.
ross
Well, this isn’t—
carrie
Which is different.
ross
This is good. We know how to take care of COVID-19 now—
carrie
Symptoms.
ross
—because we took a class online called, “Homeopathy for COVID-19 Related Symptoms.”
carrie
[In time with Ross] Symptoms [chuckles quietly]. This is important. I’m sure this all that her…what’s the word?
ross
This is her whole legal defense?
carrie
Yeah, yeah. [Ross chuckles.] That she says, “symptoms—“
ross
“I just said, ‘symptoms.’”
carrie
—and not the virus itself.
ross
How did you find this?
carrie
You know, I’ve been getting her e-mails for a while.
ross
Okay.
carrie
I think she might be the homeopath who works out of the facility where we went and sang the HU on Lake Avenue—
ross
Oh, interesting.
carrie
—in Altadena.
ross
Well, um, who is this, “she,” you keep referring to?
carrie
Oh, yes. The great, “she,” our heavenly mother, Rena Sassi.
ross
It says, “MA and C-H-O-M.”
carrie
Master of Arts, right?
ross
[Thoughtfully] Yeah. But also—
carrie
And—
ross
—C-hom.
carrie
Oh, I think I looked this up before. What is that?
ross
Some kind—
carrie
A cer—certified homeopath. I think that’s what it is.
ross
Oohhh. Okay.
carrie
I just googled, “C-H-O-M homeopathy,” and Google was like, “Hey, uh, FYI, do you have COVID-19 symptoms? ‘Cause, uh, you might be going to the wrong place.”
ross
[Chuckles briefly] I looove that Google is doing that now, if you look for Kimberly Meredith—
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
—that you interviewed. Now it warns you, “Hey, here’s good and reliable information about COVID-19.”
carrie
From Oh No, Ross and Carrie! [Ross chuckles.] No, they don’t do that.
ross
Look at this instead.
carrie
The CDC.
ross
Yeah, a lot of our web searches now trigger these little warnings like, “Hey, were you looking for good information? ‘Cause you’re not using good search terms.”
carrie
[Laughs] So, at the Homeopathy School of Colorado, I see that they have a professional certification program to earn a certificate of homeopathy, and that makes you a CHom.
ross
Okay. Well, Rena Sassi is a CHom. She is also the co-founder of Healing Studio Online.
carrie
She discovered that.
ross
I hope she did. But she’s not just the co-founder, she’s also an instructor.
carrie
A member?
ross
So, yeah, you found this. You forwarded it to me, and you said, “What do you think? Should we learn homeopathy and be able to treat COVID-19 symptoms—”
carrie
[In time with Ross] Symptoms?
ross
“—for $55 apiece?” And I said, “Of course. Well, why wouldn’t we?”
carrie
Of course we do. Why would we do anything else with our time?
ross
This is the life we chose for ourselves. I went to their site to sign up, and I—
carrie
If you’re listening to this in the future, just a reminder we recorded this during the COVID-19 pandemic. So you may hear sirens. We can’t hold for all of them. Cool situation.
ross
Yeah. On their website, I saw other classes for stress management and immune boost.
carrie
Okay, nice.
ross
Immune System Boot Camp.
carrie
Okayyy, that sounds like you’re gonna, like, make me eat my boogers or some—something that exposes me to—
ross
[Chuckles] Oh, right. [Carrie laughs.] I remember once at my dad’s wedding with my stepmother, my cousin—still a baby—dropped a hamburger that he was eating in the dirt. And his mom just picked it up, lightly—
carrie
Picked it right up.
ross
—lightly shook it and handed it back to him.
carrie
Wow-ow-ow.
ross
And I—that always stuck with me, afterwards. Like, “Wow, you can do that?”
carrie
Do you think that’s—that, what that song is about? [Sings] “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off?”
ross
I—
carrie
“Start all over again.”
ross
I don’t know that song.
carrie
Okay, sorry. Uh—
ross
Don’t be.
carrie
—that’s—that feels gross. But maybe it’s not.
ross
Yeah.
carrie
Yeah, maybe he just got a healthy microbiome going on after that in that gut for a little while.
ross
Yeah, that stuck in my head as, like, “You know what? Yeah, we need to—
carrie
Yeah, probably fine.
ross
“—eat things off the ground every now and then.” [Carrie chuckles.] I’m kind of known for that, actually. If—
carrie
Make a point of eating things off the ground.
ross
—if something falls on the ground, people realize, like, “Aw, Ross will eat it.”
carrie
Mm-hmm. One time I got tasked with writing an article. I was—I was on the science beat of this website. I was asked to write an article that was basically like the scientific version of the five-second rule. They wanted to know—
ross
Huh. Oh!
carrie
—how long can something be on the ground before it’s—[breaks off, laughing]
ross
Oh, yeah, I think the MythBusters addressed this once. And essentially, there’s kind of a quick ramp-up of bacterial—
carrie
Oh, okay.
ross
—influx and then it’s fairly constant.
carrie
I'm glad they got a straight answer. I contacted a bunch of microbiologists, and they were basically like, “[Imitates a tired voice] Get a different job. Why are you guys writing this shit—[breaks off, laughing]”
ross
Wow! That’s an interesting response.
carrie
Yeah, more or less. They were like, “This is stupid.”
ross
Okay. Well, I like to think—
carrie
Um… anyway—
ross
—that the immune system boot camp is precisely as you described.
carrie
Eating boogers.
ross
[Chuckling] yeah. And then I also saw they had Homeopathy for Families online course. And that one was $99.
carrie
Whoa. Almost twice as much.
ross
Yeah. So those were some of the courses available on Healing Studio Online. It wasn’t like there was a huge selection of courses to choose from. And they only have six instructors listed, including the two co-founders. So, eh.
carrie
Oh, wow.
ross
Guess you can’t teach too many classes.
carrie
Who’s the other co-founder? Is it a man with a French name?
ross
Yeah. Pierre-Etienne Vannier.
carrie
Okay. I’m not positive, but I think that might be her husband.
ross
Oh!
carrie
He is on her business license. He filed her business license.
ross
Oh, interesting. Okay, well.
carrie
That's not a positive or a negative, but—
ross
Yeah. I’ll allow it.
carrie
—maybe. So, when she sent this initial e-mail?
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
At the very top, there is a quote from the East Virginia Medical School.
ross
[Chuckling slightly] Oh, yeah.
carrie
Where this doctor apparently said, “Natural seems to be the best course.” So it was this critical care team at the Eastern Virginia Medical School that were responding to COVID-19, and they had released a document of sort of best practices they had learned. And in there, there is a line that says, “Natural seems to be the best course.”
ross
Well, that sounds like it’s in favor of homeopathy—
carrie
Uh—
ross
Case closed.
carrie
[Chuckles] Yeah, if you have, you know, a very limited understanding of the word, “natural,” that’s true.
ross
And you only listen when you hear what you want to hear, and then you stop listening.
carrie
And you take a several-page document and pull out one sentence.
ross
[Amused] Okay, okay.
carrie
So, I went and looked at that document, which she hadn’t linked to, but I went and found it. And, you know, it’s—it’s all standard medical protocol. But the doctor was just acknowledging we have limits in our understanding at this point.
ross
Mm. Mm-hmm.
carrie
And you don’t want to go for this, like, high-intervention approach, when you don’t know how much you’re going to help. If you still have a chance to let the body take its course naturally without putting a respirator on, that’s what you should do. When the person’s on the verge of death and they need a respirator, turn to that.
ross
Okay. Yeah.
carrie
But there was nothing, nothing about, you know avoiding typical, conventional medicines.
ross
So, you’re saying this quote was taken out of context.
carrie
I feel that it was.
ross
Did you check on this, though.?
carrie
I did. [Ross chuckles.] But as a wonderful, great storyteller, I will tell you about that in…a little bit later.
ross
Okay. Alright, so $55 later and, uh, a waiver that just essentially said, “I’m not going to come after you for anything that happens here—“
carrie
Sure.
ross
—I was signed up. You were signed up.
carrie
I was signed up, babyyy.
ross
And it was gonna be a Monday and a Wednesday. Smack dab in the middle of the day for us Pacific Time folks. So, it was going to be 12:00 to 1:30.
carrie
And she is also here on the West Coast.
ross
Very difficult when you only have a certain lunch break. So I was gonna go on Monday, and you were gonna go on Wednesday.
carrie
Wednesday, yeah. It’s just how it worked out. Perfect. She also shared a Google Drive folder with everybody, so if we missed a day, we could go back and view the video. Which is always really nice.
ross
Oh, yeah. So, much appreciated. Thank you very much.
carrie
And when she hears this, I’m sure she’ll be really glad she did that.
ross
Mm-hmm!
carrie
And in the class description, it says we will, “learn the science and practical application of homeopathy so that you can successfully manage the symptoms of colds, flus, coughs, or COVID-19-related symptoms at home.”
ross
Cool.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
By the time I was able to join in on the call on Monday, April 13th, myself and the instructor and then five other people?
carrie
Oh, okay.
ross
Like, I was joining nine minutes late, and someone else was still trying to get on. So thankfully they hadn’t really started the class; they were still trying to figure out the technology. And one of them had the last name, “Sassi,” so I was wondering, “Is that a rela—“
carrie
Ahhhh.
ross
“Is that a relative?”
carrie
She was there on day two, and I asked that question.
ross
Oh. Okay.
carrie
I'll tell you—
ross
Hey, we’ll find out.
carrie
--in day two.
ross
[Carrie makes a couple of affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Okay. So—and then someone was just listed as “iPhone.” This was a Zoom meeting, and all of us had had our microphone muted. So our way to interact was to write in the chat. And I would say I was one of the most active chat participants.
carrie
Nice. Gold star.
ross
Most of us were just kind of watching along. So, yeah, a small group that had paid $55 per person for access to this. And one of the first things that was going on was just people sharing on the chat what they’re thankful for. And that’s nice.
carrie
Yeah, that's nice.
ross
So, uh, I inputted that I was thankful for all the time I get to be spending with my family—
carrie
Ahh.
ross
--and that I have work to do. And that’s a luxury right now.
carrie
Oh, definitely. That’s interesting, ‘cause when I watched the video later, I was like, “Ooh, I wonder what Ross’ll say.” And I thought maybe you weren’t there yet, ‘cause she didn’t say your name and what you were thankful for.
ross
Well, now you know.
carrie
Now I know.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] So, she started getting into what homeopathy is. And, you know, I’ll say, I feel like I did learn a lot about what homeopathy teaches from this course that I didn’t quite understand before. So, uh, already glad I did it. She clarified that homeopathy is a method into and of itself. It’s, you know, separate from Chinese medicine, it’s separated from Ayurvedic medicine, and a very different paradigm from allopathic medicine. We’ve used that term before. That’s just what we would call—
carrie
Conventional medicine.
ross
—established, conventional medicine, right.
carrie
Yeah. Seems like that word is not—it—it’s weird. It’s not necessarily pooh-pooh-ing conventional medicine. But they are the only people who use it—
ross
Right.
carrie
—so it’s one of those, “ding ding dinggg.”
ross
As soon as someone says that, yeah.
carrie
Yeah, you just know, “Oh, okay, you have a certain point of view where you heard this word—“
ross
Right, when—
carrie
—‘cause it’s a pretty uncommon word.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] —when someone starts talking about irreducible complexity, you’re like, “Oh, okay. Alright, you have a certain vantage point on the evolution vs. creationism vs. intelligent design debate. Okay, I se where you’re coming from.”
carrie
Oh, we're going to be talking about the bacterial flagellum, are we? Okay.
ross
[Chuckles] Yeah. “Oh, hemoglobin evolution. Okay.” [Carrie chuckles.] Uh, so, yeah. She said we’re gonna talk about the scientific principles of homeopathy. Okay. I’d love to hear them.
