A Bug Bounty on Homeopathy

Introduction

This is a public document offering a monetary bounty to writers who are willing to write a piece on Homeopathy in India.

The bounty money is yours to keep. If you do not wish to keep it, I’ll donate it to a charity of your choice.

Why

Welcome Cure is an Indian homeopathy startup that raised $6 million recently. I don’t think that investors in India should be trusting their money with something that doesn’t work and plays with the public’s health. Consider this bounty as an incentive to do something about it.

Their website includes misleading content (Microsoft has nothing to do with the company despite featuring on their website if you read the linked content) and fake testimonials from celebrities.

Questions I’d like to raise

Why invest in homeopathy?

Shouldn’t the investors do some due diligence?

Why is the government still reluctant to derecognize Homeopathy

Why does the government spend (at least) $18.5M every year under AYUSH’s homeopathy section without any checks?

Why is homepathy still being taught in India?

What can we do to improve the present state?

Lots of countries in the world (most recently UK) is having a public discourse on the topic of homeopathy being legal. We need to start a discussion on the topic and figure out some answers.

Bounty Guidelines

A well written piece would do. I’m going to crowd-fund this effort, so if you feel this is worth chipping in, poke me on twitter with an amount you’d like to give and I’ll add it to the list. This is an honor system so you can chip in an amount you’d like and I’ll try to hold you accountable for it. You can drop out of the bounty any time you wish.

If you are a writer and you’d like to claim the bounty, please submit a well written article on the same. I’ll award the on January 1st 2016 to give everyone sufficient time. Assuming we get multiple entries, the best article (as per me) shall get the bounty.

Does Homeopathy Work?

See this comic for an excellent explanation and summary of this entire section.

If you skipped the above comic and your answer is yes, I’d like to ask you two questions:

Do you know when was homeopathy invented?

What is its country of origin?

Lots of people I’ve met who blindly believe in it have no idea about the pseudo-science behind Homeopathy. If you’d like to read the following pieces, you might get a lot of insight on why it can’t possibly work:

But sure, proponents would show me articles as well and you have probably skipped the above articles , so I’ll try to explain the basic principles of homeopathy:

Like treats Like Individualization of treatment for the patient Use of the minimum dose

The first and third points together mean that the cure for arsenic poisioning in homeopathy would be to give you a highly diluted dose of arsenic. This usually has no effect because of the dilution levels involved in homeopathy (which is usually 30C or 10^-60). On average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.

Bounty Amount

s1729: 250 INR

captn3m0: 5000 INR

dbalan: 2000 INR

morbid-python: 3000 INR

simula67: 1000 INR

anishsheela: 500 INR

Curent Total: 11750 INR

If you’d like to up the amount, I’ll add your name to the list. Tweet to me @captn3m0 or send me an email. You can also file a Pull Request on GitHub by editing the _data/homeopathy.yml file.

You can be anonymous if you’d like, but I’ll need to verify your contact details. The bounty details are maintained on github in the _data/homeopathy.yml file.

Suggestions

This is a list of suggestions I got while delivering the talk at hackbeach.