Talk:Oscillococcinum

ISI is showing another Cochrane hit from 2009 but it's marked "withdrawn". It has no difference to the previous 2006 update. Not sure what to make of that, I assume they just tried to update it, realised they can't actually update it because nothing has been done and retracted it. Other than that, there is fuck all on this stuff indexed. ^pathetic 18:37, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Some crap from Dana Ullman on the subject ^pathetic 18:39, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

The Sound of the Simillium

When the Simillium of Oscillococinum is in its living source, what is the sound made by that source?

Coincidence? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:14, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Argh

My mom just bought this stuff, and she got in a fight with me over it. She still has it. Тиранес^complaints 14:59, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

"Ducks" plural

Why do they need multiple ducks for the production at the marketed dilution?--82.26.216.176 (talk) 01:35, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Korsakov dilutions are not 1 to 100 dilutions, so the premise is flawed

The entire article is written on the assumption that Oscillococcinum is made by 200 successive dilutions with a 1 to 100 ratio. However, this is plain false information, so it does nothing to prove the conclusion that there isn't a single duck liver molecule in the end product. Conclusion that I can actually prove to be false right here. Let me explain.

Successive 1 to 100 dilutions diluting the initial material would be what would happen if Oscillococcinum was a 200 CH dilution. However it isn't. The dilution is 200 K, K standing for Korsakov dilution.

Korsakov dilution is the act of putting the initial mixture in a bottle, completely emptying the bottle, then filling the bottle with water and shaking it 100 times. 200 Korsakov dilutions means doing this process 200 times IN THE SAME BOTTLE.

The same bottle part is crucial. Part of the initial material fixes itself on the insides of the bottle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsorption and then with each subsequent Korsakov dilution a part of this material is released into the water. Even the 200th time, there will still be some residue.

The process is fundamentally different from diluting 200 times. It's more like putting a drop of blood on a sock, and putting that sock 200 times in a washing machine. Will there still be blood cells in the water the 200th time you wash it? The answer is a definite YES.

While disproving pseudoscience is a noble pusuit, you still need to check your facts. SatanistForFun, April 2016 ^{— Unsigned, by: SatanistForFun / talk / contribs 14:53, 22 April 2016‎}

Err ... bolllocks? Pippa (talk) 15:09, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

They've got a point that the dilution is probably more than 1:100, if their description of the dilution process is accurate. Not that it makes much of a difference on the amount of duck offal in the finished product. Hertzy (talk) 15:29, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Before we continue, can you tell me something? Do you sincerely think that this grants the process therapeutic properties? ikanreed ^{You probably didn't deserve that} 15:17, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, ok. How do you quantify the capability of the adsorbent - in this case the bottle? If the mixture is succussed inside the bottle, how is the amount of material both deposited and released per cycle controlled? Even assuming I accept your premise, at the levels of dilution we are talking a tiny variation in the adsorption or release of material will have an exponential effect on the end strength, surely? The variability of the dose and therefore effectiveness of the remedy would be incredibly unpredictable given the rather cavalier nature by which the active ingredient is adsorped by the container, and later released during potentization? MyHatIsBread (talk) 15:34, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

First off, what I said has absolutely no bearing on whether duck meat can actually cure flu or not. I don't think it can, but that's a completely different subject. What I said is that the argumentation made in the article is completely wrong because it's entirely based on false fact that Oscillococcinum is made via 200 successive 1 in 100 dilutions, and that when you consider the actual physics of the Korsakov dilution process you see that it has nothing to do with this. Claiming that there isn't a single molecule of duck liver in Oscillococcinum is equivalent to claiming that if you kill a duck and grind its body inside a glass bowl, there exists a way of washing the bowl with water so clean and perfect that *every single* molecule from the duck will be washed clean. Literally perfect washing at the molecular level with zero residue. No detergents, no high pressure water, nothing : just filling it with water a lot of times and shaking it really hard.

Also, according to http://www.njhonline.com/1994/mar_april_94_vol_111_no_2/misc/medicines_hahnemannian_ways.shtml a 200K dilution corresponds to a 7 CH dilution. Not a 200 CH dilution. All molecules disappearing because of over-dilution is only something that happens beyond 12 CH. So if you assume this correspondence to be true, the argument that there isn't a single molecule left in Oscillococcinum crumbles completely...it's more like 10^10 molecules actually. (to be honest I've also seen the claim that 200K = 200 CH by looking online, but it's founded on the baseless assumption that the Korsakov dilution is equivalent to a 1 in 100 dilution, which is proved to be wrong by mentioning adsorption on the surface that stays there during the entire process).

My main point is that the Korsakov dilution process which is used to make Oscillococcinum is completely un-scientific in nature and extremely hard to quantify. You don't know how much of the stuff gets stuck on the glass. You don't know how much shaking the glass releases the adsorbed stuff into the water. Even if the amount decreases exponentially, you don't know the characteristic time of that decay. Because it all depends on the type of bottle used, how hard you shake it, how sticky duck meat is, etc. So the claim that the amount of initial molecules gets divided by 100 with each dilution is 100% bogus.

The argument that "there isn't a single molecule left in homeopathy" only applies to 1) dilutions above 12 CH and 2) dilutions measured in CH, not in K. Again, get your facts right. If you don't, you're actually worse than the pseudoscience you're trying to debunk. Also, claims without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. SatanistForFun (talk) 18:34, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Alright, there's a reason I asked whether you believed, because I trust statements about this stuff from true believers about as far as I can throw them. It does sound like we need some re-contextualization of this info. On the other hand, thinking that we're as wrong as the homeopaths because of a factual oversight... well... this whole thing ikanreed ^{You probably didn't deserve that} 18:39, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, to me that's equivalent to saying that people who think the Earth is flat are just as wrong as those who think it's a sphere instead of an oblate spheroid. Technically they are both wrong, but one is more of a shortcut and the other denies everything about the reality of how the universe operates. Life isn't a bunch of very general Boolean logic gates. -EmeraldCityWanderer (talk) 18:53, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Question

Is this quackers quackery??

How many of [1], bioduck and a non-CP-appropriate mollusc references can be included here? 31.51.114.83 (talk) 22:30, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

A question of semantics

Does this stuff count as non-vegetarian? Anna Livia (talk) 15:45, 17 October 2018 (UTC)