carrie
And we should say, we’ve done a couple episode that involved homeopathy. And by a couple, I mean probably five, six. So, we’re not gonna go too deep here, but go ahead and back up and listen to some prior episodes if you want more of a homeopathic deep dive.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Yeah. And, uh, so she had this presentation that she was running on her screen. It was a Prezi, if you’ve ever seen one of those before. So you kind of build this visual outline of all the topics that you’re gonna discuss, and they’re all in these distinct bubbles and then the website kind of zooms into a subtopic. It’s fun, it’s visual, and I think, uh, enhances memorization. So, all good.
carrie
It's a lot like clicking around a Google map.
ross
Yeah, that's right. And she was saying that it had been co-opted form a presentation that had been that “Homeopathy for Families,” the $99 one.
carrie
Ahhh. Okay.
ross
And every now and then, she would go to explain something in more depth and say, “Oh, shoot, I think I took that part out.”
carrie
Mmm. Right, okay.
ross
She’d been kind of weeding it for this course.
carrie
Ah, that's what she was mentioning. Okay.
ross
But, you know, it looks nice. So, you’re zooming around all these little bubbles and then there’s a smaller bubble floating, and then you, you know, jump over to that one and it gets bigger.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
I like it.
carrie
Good!
ross
So, any discussion of homeopathy of course has to begin with the founder and maybe discoverer—
carrie
Some might say…
ross
—[chuckles] of homeopathy.
crosstalk
Ross and Carrie: Samuel Hahnemann.
ross
[Carrie makes a couple of affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] A German fellow, ah, in the late 1700’s. He was the one who had been a physician, and rumor has it he was upset with some of the practices of the time, like bloodletting and, you know what? I—who can blame him? Medicine was reeeally touch-and-go in the 1700’s. [Carrie chuckles.] So he…started developing his own system of homeopathy.
carrie
And I guess he felt that it was in particular lacking in scientific principles, the existing medical paradigm. I just thought this was very funny. On her slide, she wrote his name and then, “[loudly] Lacking scientific principles!”
ross
[Laughs] Freudian slide.
carrie
Haaa!
ross
[Carrie makes a couple of affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] But before she even went into him and his philosophy behind homeopathy, she made this claim that’s just—I don’t even know how I would look this up. She said that in the time of the Spanish Flu, that 30% of deaths were people who had been treated allopathically. So by the medical establishment. And, you know, that Spanish Flu of 1918 just killed millions of people. It was a horrific pandemic. But she said that for people who were treated homeopathically, only 1% died.
carrie
Well, guess who figured out where we could find that information—[breaks off, laughing].
ross
Oh, good. You—you found the source of that?
carrie
I did. So I paused it. I enlarged the screen. I found the source. I found that source. Boy, it took some time. But, okay. She is referencing a real thing that happened. I’ll give her that.
ross
Okay.
carrie
[Ross makes a few interested, affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] So, according to the tiny print on the slide, the House of Commons that—obviously this happened in the UK. The House of Commons requested a report comparing the two treatments, homeopathic and allopathic, if you will. But then suppressed the results when homeopathy came out on top, saying, “including homeopathy would skew the results.” And then that was presented as, like, a conspiracy.
ross
Okay, and that—now my hypothesis here is that maybe you had a lot more people who were treated by—
carrie
Hmm.
ross
—conventional medicine. And maybe a very small sample size treated by homeopathy.
carrie
Very interesting theory. Yeah, I wrote down in my notes before I went to check, I said, “I don’t see in this graph the number of people in homeopathy group vs. allopathic group.”
ross
[Chuckles] That might be relevant information.
carrie
[Ross makes a couple of affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] Or how far along in their disease the people were, or if anyone belonged in both groups. Like, if you got homeopathy and then got really sick and went to get real medicine and then died, because you were really sick by then.
ross
Okay, yeah.
ross
Sounds like a legitimate source.
carrie
[Giggles] Right. They had actually mentioned their source, though. So it was an article by a homeopath, by Michael Emmons Dean in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. He did sort of a historical write-up on what happened. And so, indeed, according to their source, the allopathic figures included over 20,000 patients. While the homeopathic figures account for 568.
ross
Wow. Okay.
carrie
So…yeah. And—
ross
Which is a—a decent N size.
carrie
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
ross
--but if you’re talking about getting an average, that 19,000 plus is going to be far more useful pool of data.
carrie
Totally. And then, all of the data was basically self-reported, and— [Ross makes a doubting, thoughtful sound.] —the homeopathic centers were never actually visited by the city—the person who went around and made sure you were doing everything right?
ross
Mm-kay.
carrie
The city that-guy.
ross
So no oversight?
carrie
Yep. So, it is true that they reported—
ross
Okay.
carrie
—that death rate.
ross
So, if true, very impressive.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
But…
carrie
Mm-hmm. If these self-reported statistics on a much smaller sample size are accurate, then that’s something.
ross
Okay. Alright, well…thanks for looking that up.
carrie
You're welcome.
ross
We’ll leave it to you, the listener, to determine whether that was honest reporting 100 years ago. [Carrie laughs.] But I could easily imagine the homeopaths saying, “Uh-oh. Okay, these, you know, five or six people died under our tutelage while they were here. We have to admit those were deaths. But hose other people, they went off home—“
carrie
Right.
ross
“—They died. We never saw. We didn’t follow up. We don’t know.”
carrie
Or they went to the freaking hospital down the street and got counted in their numbers.
ross
[Chuckles] Right.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
I would suspect something like that. Call it a bias. So then she was kind of turning around and dinging the medical establishment on COVID-19, saying, “Well, they don’t have any medicines for COVID-19 yet.” Then she was starting to talk about a nosode—
carrie
Ah, yes.
ross
—that could be helpful fighting against COVID-19—
carrie
Thank goodness.
ross
—called, “Leptospirosis,” nosode of Leptospirosis.
carrie
Oh, man, is that what it was? I've heard that word so many times. What is Leptospirosis? Typing. [To herself, slowly] Leptospirosis.
ross
I would think of, like, Lepidoptery, like butterflies. I doubt it has anything to do with that.
carrie
[Chuckles] It is a bacterial diseases that affects humans and animals, caused by the bacteria Leptospira. I think that’s one of the foodborne pathogens that you hear about. Like, “Oh, they had to recall a bunch of cantaloupe.”
ross
Oh, okay.
carrie
"It had leptospirosis.” I’m just talking out my ass, but I think that’s right.
ross
Hm. She did link to an NIH PubMed article. When I go there, it gives me a warning. “COVID-19 is an emerging, rapidly-emerging situation. Get the latest public health information from the CDC and research from the NIH.” But, yes there was a large-scale application of highly diluted bacteria for a leptospirosis epidemic control…
carrie
Ah, yes. I did look at this.
ross
“Conclusions. The homeoprophylactic approach was associated with a large reduction of disease incidents in control of the epidemic. The result suggested that the use of HP as a feasible tool for epidemic control. Further research is warranted.”
carrie
Yeah, so I think this is one of the studies she’ll mention a few times that are out of Cuba the seem to be pretty controversial.
ross
Mm, okay.
carrie
[Ross makes several affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] I’m not smart enough to summarize them, but she brought up a lot how Cuba is using these protocols. And as I was going around trying to make heads or tails of that, I kept seeing scientists I know and respect saying, “Well, okay, but Cuba has a habit—[puts on a snooty voice] Cuba’s got a habit—[resumes regular tone] of sort of…treating people with natural medicines and claiming success when the data’s not all there. Um, but I don’t know. I’m…
ross
So, uh, so this is from 2010. Looks like the studies were done in Cuba in 2007. So this is not from COVID-19, but it’s for managing a different situation.
carrie
Mmm.
ross
Alright. So, it’s one data point that does sound promising, but it is one data point.
carrie
Sure. And a nosode, by the way, is basically homeopathy’s claim to a vaccine. So the idea is that they dilute the actual pathogen down to a really tiny amount and then give you that. And then your body learns how to react to that pathogen. Now, we do—
ross
Which is so similar to the idea of a vaccine.
carrie
Riiight! We have a version of this that works, and we call them vaccines.
ross
[Chuckles] Right.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
Where you know exactly how you’re introducing either a disabled form of the virus that has just the right markers on it, still that the body can build up an immunity to that in a safe fashion, and then fight the real thing when it shows up. Or there’s various other ways that you can kind of do the same thing with a live virus, a—a weekend virus. It differs from vaccine to vaccine. But, you know, we know the mechanism there. Whereas, in this case, it’s a little bit more of the sympathetic magic thinking.
carrie
Yeah, assuming that there really is no active ingredient in the nosode—of course, if you were giving people, like, an actual bit of the pathogen—
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
—then yeah, you know, some people would become immune and some people wouldn’t, and you'd probably make them very sick.
ross
But—[chuckles]—that’s where it’s nice to know that it is homeopathically prepared, because the chance that there is an actual pathogen in the substance is vanishingly small.
carrie
And that is because of the principles of homeopathy!
ross
Yeah, let’s talk about those.
carrie
So, the first principle of homeopathy, of course, we all know. Like cures like.
ross
The law of similars.
carrie
[Ross makes a couple of affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] So, you've heard us talk about this a million times, if you listen to the show. So, we’ll be quick. But the idea is, in a healthy person, a certain substance might make you sick. That same substance is going to make you better if you’re ill. So—
ross
In a very small amount.
carrie
[Ross makes a couple of affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] Right. In a tiny, tiny amount. So if my arm has swelled up to high heaven, and it hurts to touch, and it’s bright, bright red, Ross might say, “I know just the thing to do. I’m gonna take snake venom and I’m going to dilute it a bajillion times until there’s basically none left in the water in which I diluted it. I’m gonna inject that into your arm. Because like cures like.”
ross
That all sounds eminently reasonable.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
This was Samuel Hahnemann’s big innovation, to claim that like cures like and that you could somehow, by diluting this substance, make it affect this system, which we’ll kind of describe in more detail. So that’s one of the laws here. And here, this is where we talk about laws vs. theories. [Carrie makes a thoughtful sound.] Sometimes you just say something is a law, and that doesn’t make it any more— [Carrie laughs.] —reliable. But she pointed out another law that lies behind homeopathy, and that is the law of Dynamis.
carrie
Mm-hmm. Which basically means you have an energy body?
ross
[Carrie makes a couple of affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] So, it's this vital force that animates the human body. There’s been many terms for that, like the lung ta. It seems like every kind of spiritual philosophy has its own name for that. The qi, you know. There's many different terms for essentially a life force. It's sort of like dark matter, I guess, except not as well backed up by scientific observation. But it’s sort of a placeholder in that sense. Where it’s like, “Well, we know there’s this thing that makes people live. Let’s call it the life force, and we’ll figure out how to measure it later.”
carrie
I don’t know anything about dark matter, but I’m now going to assume it’s the human soul.
ross
[Chuckles briefly] Aw, no.
carrie
[Chuckles, then in a singsong voice] Thank you, Ross. I got a tiny bit of information, and I’m running with it.
ross
Wait! Come back, Carrie! No, no! Come back! Come back! I didn’t communicate that well! [Carrie laughs.] Oh, by—by the way, as she was describing the law of similars, she had a very interesting example. She said, “It’s kind of like Ritalin.”
carrie
It's exactly like Ritalin, yeah.
ross
So—
carrie
No, it's not.
ross
[Chuckles briefly] I don’t know as much about this as you do. So maybe you can, uh, kind of address this. But, essentially, she was saying, “First of all, Ritalin is very dangerous. I don’t recommend it for children.” That’s what she said. But then she hastened to kind of unpack her metaphor, and she said that Ritalin does all the same things that a person with ADHD is already experiencing. So they have the hyperactive focus. And she was asking us to kind of contribute these different aspects. Racing heart. And—and maybe weight loss. Sort of a nervous energy. And she said, “Well, that’s exactly what Ritalin does. And they give it to the person.”
carrie
And she said, “And do you know? Does anybody know what Ritalin is? What’s the—Ritalin is methamphetamine. It’s Speed.” [Chuckles] Uh, so they are chemically similar.
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
But, I mean, there are a lot of prescription medicines that you could take recreationally and fuck yourself up. [Laughing] That doesn’t mean anything.
ross
Mm!
carrie
[Ross makes a few affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] And also, yeah. Dosage matters, where you got it matters. Do you make it out of cold medicine from the street? Yeah, yeah, a lot more dangerous than, uh, taking Ritalin from your doctor. She’s so close to a good idea here, you know? Like—ah, homeopathy, every time I think about it, I’m like, “Okay. You just missed the part that this all has to be before you get infected.” Because it is true that if you encounter something and give your immune system time to practice with it, it gets better at it, like practicing anything.
ross
Like we were just saying, the idea of a vaccine—
carrie
A vaccine!
ross
—is very similar.
carrie
Right, right.
ross
And the law of similars tells us you should get vaccinated.
carrie
Yeah, it should, right? So, she gives this Ritalin example, and then on her slide, next to the Ritalin was a big onion.
ross
[Amused] Uh-huh.
carrie
And I was like, “Ooh, yeah, which would I rather have, Ritalin or an onion? Ooh, yeah. Great example.” But she’s telling us all this, and then is like, “But anyway, don’t take Ritalin.” And I was like, “Well you can’t—eh—you’re just speaking out of both parts of your mouth. You can’t be like, ‘This is a perfect example of what I'm describing. Don’t take it.’”
ross
Oh. Yeah, good point.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
Well, I guess because they haven’t prepared the Ritalin homeopathically. If they had—
carrie
Mmm. It would be as strong or stronger.
ross
Yeah! That—that one would be interesting, if you made a homeopathic of Ritalin, you could do that.
carrie
Mm-hmm. You could.
ross
But she recommended for the exact same symptoms—it’s all about the symptoms—to give someone onion, and that is if you see a homeopathic remedy that is titled “allium cepa,” C-E-P-A—
carrie
Yeeahh.
ross
—that is using onion that has been diluted, diluted, diluted. Uh, she asks us kind of that leading question. “What happens to you if you have an onion, you know, and you slice it?” Uh, crying? [Carrie chuckles.] “Yeaahh, you know, your eyes water. And—and that’s very similar to what we’re talking about with the ADHD, so we use that.” What?
carrie
Yeah, well, she—[giggles]—I kind of know where she was going with this. She quickly mentioned hay fever. I think ADHD and allergies are often comorbid—
ross
Ohh.
carrie
—so maybe that’s where she was getting it, or maybe I am drawing together things for her benefit that she did not mean to.
ross
Hey, okay. Well, that makes more sense, the way you say it.
carrie
I should teach this.
ross
The—and then she unpacked the law of Dynamis, about the vital force. And she said, “And this was all corroborated by Albert Einstein— [Carrie giggles.] —when he discovered E=mc^2. See, all energy is matter.”
carrie
Let’s get him on the phone.
ross
[Sighs] That’s all we had to do to establish that yes, there is a life force that animates us. I thought that was quite the bit of prestidigitation. [Carrie chuckles.] I noticed she was also talking about disease, and she kept enunciating it—
crosstalk
Dis-ease.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
I like it, actually. That's kind of fun. ‘Cause the—I mean, that’s where the term comes from. “I’m not feeling at ease!”
carrie
Yeah! Totally. Dis-ease.
ross
And the—and the doctor is there to tell you, “At ease, soldier.”
carrie
[Amused] Mm-hmm. “Oh, it hurts when you do that? Don’t do that.”
ross
Um…[chuckles].
carrie
So then she showed us the hierarchy of dis-ease, and it is a triangle, a pyramid, if you will.
ross
Yeah. Very much like the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if you think of, like, your basic needs at the bottom. You need food. You need shelter. And then as you get higher, you need respect and community. And then as you get even higher, you can get to your self-attainment, self-actualization.
carrie
Sex. Fucking, whatever it is.
ross
Yeah. [Both laugh.] Whereas, on this pyramid, at the bottom you have the physical.
carrie
Physical.
ross
Then you work your way up to—
carrie
E-mo-tional.
ross
Okay. And then the next rung is mental.
carrie
Mental.
ross
And at the very cap of the pyramid—
carrie
[In a pinched voice] Spir-i-tu-al.
ross
[Exaggerating Carrie’s pronunciation] Spir-it-tu-al. And so, your disease starts in your energetic body—
carrie
Right.
ross
And—and so homeopathy—and this was—this was kind of new to me.
carrie
This is so confusing.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] I didn’t really understand it. Homeopathy—rather than addressing the physical body—they’re looking at what is your spiritual body, that we just proved with Einstein. What is it lacking? Let's address that. And, at least by way of analogy, we have a certain logic. You know, if you knock over your almond milk on the table and it spills onto the ground, don’t start mopping up the ground first. First, fix the glass. Put it upright. Clean the—the surface so that it’s not gonna keep dripping down. Take care of that first, and then clean up the floor. And you don’t need to cry over any of that— [Carrie chuckles.] —unless there’s an onion nearby.
carrie
So you’re saying if there—
ross
I hope this all makes sense now.
carrie
You're saying that if there were going to be a pandemic, it might make more sense to control the cases that are already in existence than let them spread and then triage all the worst cases one at a time in a widespread fashion, when you don’t have enough PPE or doctors to do it.
ross
It sounds logical when you say it that way. Yeah, you might want to cut off the transmission first and make sure the situation’s not getting worse, and then treat all the people who have, uh, the disease. Yes.
carrie
Boy, if only we had received a warning. [Ross chuckles.] Um— [Ross sighs.] —no, that makes sense, as long as you have the cause right.
ross
Exactly. So, if that is true—if disease really starts with the energetic body, then yeah. That makes sense to—to try to suss out what that energetic cause is and address it. And that’s—that’s how they’re looking at this.
carrie
Mm-hmm. Then it gets confusing. [Ross laughs.] This is how it always is, right? At first you’re like, “[Very high-pitched voice] You know what? Okay, okay.”
ross
“[Matching Carrie’s tone] I’m feeling you.”
carrie
[Ross makes a couple of affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] Oh, now you’re giving me examples and—nope, nope. This doesn’t work. So, she says they start in the energetic body, which suggests to me starting somewhere around the spiritual level. But she said that the more physical the symptoms, the more superficial the disturbance.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] [Sighs] I guess there’s some sort of handshake that’s happening here between the physical and the energetic body. And that you can have these very minor, easily treatable things, that are just more physical. They’re just kind of surface-level. So they—they might be easier to treat, but they’re not as important. And it’s the deeper, more significant, energetic things that you really need to focus on
carrie
I know.
ross
Okay.
carrie
But if it starts in the energetic body—
ross
Yes.
carrie
Then, a superficial disturbance would have to still be in the energetic body.
ross
I think I see what you’re saying now. So, my thought is that if you’re seeing that kind of surface-level manifestation, it’s the tip of the iceberg that’s pointing to something—
carrie
Ahhh.
ross
—that’s pointing to something more significant. That’s how I was understanding her.
carrie
Oh, interesting. I bet—
ross
So—
carrie
—both of these explanations work for her.
ross
What—whatever is convenient at the moment, maybe. But, yeah, my understanding was, “Oh, sure. We can put a band-aid on that, but let’s really focus on the—
carrie
Okay. Okay.
ross
—deeper energetic issue.
carrie
I’m sure one of these or both of these are correct, even though they are in opposition.
ross
But the important concept about homeopathy here—again, this was kind of new to me, and I—and I like that she clarified it as such—is that homeopathy is not about diagnosis.
carrie
Right.
ross
Uh, so they’re just—they’re not interested in finding out what caused it or giving it a name of a disease. They’re all about identifying symptoms and treating those symptoms.
carrie
Right.
ross
And there’s kind of a system for saying, “Okay, what is the symptom, and then which of these little preparations are known to treat that?”
carrie
Which, for me, at least, feels inconsistent? “The most important thing for you to know is that we figured out the origin of the disease. It’s your energy body. Now, we don’t believe in figuring out the origin of diseases—“
ross
[Chuckles] Uh-huh.
carrie
“—just their symptoms.”
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Yeah. I guess it’s not so much about naming or giving it, like, a title. Like, “Oh, you’re experiencing this.” It’s like, “Oh, you have a little cocktail of fever and sweatiness and we’re gonna treat all those kind of differently. And we have this huge cocktail—or potential cocktail—of different homeopathic remedies. And each one is supposed to handle different things.” And so individualization was another key, uh, concept here. So—so, you, Carrie, are sniffling in front of me— [Carrie sniffles and groans.] Oh, Carrie just got really sick all of the sudden. [Carrie chuckles.] So then I start looking through my pharmacopeia here, and saying, “Okay, well I have this thing that actually—oh, this treats both flush and the feverish part.” And so if you were maybe flush and…clammy, uh, then I might choose a different one that kind of intersects with those better. And even on this particular intersection that is Carrie, there might be six or seven different things that kind of are in that neighborhood. So maybe I grab a couple of them or one of them that I trust and know well. Good, we good? Does that all make sense?
carrie
Oh, yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. Oh, she did differentiate here between chronic disease and acute disease. Uh—
ross
Right. This felt like just her stalling for time defining something that I should think everybody would understand.
carrie
[Chuckles] Well, it was, I think, mostly to say that we—the people in this room—can start right away with treating acute diseases.
ross
Mmm.
carrie
But it’s the chronic stuff that you do want to send someone to a trained homeopath—
ross
[Chuckling] Okay.
carrie
—to deal with. And she said, “But I encourage you to start doing this right away,” meaning treating acute disease. And she said, “Whether it’s COVID-19 or not, because the more practice you get, the more successful you are becoming as that lay homeopath.”
ross
Okay. Again…that makes sense.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
You know, as long as we assume these basic principles, yeah, okay. That’s logical.
ross
Well, Carrie.
carrie
Yes, Ross.
ross
I’m—I’m enjoying this class that we’re in.
carrie
Me, too.
ross
That we—
carrie
God, I hope nothing takes me away from it.
ross
Well, having learned that like cures like—
carrie
[Slightly under her breath] Okay, I’m listening…
ross
I’m wondering about the theory that fun begets fun.
carrie
IIInteresting. Okay.
ross
And I have some data for you.
carrie
Okay, alright. I’m willing to listen to the data.
crosstalk
Ross: Mm-kay. So I— Carrie: Just— Ross: Yes— Carrie: —as long as it confirms my previously held convictions— Ross: Mm-kay. Carrie: —and does not shake them at all.
ross
Well, here’s what I got for you.
carrie
Okay.
ross
With the app, “Best Fiends—“
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
—you can have a whole barrel of fun on your phone.
carrie
Oh, I completely believe this. This fits in with my pre-existing beliefs. So, I’m ready to hear more.
ross
[Chuckling] Okay. Hey, awesome. I play this game, and I can tell you a lot of things about it, Carrie.
carrie
Yeah?
ross
First of all, doesn’t require an internet connection.
carrie
That is nice.
ross
I mean, once you’ve downloaded it.
carrie
Sure.
ross
It’s a free download. You get it on your phone.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
But then you can play…on the subway.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
Or in a subterranean bunker.
carrie
Oookay?
ross
You never know where you’ll find yourself.
carrie
Kimmy Schmidt could play this game.
ross
I’ll watch Kimmy Schmidt sometime after I watch Breaking Bad.
carrie
Breaking Bad’s more important.
ross
Okay. Well, anyways. Best Fiends is—it’s a puzzle game, but it’s al—
carrie
Okay, I like puzzles.
ross
So, you’re—you're solving a puzzle with each level, but you’re also getting achievements. You’re adding new characters.
carrie
Okay.
ross
You’re levelling them up.
carrie
Nice.
ross
There’s—there’s a lot of pieces to this. And so, as you level up, you gain more powers. You gain new characters. They gain special powers. You can solve more difficult puzzles. And it’s really fun.
carrie
And does your strategy evolve as you’ve been playing this so long?
ross
Yeah! Because there will be new obstacles, new things that you need to incorporate. So, you know, sometimes you’re learning logs, or sometimes you’re helping, uh, little chick eggs get to the bottom of the screen.
carrie
Aw.
ross
And over time you get these new things that behave in new ways. So, you’re like, “[In a lower, pinched voice] Oh, how do I deal with this one that changes all the colors around it?”
carrie
So you’re like the whole god of this world?
ross
Eh, no. If you’re drunk on power like that, sure. [Carrie laughs.] But yeah, I gue—I guess you are. So, it’s fun, it’s colorful. You’ve got pretty cool graphics, even. They’ve got like some animated shorts that go with it. Pretty high quality.
carrie
It has nice, bright colors. Uh, reminds me of Goof Troop.
ross
Oh, yeah!
carrie
Yeah.
ross
Yeah, totally. I could see that. Yeah, I’m well into the 800’s now, and—the levels, that is.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
So, I’ll play it while I’m kind of sitting and watching a movie or, uh, you know, if I just need a little break away from everything else.
carrie
And there’s cute little characters. Do you get more as you play, or—
ross
Yeah.
carrie
—have they all been the same?
ross
I’ve got a bunch. You know, it’s funny. You’ll get to certain levels, and they’ll say—they’ll say, “[deeper voice] You can—you can unlock this if you’ve already collected, say, 12 characters and gotten them all to level 15.” [Resumes regular tone] And I always have already passed those requirements, ‘cause I’ve got a lot. See, look at this. Here’s—here’s my, uh, green characters—
carrie
Whoooaaa.
ross
Yep. And then here’s my red characters.
carrie
Whoooaaa.
ross
Yeah. Here’s my purple characters—
carrie
Purple characters. Whoooaaa.
ross
There’s—Ru’s one of my favorites. And, of course, Bam is probably—
carrie
Aw, he’s cute.
ross
He’s my all-time best, epic fiend. But then there’s my yellow. See, I’m only missing two yellow characters.
carrie
My goodness.
ross
But, see, look at that. I’ve been busy.
carrie
Yeah. No wonder Best Fiends has over 100 million downloads and tons of 5-star reviews. Clearly, Best Fiends is a must-play. They have thousands of levels already. They have new levels, events, and characters added every month, and it’s hours of fun right at your fingertips. And you can even play offline.
ross
With over 100 million downloads, and tons of 5-star reviews, Best Fiends is a must-play.
carrie
So, download Best Fiends free on the Apple App Store or Google Play.
ross
That’s, “friends,” without the R. Best Fiends!
ross
[Carrie makes several affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Some other important points she made about homeopathy is that symptoms really are our friends. We should see them that way. Like, “Ah, this is helping me as a signpost that’s gonna tell me how to get to the root of the problem, wherever it is on the energetic level.” And also that the approach should be wholistic. So, we’re looking at three different aspects of the person. Their mental, their emotional, and their physical selves. And not just the physical, you know, as the industrialized medicine…establishment wants you to…objectify a person. Okay, so how does homeopathy get made?
carrie
So, you take that substance—that like-cures-like substance.
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
So, in my example, that was snake venom.
ross
Yes, and it’s usually a mineral, animal, or plant.
carrie
Yes.
ross
Which, doesn’t leave too many options.
carrie
That’s correct. Well, I guess it leaves—
ross
It couldn’t be a fungus?
carrie
—water, which is what you end up with.
ross
Okay.
carrie
[Noncommittal] Yeah. [Regular tone] So, you take that substance. You put it in what’s called the mother tincture. So this is your first vial of homeopathic medicine, the mother.
ross
I don’t know why I like this term. But, “mother tincture,” yeah. Okay.
carrie
[Laughs] It’s like the mother of bread, or whatever. [Ross chuckles.] Um, and you take that and you take one drop out of that jar, and you put it in a—that one drop, you put in a new jar full of water.
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
And then you succuss. This is very important. You shake the Dickens out of it.
ross
Now, let’s discuss succuss.
carrie
[Amused] Okay.
ross
Cause this is a term I don’t think I’ve ever encountered outside of the world of homeopathy.
carrie
Oh, that’s a good point. Yeah, I’m gonna look up suc—I bet—okay, if I look up, “succussion,” bet you anything Google will be like, “[Lower, softer tone] Do you mean the show, Succession?” [Regular tone] Let’s see.
ross
Ohh! [Chuckles] Okay. Or it might say, “If you’re looking for information about COVID-19, please refer to the CDC.”
carrie
“[Same “Google” voice as earlier] Did you mean ‘Succession?’ [laughs]”
ross
[Chuckling] Oh, hey! Okay! Alright!
carrie
[Sighs with laughter] Fun. Oh, interesting! Succussion is used in, uh, gastroenterology, because of succussion splash, which is a sloshing sound heard through the stethoscope during sudden movement of the patient on adnominal auscultation. It reflects the presence of gas and fluid in an obstructed organ.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Okay. Well, there you go. Multiple uses of the term, “succussion.” So, uh, this was also kind of news for me, ‘cause I’ve always pictured when someone’s preparing one of these remedies—and her picture made it look like this, too— that you have, like, a VOS water jar bottle or something like that, that, you know, is filled with water, and then you drop one drop of this substance into that, and you shake it up. And then you take one drop of that and you put it into another similar cylinder of water.
carrie
And—and—or alcohol, yeah.
ross
But what she was saying, was that it’s 1 drop combined with 99 drops of pure alcohol.
carrie
Oh, okay.
ross
And that’s a one C preparation. So, C—
carrie
Mmm.
ross
So, C kind of like the Roman numeral for 100. And then you shake that up. And it seems like usually—she didn’t get into the number of shakes. But it seems like usually there will be sort of a set number. Like, you shake it 14 times.
carrie
Right.
ross
That is a successful succussion. [Carrie chuckles.] Um—
carrie
And then you do succeeding successful succussions.
ross
[Chuckling] Yeah, that’s—
carrie
And then you succeed from the experiment. [Ross laughs] It’s just too successful.
ross
So then, the second—the 2 C process is taking one drop from that first 1-in-100 drops and putting it in the second collection of 99 drops of pure alcohol. You shake that. You take 1 drop from that, put it in the next 99 drops of alcohol. That sounds very time consuming.
carrie
Yes.
ross
And so my question was—on the chat—“Hey, uh, what about water? What—how much water is in there? I—I always pictured this with water.” And so she said, “Oh, you know what? Actually we—they try to minimize water, and if they have to use water, you know, they’ll only go up to 30% water.”
carrie
Hmm.
ross
So, I guess an additional 30-something drops of water?
carrie
Hmm. Okay.
ross
I don’t know. I don’t—that—none of this seemed like the scale I was picturing. I was—
carrie
Yeah.
ross
—picturing a much larger—
carrie
Yeah, yeah, you’re right.
ross
—body.
carrie
Uh, yeah, and having 1% of the original mother be the substance—yeah…
ross
Because, you know, it’s harder to shake a tiny amount of something—
carrie
Yeah, definitely.
ross
—and 100 drops just doesn’t sound that much to me.
carrie
Yeah. Huh, interesting.
ross
So, anyways. Uh, that changed my mental image of what was going on. And she clarified that normally places that are preparing these, they have machines that do this.
carrie
Right.
ross
And I’ve always wondered—yeah, I would—I would actually love to visit a homeopathy facility.
carrie
Oh, yeah.
ross
If anyone know about one that’s within reach of me, I would love to just see the process, and—
carrie
Yeah, me too.
ross
—do they actually put all that effort into creating the homeopathic preparation? I would—
carrie
You know, we should ask Santa Monica Homeopathic Pharmacy.
ross
If we can get a tour of the factory?
carrie
Yeah, or, like, where—where it is.
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
Where do you actually get these things?
ross
Yeah.
carrie
Yeeaah. That’s our local homeopathic pharmacy. We live in LA.
ross
[Chuckles heartily] Oh, by the way, there is a homeopathic preparation called, “apis,” which comes from the bee, but not the venom of the bee—
carrie
Don’t start thinking it’s the venom.
ross
Would—does that mean they just crush a bee?
carrie
Yeah, that’s what it sounded like.
ross
[Disappointed] Aww.
carrie
It’s from the body of the bee.
ross
Okay. Well—
carrie
Rude.
ross
—Rena said you might want to consider that for COVID-19.
carrie
[Chuckles] You might.
ross
So, we’re already—we’re already getting a—a tip here.
carrie
I was picturing—as she’s explaining the dilution process, and she’s like, you know, really laying out the basics of homeopathy—I got this little, I don’t know, butterflies in my stomach thinking, “What if there’s just one person on this call who’s never heard this and is like, ‘Wait, this can’t be right.’” [Ross chuckles.] ‘Cause I remember the first time I heard about homeopathy.
ross
Yeah!
carrie
It was a James Randi video.
ross
Oh, right.
carrie
And I thought—
ross
“You’re misrepresenting this.”
carrie
Yeah, this—this can’t be right. And—
ross
“That’s a straw man. They—no one would say that.”
carrie
I think I also—to my credit—like, knew that, “No, there are some things labelled, ‘homeopathic,’ that are just herbal.” And that’s true. Unfortunately, that’s a mislabeling problem.
ross
Mm. Mm-hmm.
carrie
True homeopathy doesn’t have anything in it. But, obviously Randi was right about true homeopathy. And, then I went on a James Randi YouTube hole. And here I am today.
ross
[Chuckles] One thing leads to another. [Carrie chuckles.] A succession of James Randi videos and you succumbed to the message.
carrie
So true. So then someone asked what became maybe my favorite question of the day.
ross
‘Kay.
carrie
They said, “Okay, well what do you do if you know that you want a certain potency, but you can only find—“
ross
Yeah.
carrie
“—a different one at the—at your local homeopathic pharmacy?”
ross
Which is a good question. So what if they’ve gone to all the trouble to create a 200 C and all you have is a 30 C, but you’re pretty sure you need a 100 C. What do you do?
carrie
Well, she says, “We are gonna talk about that later, but basically it would be very hard for you to do this on your own—“
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
“[becoming more emphatic as she speaks]—to make your own succussions. So the general rule of thumb is, whatever amount or remedy you have, even if it is the wrong remedy, go ahead and give it.”
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
“[Loudly, punctuating each word] Give them anything.”
ross
Yeah. I guess the energy body will respect that—[chuckling]—the thought is what counts.
carrie
I think—you know, I think that’s right. I think that is literally the thought—
ross
So this—
carrie
—[loudly] that counts here.
ross
[Chuckles briefly] So this might be the third law. The law of, “The thought is what counts.”
carrie
Yeah. Oh, man, yeah.
ross
The law of, “It’s the thought that counts.”
carrie
Yeah, that’s what placebo is. Placebo: it’s the thought that counts.
ross
Even if you tell somebody that it’s placebo—
carrie
Yep. [Ross makes a an amused, giving-up sound.] It’s still pretty powerful.
ross
It—the—a lot of power in a gesture. So, you’re right, that…kind of…gave up the ruse? I don’t know?
carrie
Yeah.
ross
But—
carrie
Oh, for sure.
ross
Yeah, don’t try to, like, take that sugar pill—we’ll kind of get to that—but don’t, you know, crush it up and try to—don’t try to dilute it in some more water and do your own succussions. Eh, that’s a lot of work.
carrie
Though—though if you did, same thing would happen!
ross
Yeah. Oh, and we’ll get to another aspect that really bothers me in this.
carrie
Oh.
ross
I—but—okay.
carrie
Can’t wait. So, okay, we were talking about sugar pills.
ross
Yes.
carrie
So, just to skip to the, uh, punchline here, so people have the right frame of mind. So, you do all those things. You—you—you dilute it a bajillion times. You finally come up with a substance that has zero amount of the original—the original medicine.
ross
Right.
carrie
You take that. This final, pure, alcohol-water concentration. You pull a little bit out of that and you put ‘em in literal sugar pills.
ross
Yeah. And I asked her later—this does come up—I said, “So, what are these pellets made out of?” And she said, “Ah, lactose or sucrose.” Sugar.
carrie
Fancy names for sugar, yeah.
ross
Yeah.
carrie
Um, but also it’s important that you know that after 12 C’s, it becomes—
ross
Yes.
carrie
—pure energy. There are no more molecules of the original substance left.
ross
[Carrie makes a couple of affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] So, you’ve taken this drop of the original substance, you’ve put it into—just so you know, to recap for those at home—you’ve put it into a solution of 99 drops of pure alcohol. Maybe you've added some water to help preserve the alcohol. Not too much, apparently. You’ve shaken it. Okay. You take one drop out of there. You put it in the next bottle. You do that again. You take it out, next bottle. You do this twelve times, and so she tells us at this point she realizes that the changes of any molecule, any physical representation from the original substance, infinitesimally small. Essentially, you know at this point you probably don’t have any of that original substance that was the original onion or bee part or snake venom.
carrie
Right. And if you were going to accept that, “No, it’s still sort of in there energetically,” then we would have to assume that tap water has so much, like, birth control, Ritalin, every—all these medicines people are taking.
ross
[Sighs] Yep. Yep. This is where we literal-minded people start thinking about the implication—
carrie
Right
ross
—of what you’re saying. You’re saying that by shaking the water, you can get it to kind of hold onto this idea. And this is another term in homeopathy that we’ve talked about before and she didn’t come out with right away, but water has a memory. That’s the idea.
carrie
Mm-hmm. Frozen II.
ross
[Chuckles] So, you have to ask, then, “How does it maintain that memory?” And, “Why doesn’t it remember everything else?”
carrie
Yeah.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Because it’s kind of like that idea of Cesar’s last breath. You know, every time you breathe in, there’s a fair chance that you get a molecule that at some point had gone through the lungs of Cesar. Cause he breathed a lot in his lifetime, and we live in a closed system for the most part. All of our air is recycled from previous air. So, that water’s been around. And certainly any H2O you encounter has a very, very, very, very, very high probability of having past through a dinosaur gut at some point. Does it remember that?
carrie
[Chuckles briefly] If it does, I want to interview it.
ross
Does that affect my life?
carrie
Probably not.
ross
Should I care about that?
carrie
I mean, it might affect your life in an evolutionary sense.
ross
Other than general, intellectual curiosity—
carrie
Right.
ross
—does it affect me?
carrie
No.
ross
Probably not.
carrie
Are these rhetorical, ‘cause no!
ross
Yeah, they’re all rhetorical.
carrie
Oh, okay.
ross
But, still, I think they enter into the equation if you’re making this claim.
carrie
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
ross
So, I even tried to ask her that. I posed a question in the chat, “Can you talk more about how the memory of the substance is preserved or stored after 12 C?” Because she’s made it clear, you want to get to these much higher numbers than 12, but already at this point—
carrie
Oh, right.
ross
—you’ve lost the substance. So, okay. So tell me more about how that get stored. And she said, “I’m not sure I understand the question. Can you be more specific?” So, I rephrased it. [Carrie chuckles.] I said, “You were talking about how there are no molecules left after 12 C, but I’m curious as to how the memory of that substance remains in the dilution.”
carrie
How does the water do it?
ross
She hadn’t yet talked about water having memory.
carrie
Implied parentheses, “This doesn’t make sense.”
ross
[Chuckles briefly] Right. Certainly not to me. And it took her a long time to—to get to that answer. But she just sort of restated it.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
It was like, “Oh, well, you know, it’s…it’s energetically there.”
carrie
Right.
ross
So, you’ve taken over having a physical representation and now you have a energetic representation of that original substance. But what about all the other things that were floating around in that water that—that they do recommend using distilled water, boiled water. You know, they’re trying to get fairly pure water. But, any water you find that you can get your hands on has other things in it.
carrie
And boiling doesn’t even do that much for things like lead. Doesn’t it make the lead content worse?
ross
Oh, interesting. Because that’s heavy and it doesn’t get boiled out, so it become technically more concentrated?
carrie
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
ross
Okay. So, again, to my mind, this is not a good explanation. But I guess the important principle of homeopathy is that we have made that handshake, from physical now to energetic. And by continuing to dilute, we are only enhancing the energetic potency.
carrie
Okay. Well, those are certainly words a person can say.
ross
Yeah, okay, and here’s where we get to something that I misunderstood and Carrie had to set me straight on. ‘Cause she keeps using this term, “potency—“
carrie
Oh, right.
ross
And so I—
carrie
Well, who can blame you? The way she’s using it is very counterintuitive.
ross
Yeah, I thought potency referred to like the physical scale, and then energy was on the other end of the scale. So you could either be more potent or more energetic. But no, no, no, no.
carrie
Which would make sense with the way we’ve been talking about this.
ross
Right. But, yeah, think of everything as an inversion here. So, as the substance gets smaller—
carrie
It is more potent.
ross
—it is more potent in homeopathy
carrie
Because the energy is stronger.
ross
Yeah. Yes.
carrie
Yes.
ross
And I remember as she was saying this, she was kind of twirling her hair and looking off to the side.
carrie
Yeah, she does twirl her hair a lot. [Ross giggles.] And she explained that very important to this whole theory is Av-ro-gado’s number.
ross
[Chuckling] Yeah, well she had it written wrong on the slide. And—
carrie
Mm-hmm. Av-ra-ga—I’m looking at it. Av-ro-gado.
ross
Avril Lavigne. Avril Lavigne’s—
carrie
[Chuckles] And an avocado!
ross
Avril Lavigne’s number. Oh yeah, with an avocado. If they had a baby, it’d be Avrogado’s number. [Carrie laughs.] Uh, so, yeah, Avogadro’s number is a way of kind of knowing from the mass of a substance how many molecules are in a mol of a substance. Uh, so it’s a constant. 6.022 x 10^23rd.
carrie
Don’t look at me.
ross
Something like that.
carrie
I don’t know. My mom’s allergic to avocados, so I didn’t grow up with a lot of it.
ross
Let's make sure I don’t get that wrong. Well, that’s truncated a bit. 6.022, and it trails on. But, yes, x10^23rd power. So that helps you do that math. That’s an important number to have. But she was saying essentially, that because we know that number, using a little bit of actual, empirical science, we can know something about how much substance we would expect in a certain volume. And they realize then that that means that after a certain point, you just—you don’t have that substance in there anymore—
carrie
Right.
ross
—in a homeopathic preparation.
carrie
We dip our toe into the world of evidence and science when we feel it serves us, and then we pull that foot right back out.
ross
Yeah, when it serves us, uh, we love it.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
That’s good science.
carrie
[Chuckles briefly] She also said—I loved this—she said, “And because this is energy, it’s not so easily understood in terms of physics, right?” I was like, “That’s one of the primary things physics studies—“
ross
Ah, yeah. Mm-hmm.
carrie
“—is energy.” But she's added—“It’s more understood in terms of nanophysics and nanomedicine.” [Ross sighs deeply.] Okay. Tell me more. Oh, that’s it? Okay. [Ross chuckles briefly.] So you just added the word, “nano.”
ross
If you wanted to use Einstein to equate matter and energy, then you have to accept that energy is part of—
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
—the realm of physics. But you are using, “energy,” in a very different way, and using his use of, “energy”—which is the accepted one—to subsidize your idiosyncratic definition of, “energy.”
carrie
It would be funny to just ask her, like, “What kind of scientists was Einstein?” [Ross laughs.] And see what happens.
ross
Right. Right. Yeah. He wasn't a metaphysicist.
carrie
One of my biggest frustrations during the 2016 debates was I just wanted someone to ask Trump, like, “What’s the capital of Michigan?” Just like—
ross
Yeah.
carrie
—something super, like—a school child might know, a full-grown adult might not know, but you should know if you are a politician.
ross
“Where do you find Kansas City?”
carrie
Right! [Giggles] Yeah, right.
ross
[In a Southern US accent] Kansas!
carrie
Cause I think it would just be a fucking shitshow.
ross
Technically…part of it. I’ve fantasized about asking him on television, “Explain the significance of Easter.”
carrie
Oh, yeah. Yeaahh.
ross
You know? Or…I—just like the basic Bible questions.
carrie
Totally.
ross
Cause I don’t think he’d know ‘em.
carrie
Oh, there’s no way. There’s no way. Yeah, name—
ross
Mr. Two Corinthians. [Carrie laughs.] Like, just tell me one thing Jesus said.
carrie
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
ross
I would love to hear his answer.
carrie
It would probably be like, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Something like that. You, would you acc—
ross
I will—I would accept that.
carrie
Mm-kay. Alright.
ross
Yeah. But I imagine it would be, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”
carrie
Oh, right. One of those apocryphal—
ross
Or something like—something that sounds—right, like, adjacent to the Bible, but not actually in it.
carrie
Mm-hmm. Or like some very weird summary. Like, “[Imitates Donald Trump’s voice] Well, you do to Bill what Jane wants, because Jane wants to be treated like Bill.”
ross
[Laughs] Yeah, right.
carrie
Okay, I think I know where this is headed.
ross
Mm. You might have heard something that sounded like it once—
carrie
Right
ross
—when you were…
carrie
Eight.
ross
…walking past Norman Peale’s….
carrie
[Laughing] Right.
ross
…presentation. Or ask him, like, “Oh, what is your favorite miracle that Jesus performed?”
carrie
Mm.
ross
I just bet he’d be flummoxed. Like—
carrie
“[Imitating Donald Trump] My own birth.”
ross
Yeah [chuckles briefly]. “[Imitating Donald Trump] Uh, you know, the water, how he moved the—uh, the—uh, he was so powerful with water. He was great with water. I mean—“
carrie
“[Continuing the impression] And you know, people say I’m great with water.”
ross
[Laughs] Right.
carrie
“[Continuing the impression] They say, ‘You put the memory in water.’”
ross
The—the answer would swirl back to him. Anyways.
carrie
[Chuckling] Anyway.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Another thing she clarified for us here was that sometimes when you’re looking at a homeopathic preparation, it’ll say, “30 C,” or, “100 C.” But sometimes it’ll say, “X,” and that’s a different scale. So, also with the Roman numerals, it just means ten.
carrie
Ten.
ross
Which means—it seams like, X is sort of like the lazier man’s approach to homeopathy. That’s when you only have nine drops of the pure alcohol to one drop of the substance. And then you shake that up and then—which seems—that’s ridiculous. That’s so little. But you’re only doing these multiples of ten, rather than multiples of 100. And so much higher numbers—I guess a 2 X would be the same as 1 C, I guess by that logic? 10 x 10 would be 100.
carrie
That…makes sense, yeah.
ross
And so then the way the exponentiality grows, the C is far more rapid.
carrie
This is where homeopathy gets really complicated. ‘Cause I have seen on—especially on cough drops, where it’ll say, “homeopathic,” and then I turn it over and it says, “This particular ingredient at 2 X—“ which probably still leaves something in there—
ross
Mmm
carrie
So, they're just co-opting this term, “homeopathic—“
ross
Right.
ross
—to give you actual medicine. And now you’ve got a whole other freaking problem.
ross
[Carrie makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Yeah, you've got to be kind of careful about that, because something that we've done before and is kind of a—just a common response to homeopathy is to say, “Hey, well, let's overdose on this. Let's take a bunch of it at once,” just to kind of demonstrate that this isn’t dangerous. But also that means it's probably not helpful either. It doesn't really do anything. And so you take a bunch of pills at the same time, but sometimes things are marketed as homeopathy, and they have active ingredients in them, like zinc. So, definitely do read the back of the substance before you go and take a—a jar-full.
carrie
Especially if it's in those X's, because that means they were dealing with much smaller dilutions.
ross
So that means they’re less…potent? Ah!
carrie
Mm…less potent to her, yes. Rena would say less potent—
ross
And more potent to us.
carrie
[Chuckles] Yeah. More potent to the human body, but to the energy body, less.
ross
[Chuckles] I hope that all makes sense now.
carrie
[Chuckles] So then we also learned about the law of resonance. That had something to do with the water. And she said, “You know, the way you can understand this is if you have two tuning forks at the same frequency and you put them next to each other, they stop vibrating? The vibrations cancel one another out?” Had you ever heard that?
ross
Okay. Well, the way I was hearing her describe this, was that, if you put these next to each other, they’ll start to bounce off of each other and create something new—
carrie
Ah.
ross
—that was not inherent in either of them.
carrie
Oh, interesting. Okay.
ross
[Carrie makes a couple of affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Though, at least within sound—I—I mean, this is how noise-cancelling headphones work—you can take a—an oscillation pattern, essentially, vibrational pattern and invert it and cancel it out, essentially. So that could be part of it as well. But—
carrie
Well, it sent me on a YouTube rabbit hole—
ross
Oh, okay.
carrie
—looking at, uh, science experiments for kids where they used tuning forks—
ross
Yeah!
carrie
—and I ended up being a big fan of a guy—I’m going to show you his picture—because he always has this goggles-based sunburn.
ross
Oh, yeah. I noticed you posted the picture of this guy. Okay.
carrie
[Laughs] Anyway, that’s all. But he did the experiment, and it—yeah, it—basically, you can get it to sympathetically vibrate by, you know, you hit this one and the other one responds.
ross
Oh, okay.
carrie
So, it’s just cool.
ross
Yeah, alright. A lot of cool things you can do with tuning forks. Uh, does that mean the law of resonance is true?
carrie
Yes.
ross
Okay.
carrie
‘Cause the energy body is the same way. Like cures like.
ross
So, I guess the—the important takeaway here is that by influencing energy, you can create something new.
carrie
Yeah, I think it’s another like-cures-like thing.
ross
Okay.
carrie
So, you’re introducing into your body a thing that’s on the same frequency or resonance or whatever, and instead of them both staying the same, the sum is greater than the parts.
ross
Okay.
carrie
I guess.
ross
Okay. Well—
carrie
But we are—uh, you know, I think we’re saying the same thing over and over. Or she’s saying the same thing over and over in different ways.
ross
Yeah. So the idea is, uh, whatever substance you’ve used, it has sort of an energetic imprint. And it’s now gonna go into your own personal energetic imprint and work with it to begin this healing process.
carrie
Yes.
ross
Phew!
carrie
So, some people will have mild symptoms. Other people will have more severe symptoms of the same illness. And she said, “If you have more intense symptoms, if you’re on the verge of collapse or have already collapsed—“
ross
Mm-hmm?
carrie
“—go with higher potencies.” [Ross chuckles.] Meaning higher dilutions.
ross
No, go to a doctor, please!
carrie
Because you need to get to that energy body. Yeah, can you imagine someone’s like collapsing in front of you, you’re like, “Hold on! I have a hundred C’s of onion!”
ross
[Laughs] Though, wait a second, so that means you would need—if it was—oh, you go for higher potency in that case. Okay.
carrie
Uh-huh!
ross
Okay. Oh, goodness.
carrie
[Laughs] Not that the lower potency would do anything either, but— [Ross makes a thoughtful sound.] —yeah, higher dilution.
ross
Alright.
carrie
Um, and then she said, if someone is on the verge of death, they would probably need a higher potency—[laughing]—meaning higher dilution—to meet that disturbance that’s happening on the energetic body.” Someone is dying in front of you… [Ross chuckles.] …and you’re like, “Gotta make sure that it’s very thin homeopathy.”
ross
Uh, this is, uh, where everybody things of that homeopathic ER, uh—
carrie
Oh, yeah.
ross
—sketch that Mitchell and Webb did. We’ve seen this, uh, many times. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out. They kind of show what an emergency room would look like if— [Carrie makes a thoughtful sound.] —all of the doctors were homeopathic. “Quick, quick! Get him on a drip of…you know, 100 C’s—“
carrie
Apis!
ross
Right, yeah. “Something very, very dilute, just barely touch him with it.” Uh, it’s good times. Good times.
carrie
[Chuckles] So, Ross, did you know that we have actually known for a long time that the memory of a substance imprints itself on alcohol and water?
ross
Have we known that a long time?
carrie
We’ve known it since 2009.
ross
Uh, that’s not as long as I would have thought from—
carrie
Weelll, that’s Nobel-prize-winner Luc Montangier discovered that there are electromagnetic signals, or basically nanostructures, in the form of nanoparticles, in ultra-diluted homeopathic remedies. So essentially, homeopathy is a nano-medicine.
ross
Okay.
carrie
Mm-kay?
ross
So, I’m guessing this is not what this person got their Nobel prize for.
carrie
Correct. He got his Nobel prize for co-discovering the AIDS virus, HIV.
ross
Oh, hey! Okay.
carrie
Yeah. Legit guy. And—
ross
So, he’s looking at homeopathic preparations and he’s detecting a lot of nanoparticles in them?
carrie
According to her telling, he discovers that there are electromagnetic signals, uh, in the water even though the substance is gone. Had to go and look this up.
ross
Yeah.
carrie
So…he did publish a paper. It was a non-peer-reviewed paper.
ross
Okay.
carrie
But it argued that bacteria can re-arise in substances that were previously thought to be sterilized.
ross
Oh, interesting. Okay.
carrie
Which probably mostly suggests a limitation in our ability—
ross
Ability to measure the presence of those substances, or those—
carrie
You’d think.
ross
—bacteria.
carrie
Right, which is important.
ross
Yeah!
carrie
Like, sterilization is very important.
ross
Yeah!
carrie
So, he went on to—to theorize that there maybe was some sort of signal coming out the bacteria, which is unusual. That’s a strange way to look at it. There’s a really good writeup by Harriet Hall on this, if you want to really do a deep dive. But, here’s what’s really great. There was a CBC reporter named Erica Johnson who did a story about this. And she reached out to him, and said, “Okay, but what do you think about homeopaths using your work, uh, in order to promote homeopathy?”
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
And he said his results could not be extrapolated to the products used in homeopathy.
ross
Okay!
carrie
Done.
ross
That’s such a scientific response, too.
carrie
[Chuckles] Right.
ross
That's a very measured—alright, well, good for him.
carrie
Definitely. And then, of course, we heard about Dr. Emoto’s water studies.
ross
But it’s understandable why they would use that paper—
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
—because like cures like.
carrie
[Chuckles] Oh, wait. Okay, what does that mean?
ross
So, this paper—
carrie
Uh-huh.
ross
—sounds something like the claim we’re making—
carrie
[Laughing] Oh, I see.
ross
—and it cures—
carrie
So it makes the claim go away.
ross
It cures our lack of evidence.
carrie
[Laughs] So then, of course, we heard about Dr. Emoto.
ross
Oh, yes.
carrie
One of our favorite people.
ross
She mentioned, uh, “Some of you may have heard about how water can be imprinted.” And so, uh, I wrote, “Dr. Emoto?,” question mark. [Carrie giggles.] And so she said, “Oh! Someone has heard of this. Yes. Dr. Emoto.” Of course. He always has to be introduced into any of these discussions.
carrie
Made famous by What the Bleep Do We Know? the documentaryyy?
ross
Quote-unquote.
carrie
Where they talked about all sorts of new-age and occult claims. But in particular, they highlighted this—this man Masaru Emoto, who claimed that he could talk to water and then freeze it. And the water that he said nice things to would freeze into these beautiful shapes, these beautiful snowflake-like designs. And the ones that he was mean to would freeze into ugly, disgusting shapes.
ross
[Chuckles] Yeah.
carrie
Very thoroughly discredited research.
ross
It's just one of those ones where you think, “Who…would believe that for a second?”
carrie
[Laughs] That was a long pause. I believed that for a second.
ross
You tried it.
carrie
Yes. I also tested it. I watched What the Bleep when I still—
ross
Oh, okay.
carrie
—believed that sort of thing. And I was like, “This is amazing.”
ross
Alright. Yeah.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
Well, we hear it a lot. It really resonated with people.
carrie
Mm. A lot of resonance, yeah.
ross
They really have a memory— [Carrie laughs.] —of that experiment. And it comes up all the time in our investigations. He wrote the book, The Hidden Messages. And I have this long list of books that I really want to read that are kind of foundational—
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
—to some of these—I would say—bad ideas. So that’s one of ‘em. Uh, also, Samuel Hahnemann’s book that kind of started all of this, The Organon of Medicine.
carrie
Yeaahh.
ross
Um, I—I feel like I need to set a summer aside, or something, and just read a lot of these foundational texts.
carrie
That’d be fun.
ross
Yeah.
carrie
So, good news, everybody. Rena is working with a pharmacist who’s putting together a 50-remedy kit for treating coronavirus with homeopathy.
ross
Phew!
carrie
She recommends we all get the kit.
ross
Mm-hmm, of course.
carrie
They are remedies that have been working around the world. And it’s pretty interesting, because she said in the past during an outbreak, there would be like one to two remedies that work for everybody.
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
But with this virus, there are such different symptoms in different regions—accurate—and so there are about 25 different remedies that work on this. And she said, “And that could be because it’s mutating so quickly.” But again, I’m like, “Okay, wait. It’s mutating so quickly. So we’re back to talking about the physical body.”
ross
So—right, right. Now we’re talking about a cause of a disease—
carrie
Right.
ross
—on the physical realm rather than just symptoms.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
What’s going on? Aren't the symptoms very similar?
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
Hmm. By the way, I will—I will note, any time she would see the little chat icon light up with a new notification, she would immediately go jump on it, “Oh, oh, yes! Let me answer your question.” And I asked around this time, “Do you ever need to clear previous imprinting of the water or alcohol?”
carrie
Oh, yeah.
ross
Cause I wanted to get her to at least respond to that. She did not, uh…either see that or answer that.
carrie
Hmm.
ross
But I did try asking again later. So, we’ll get to that.
carrie
Oh, okay. Good.
ross
Just letting it be known.
carrie
[Chuckles] Um, soon after this, we got to one of the more bummer things she said. So, she said that one of the remedies that she wanted to have in the kit but wasn’t able to—
ross
Ohhh, yes.
carrie
—[chuckles briefly] was homeopathic cyanide.
ross
Hydro cyanide acid.
carrie
And she said, “That works especially well for people with ancestral trauma.” She said, “For example, the surviving family of Holocaust victims, people with collective trauma of genocide, because—“
ross
[Exhaling the first word, upset] God. Goddamn, let’s—let’s give them an infinitesimally small amount of cyanide.
carrie
And then of course she has to go on to explain, “Because cyanide was used in World War Two to gas people.”
ross
Yeah, yeah we know why this is offensive [chuckles].
carrie
Yeah, we get it. Yeah. [Quietly] And then she also kept using the word, “gypsies,” which is just not—not—not the appropriate word. [Regular tone] Oh, man. And then she said, “Oh, African-Americans will respond well to this as well.” And I was like, “Okay, so just—“
ross
Wait, yeah, just—
carrie
—anybody who’s—
ross
Has been maltreated—
carrie
Yeah, who’s been oppressed?
ross
—can be fixed by this because the—
carrie
Of World War Two?
ross
—Nazis used it?
carrie
Yeah. What? That don’t make no sense.
ross
So if you—
carrie
I was with you the entire time.
ross
[Chuckles] If you’re feeling put-upon as a homosexual, then yes, this cyanide is also for you.
carrie
Oh, right, yeah. Or a woman! Yeah. Should I be taking it?
ross
Right?! But I guess it’s a similar energy, but it— [Carrie sighs.] —she made it very clear that not everybody can make this. But she said that, “If you reach out to me, I have a provider. The I & E Organics. They can make this preparation.”
carrie
She knows a guy.
ross
“So let me know on the side, and I’ll get you some side cyanide.”
carrie
Yeah, I really wanted the—the nosode. But it seems like you had to, like, meet with her, like become a patient officially to get the nosode. Obligated.
ross
Mm. Mm-hmm. She wanted to know you could handle it.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
[Sighs] Yeah. That was, um…I don't like that.
carrie
[Ross makes a few affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] So, she also differentiated between taking a wet dose and a dry dose. As you might imagine, a wet dose is taken with water. But it’s very counterintuitive to me which one you give. So if someone has high fever—like over 102—you consider them to have a strong vital force, ‘cause their body is working to fight off the pathogen. Okay. So them—you give a dry dose. You force them to swallow it without water.
ross
Oh. Yeah, that is counterintuitive.
carrie
Right?
ross
‘Cause it seems like the person who’s really hot, feverish, would be like, “[raspy, quiet voice] Water.”
carrie
Yeah. And then has like a really sticky mouth, and you don’t want them to choke on anything.
ross
Right. It would help it get down.
carrie
Get down. Get down with it. But if a person has a weak vital force—so, example, no fever, feeling fine—you’re gonna want to water dose that.
ross
O. Kay.
carrie
So, I mean, should I just be water dosing you right now? ‘Cause nothing’s happening?
ross
[Sighs, then, sounding tired] I guess so.
carrie
[Laughing] I don’t know.
ross
Yeah, so you can take that capsule or that sugar pill and just put it in a bunch of water. Which seems like an additional succussion—
carrie
Yeah.
ross
—process, but whatever.
carrie
Yeah, well, she also said that you can, like—you can take this kit and make your own homeopathy forever, by just putting in water.
ross
O. Kay. Yes. That’s the thing that annoys me. [Carrie laughs.] So…the rest of this is fine. I—I accept it. But the idea that you can make your homeopathic preparation—let’s say you’re running low. Well, just take a drop of that and put it in a new container of water, and then you’re good to go for another ten years or whatever.
carrie
Yeah. That’s what she said.
ross
Uh—wh—why do we then have a homeopathic industry?
carrie
[Amused] Uh-huh.
ross
Why do people need to buy any of this?
carrie
So—and also why can’t—
ross
If it’s no different, why do we care about the C’s or the X’s or anything?
carrie
Uh-huh. And how about, I put it in a cup of water, and I take that, and I pour it in the ocean? Now everybody’s got it.
ross
Right!
carrie
End of homeopathy! Don’t need it anymore.
ross
By the same logic, right?!
carrie
Yeah!
ross
Right?
carrie
Flush it down the toilet. You’ve helped the whole world. [Ross makes an exasperated sound.] It don’t make no sense.
ross
Speaking of things that don’t make sense, okay, so she was talking about how to store your homeopathy. And she said you want to keep it in a cool, dry place. Keep it away from phones.
carrie
[Chuckling] Oh, right.
ross
Keep—keep it away from Wi-Fi routers.
carrie
That’s important.
ross
Any radiation, you know, just try to protect it as best you can. And I’m thinking, “Oh, come on. Cosmic radiation at every moment is inner-penetrating this water of yours or the sugar pills, from every direction.” It’s a futile effort to protect it from that. She was also saying, “Don’t leave it out in the car or the sun, because all of these things—if you get it expose to too many of these factors—the heat, the sun, what have you—it will—“
crosstalk
Ross and Carrie: Antidote
ross
“—it.”
carrie
[Thoughtfully] Yeeaah.
ross
Antidote. So she said, “Oh, yeah. I k—I have this backpack and I keep a first aid kit.” Oh, she kept saying, “first aid kit.” Don’t call it a first aid kit, ‘cause when I hear that someone has a first aid kit, I think that they’re gonna have some antiseptic—
carrie
Mm-hmm. A tourniquet.
ross
Right. A—a Band-Aid or two.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
Uh, some gauze. Uh—
carrie
Snake bite kit.
ross
Some—maybe some Aspirin or something. And you’ve got a bunch of homeopathy in your backpack— [Carrie chuckles.] —that you walk around with all the time. Uh, but she said, “Oh, yeah, I’ve accidentally left it out in the car and then come back and, ugh, it’s antidoted. I have to get rid of it all and start over again.”
carrie
But she also said, going through an x-ray is supposed to antidote it, but she’s had to do that a number of times at the airport, and they still work. And then she said, “And trust me, I try to take it out and—[giggles]—walk through with it, but they won’t let me.” And I’m picturing her like, “[Small, soft, pinched voice] Eh, no, you don’t understand.”
ross
“[Imitating Carrie’s voice] It’s homeopathic.”
carrie
“[Continuing the voice] It’s my homeopathic medicines.”
ross
“[Continuing the voice] I need—[sighs].”
carrie
“[Deeper, firm voice] Yeah, lady. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put it on through.”
ross
So then I asked later on, “How can you tell if something’s been antidoted. What if somebody—“
carrie
Yeah!
ross
“—hit it with a hair dryer when you weren’t looking, because hairdryers—“
carrie
Yeah. A dirty motor held at your head.
ross
That’s essentially what a hairdryer is.
carrie
[Chuckles] Uh-huh.
ross
And it’s been antidoted. She said, “Oh. Okay. Well, usually I would say the easiest way to tell is to use it, and if it doesn’t work, it’s been antidoted [laughs].”
carrie
Oh. Hmm.
ross
So, if you’re homeopathic preparation is not even meeting your standards— [Carrie laughs.] —for efficacy, then you could say, “Oh, probably got antidoted at some point.” But she said she will also often use a pendulum and—
carrie
Yes.
ross
—kind of swing it over and ask it, “Oh—are you—how are you doing—“
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
“—homeopathic remedy?” And then it will either nod yes or no.
carrie
That’s where you really tip your hat to the fact that, oh, you really are dealing with, like, some pretty outside-the-bounds-of-evidence stuff.
ross
Are you feeling you’ve gotten your $55 worth yet?
carrie
Nah. You know, ‘cause we aren’t talking that much about COVID-19 yet.
ross
Oh, good point. Alright, well, let’s keep going.
carrie
So—so, let’s. So, she gave us a little preview of what we were going to talk about on Wednesday. She said we’re gonna talk about prevention. Okay. Sounds good. And then she said, “It would really help for herd immunity for all of us to just go ahead and contract this disease, because there are ways to get it without being symptomatic.”
ross
So, she said, “It would be the best thing in the world if all of us just went out right now and just got COVID-19!”
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
“Just do it. Get it over with.”
carrie
“But don’t get any symptoms.” So, she obviously knows part of the information, which is that you can carry it without being symptomatic. She seems to think we have control over who’s going to be symptomatic. Therein lies the issue, ma’am.
ross
It would not be the best thing ever, because yes, everybody would then have COVID-19. Many of them would have horrible symptoms, and they would need a hospitalization. But uh-oh, the hospital is filled with other people who are also struggling with COVID-19.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
Many of them will be dying. And more people will die, period.
carrie
And to be a carrier without symptoms is one of the most dangerous things you can be, because no one even knows to stay away from you.
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
Hmm.
ross
Sooo, she kept saying that.
carrie
Yeah, and then she said, “There are ways to educate our bodies to ward this virus while still saying healthy and not getting sick.” And I was like, “Yeah! A fucking vaccine! When we get a fucking vaccine, it will do exactly what you just described.”
ross
Mm-hmm!
carrie
But we aren’t there yet.
ross
Mm-hmm!
carrie
And we are so freaking impatient that we are just like, “There just has to be a way. We have to be able to do it right now—“
ross
Right, right. And because the medical establishment hasn’t generated it yet doesn’t mean that we can then rely upon proposed method—
carrie
Right, right.
ross
—that has no efficacy.
carrie
[Ross makes a couple of affirming sounds as Carrie speaks.] Yeah, you hear this so much and it—it’s understandable, but this, like, “Well doctors didn’t have any answer for me.” Okay. Well that sucks. It doesn’t not suck. But it also means someone who could have sold you something bogus chose not to, to be honest with you that they didn’t know the solution. That’s actually, like, a pretty strong marker of honesty.
ross
Right, let’s just be aware of our ignorance where it is. Feel it’s very similar, too, to how many people debate about God’s existence or creationism vs evolution, will go straight to, “Well, do you know exactly how all matter was created?” Well, no! [Carrie chuckles.] We have some—some ideas, some theories, but yeah, we don’t know exactly. “Ah-ha! Well, I do! I know!” [Carrie laughs, then makes a few affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Like, “Well, you’re very confident, but that doesn’t mean that this answer that’s been passed down for generations from someone who knew next to nothing in a pre-scientific era—doesn’t mean that that is now all of the sudden the best answer because you’re more sure of it.”
carrie
You say you know. I disagree with that, too.
ross
[Laughing] Yeah.
carrie
Yeah. [Ross sighs.] Oh, also. [Chuckles] You know, you asked that question about clearing imprintings on water or alcohol.
ross
Yes.
carrie
So, she did say that distilled water is best.
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
She said you can boil or filter your water, but she specifically said, “Do not get Dasani.”
ross
[Chuckles] Oh, right.
carrie
“[Chuckling] That is not healthy water.”
ross
Cause that’s made by, what, the Coca-Cola company, or—
carrie
Or Pepsi, maybe.
ross
—Pepsi. One of those. Yeah.
carrie
Yeah. Um, but Fiji water, that is—
ross
Pretty good.
carrie
—that’s great. That’s great for detox.
ross
Pretty, pretty, pretty good.
carrie
[Laughing] Okay. So random.
ross
[Chuckles briefly] This class has been brought to you by Fiji water. [Carrie chuckles.] Oh, uh, another way, by the way—I—[sighs]—I feel like I really need to warn everybody. You can also antidote your homeopathy by exposing it to essential oil.
carrie
Oh, yes.
ross
Which is essentially— [Ross and Carrie chuckle pointedly.] —the opposite of homeopathy.
carrie
Oh, right.
ross
It is very—highly—
carrie
Some might say potent—
ross
—potent [laughs].
carrie
—but of course, you’d be using that wrong.
ross
Uh-huh.
carrie
Okay, and then she also said that one of the ways that conventional medicine and homeopathy disagree is that conventional medicine views all viruses and bacteria as evil things we should never interact with. And while homeopathy acknowledges that there are 80 billion bacteria already alive inside of us, and—
ross
How did you learn that, homeopathy?
carrie
Right?! And 80 billion viruses already live inside us. A, no. Not correct about the viruses. Uh, we—we—you do have a viral load, but it’s not that. But, regardless, science is very aware—[breaks off, laughing]—that we need bacteria. That friendly bacteria are critical to survival. And that a lot of our DNA was made by viruses. No one’s in the dark about this in organized science.
ross
Yeah, that is not the message of science. In fact, I’m reading a really cool book right now called, “I Contain Multitudes—”
carrie
[Chuckles] Oh, cute.
ross
“The Microbes Within Us.” Yeah, that’s a great use of that, uh, that quote I think is a Whitman—
carrie
Whitman?
ross
—quote? Yeah.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
[Carrie makes a couple of affirming sounds as Ross speaks.] Uh, by Ed Yong, and it’s—it’s all about how bacteria have gotten a really bad rap. It talks in a very even-handed way about both the good and bad bacteria. But, yeah. The vast multitude are essential to our living. We could not live without bacteria. So, yeah, I don’t—I don’t know what point she thought she was making there.
carrie
The mass of your body is about half bacteria.
ross
That’s right.
carrie
Pretty wild. Uh, so someone did say, “Okay, so, you know, you’ve been talking about, like, the nosodes and how introducing this into your body allows it to prepare for when it encounters the actual virus. So is it a little like a vaccination? [Ross and Carrie chuckle.] Wrong question.
ross
It’s a good question.
carrie
Boy, she just, “[Sighing sound, then in a higher, soft, pinched voice] I don’t want to say yes to that, and I don’t want to say no to that.” [Ross chuckles.] “[Continues imitating Rena’s voice] Let me turn my webcam on.” And then she turns on her webcam, and she’s like rubbing her forehead and she’s like stressed out and she’s like, “Ahe—oh, I don’t know—well, okay, it’s—it’s not the same as vaccines, because it’s a different medical paradigm. In homeopathy, we believe that the energy body is the thing being attacked by the virus. But in conventional medicine, they think sickness is in the physical body so—so they put stuff in the vaccine like, you know, heavy metals and aluminum and DNA from other animal species, because they want to agitate the immune system and create an allergic response from the immune system.” [Regular tone] Very few words in that statement are so.
ross
[Laughs] Yeah, I—I never knew that. [Carrie chuckles.] Huh. Uh, every now and then she would drop in some substance and say, “Oh, people have been using that with coronavirus.“ Clearly, she has just dozens that she thinks have been really successful. Why aren’t they…getting rid of this pandemic, then? Like why is this—
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
If this is so effective—
carrie
[Pointedly] Mm?
ross
—why are these homeopathic doctors not getting out there and letting people get into businesses, but screening them in advance and giving them Bryonia, which is working for—I couldn’t tell if she said 15 or 50 percent of people with coronavirus, but, you know—
carrie
Oh, whoa. I missed that. Cool.
ross
—some significant percentage. Uh, another thing that she told us about homeopathy and, just, how to use it is to not just use it once and then shift and pivot and try something different. Give it time.
carrie
Mm.
ross
Sometimes, you know, the first time it won’t fully work with your energetic body, but…you know, try a second and a third and even a fourth dose, but—
carrie
So, your friend collapses in front of you—
ross
[Chuckles] Yeah.
carrie
Give it time.
ross
“Eh, he’s still collapsed.”
carrie
Huh.
ross
“Doesn’t seem like it’s working.”
carrie
Try a fourth dose.
ross
And, you know, she talked a little bit about how long to wait between doses, you know. Don’t-don’t-don’t do it too often. But yeah, e—essentially, if at first it doesn’t succuss, try, try again.
carrie
If at first it doesn’t work, deny the situation to yourself.
ross
[Chuckles] Discard that data point. She also told us that distilled vodka is good for homeopathic preparations and storing, you know, whatever energetic signature it is. And she said that alcohol really is kind of the best medium because it lasts forever. It never goes bad.
carrie
Oh, right. I—I mean everything goes bad eventually, right?
ross
Nope, never.
carrie
Hm. Interesting.
ross
And—and then we got to the end of the c—actually, I think I had to go to another meeting. We were already nine minutes past. So, my notes stopped around here somewhere. And I pointed out, “Hey, sorry, I gotta—I gotta run. But, uh…thanks for all the fish.” [Carrie chuckles briefly.] And, uh, she said, “Oh, that’s right. We’re, uh, okay, yeah. We should wrap up.” But, uh, there was evening and there was morning the first day—
carrie
Mm!
ross
—of the class.
carrie
Mm-hmm. And I would tune into the video the next day. But on Wednesday—
ross
Yeah.
carrie
—’twas just me and her and two other people.
ross
Awkward.
carrie
Tiiiny group.
ross
Wow, okay, so half. Interesting. So, you know, people invested $55, presumably, to take this course.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
I just had obligations. I couldn’t be there. But yeah, wow.
carrie
But, yeah, little bit of attrition. But she was also putting all of the materials in a Google folder, so it’s possible people were like, “Eh, I can get it later.”
ross
That’s true. In—I—And in fact, I’ll give her credit for that.
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
For doing a really good job of following up with all of the materials—
carrie
Yeaahh.
ross
—making sure everything’s freely avail—well, $55-ly available. [Carrie chuckles.] So, yeah. Kudos for that. So, yeah, next time we’ll—we’ll get to the meat of COVID-19 response with homeopathy.
carrie
These two non-meat-eaters will get to the meat.
ross
It might be vegan meat.
carrie
Yeah. It should be. Well, that’s it for our show.
ross
Our theme music is by Brian Keith Dalton.
carrie
Our administrative manager is Ian Kremer.
ross
Our editor is Victor Figueroa!
carrie
You can follow us on social media, did you know that? You can go to Facebook.co—
ross
What?!
carrie
I know!
ross
Wait, wait. Where on Facebook? Where? I’m checking Facebook.com—
ross
O-N-R-A-C
carrie
R-A-C. Like, “Oh No, Ross and Carrie.”
ross
[Gasps] Oh!
carrie
That’s what that is.
ross
Oh, my goodness. That makes sense. Okay. [Carrie giggles.] I always wondered why you said that. Okay. Oh, look at all this. there’s pictures.
carrie
Yeah.
ross
There’s posts.
carrie
Videos.
ross
Oh. Conversations. Look at that. Ooh, other people I can—
carrie
If you’ve ruined America…
ross
—connect with. Yeah. This is great!
carrie
Mm-hmm. All good. A—
ross
You never told me this was here!
carrie
[Laughs] Yeah, I’ve been doing this the whole time, and I’ve been signing on as your name and posting things. Yeah.
ross
Thanks for doing that.
carrie
No prob. And then there’s, uh, Twitter, of course. Find our Twitter !!OhNoPodcast. Oh! And by the way, also we have a YouTube, and I did finally put up the— [Ross giggles.] —David John Oates episode, fully in reverse. So you have 2.5 hours to listen to a nonsense and try to pick out words.
ross
We have a YouTube, and Carrie made a YouTube.
carrie
Mm-hmm!
ross
It’s always one of—
carrie
And I maaade a YouTube. Did I say that?
ross
No, you just said, “We have a YouTube.”
carrie
Ah.
ross
And it made me think of people I’ve known who—you know, in their seventies have said, like, “Oh, I saw a YouTube the other day.”
carrie
I like when people say, “we’re making a viral video.”
ross
[Laughs] Oh, yeah.
carrie
Are you? Well, that’s a lot of confidence!
ross
And very often, people will use the verb, “see,” in relation to our show. “Oh, I saw your show recently.”
carrie
Ah, sure. “I watched it.”
ross
“I watched your podcast.”
carrie
Mm-hmm.
ross
Good. Thanks for watching, everybody.
carrie
Now I’m picturing everyone, like, holding their phones up to their faces the whole time— [Carrie and Ross laugh.] “Don’t want to look away. Something good’s gonna happen now [laughs].”
ross
Yeah, you—[breaks off, laughing] now I feel like I’ve let them down. [Carrie guffaws in the background.] “The logo’s staying steady! But something gonna happen!” You can support us. If you like this, if you want us to keep making this podcast, consider becoming a member at MaximumFun at MaximumFun.org/join or /donate? We’re gonna have some really fun incentives coming up with our MaxFun Drive.
carrie
Yeeaah.
ross
But, you can even join now. If—if you are able and you want to help us out, then later on you’ll find out what goodies you just earned.
carrie
Or support us by embroidering a pillow, sending it to your mom—
ross
Mm-hmm.
carrie
—and the pillow says, “Hey, Mom, how are you? I’m sorry I haven’t called very much. But I think you’d really like this podcast called, ‘Oh No, Ross and Carrie!’ Love you so much. Signed,” and then your name.
ross
Oh. I would love it so much if someone did that. [Carrie laughs.] Sent us a picture. I mean, not to—not to give you a project, but if you do it…you will make my day.
carrie
Or leave us a positive review on iTunes. That’s another way to support us—
ross
That will also—
carrie
—if you’re, like, pretty fucking lazy.
ross
—warm the cockles of my heart.
carrie
I’ll be like, “Where’s my fucking pillow?” [Ross giggles.] Nooo, it’s not true.
ross
And remember,
clip
Speaker 1 (From That Mitchell and Webb Look, Series Three, Episode Four): What have we got? Speaker 2: RTA broken arm, suspected internal injuries, severe contusions to the head. Speaker 1: Gonna need to move fast. Prep me a solution of Anica Montanis, stat. Speaker 2: Strength? Speaker 1: One part in a million. Speaker 2: Are you sure? It looks serious. Speaker 1: You’re right. We need to strengthen the dose. One part in 10 million. Speaker 2: On it, doctor. [Audience laughs.] Speaker 3: Well, you’ve got a tricky one.
clip
Speaker 1: Nothing we can’t handle. Get me some wolfsbane, also known as, “monkshood,” in here! [Audience laughs.] Speaker 1: And a whole tray of flower remedies. Speaker 3: Whoa. His chakras are fading. You’re gonna need some crystals. Speaker 1: Nurse, fetch him some purple-tinted quartz. [Audience laughs loudly.] Speaker 1: Damnit, you’re right. Make that aquamarine quartz. [Audience laughs.] Speaker 3: Good call. Speaker 1: Okay, he’s stabilizing. Now, does anybody know what sort of car hit him?
clip
Speaker 2: Blue Ford Mondeo, apparently. Speaker 1: Right. Get me a bit of blue Ford Mondeo, put it in water, shake it, dilute it, shake it again, dilute it again, do some more shaking, dilute it some more, and then put three drops on his tongue. If that doesn't cure him, I don’t know what will. [Audience laughs.]
music
“Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.
promo
Music: Straightforward, thump-y electric bass guitar beat with light drums. Jackie Kashian**: Hi, I’m Jackie Kashian. Laurie Kilmartin**: Hi, I’m Laurie Kilmartin. Jackie: Aaand we have a podcast called, “The Jackie and Laurie Show.” Who are you, Laurie Kilmartin? Laurie: Oh, my God. So much pressure. Uh, let’s see, I’m a stand up. I’ve been doing stand-up since 1987. Uh, I’m a writer for Conan, I’ve written a couple books, have a couple CD’s out, have a special out. Who are you, Jackie? Jackie: Well, I too am a stand-up comic, since 1984. And, uh, I do the road like a maniac and, uh, don’t have a cool writing job, but I have four albums out. Working on a new album. We talk about stand-up. We talk about, uh, all the different parts of stand-up comedy. So, that’s The Jackie and Laurie Show, and you should subscribe on MaximumFun if you want to hear that. Laurie: [Chuckles] And I would encourage you not to. [Jackie laughs.] [Music fades out.]
music
A cheerful guitar chord.
speaker 2
Comedy and Culture.
speaker 3
Artist owned—
speaker 4
—Audience supported.
About the show
Welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, and claims of the paranormal, but take part ourselves. Follow us as we join religions, undergo alternative treatments, seek out the paranormal, and always find the humor in life’s biggest mysteries. We show up – so you don’t have to. Every week we share a new investigation, interview, or update.
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