One of my favorite jokes: A homeopathic physician was treating himself and one day forgot to take his pills. He died of an overdose.
OK, it goes for what my lovely and intelligent spouse (a recovering comedian) calls the "pocket laugh," meaning only a handful of people are going to a) get it and b) giggle.
But I assume most folks who read these musings will be among the handful and might also be amused by the following:
Terra-Medica, a homeopathic drug company, is because they might accidentally contain ... wait for it ... a medication.
It is, you have to admit, funny.
Homeopathic products are so diluted as to contain almost none of the purported active ingredient. A looked at the mathematics of homeopathy and concluded you'd have to be enormously lucky to get even one molecule of an active ingredient into your system.
And here this company has to recall products because they could have an actual effect.
To be fair, the is acting properly and would no doubt have done so even if it hadn't been told to by the FDA.
The agency says Terra-Medica is voluntarily recalling 56 lots of Pleo-FORT, Pleo-QUENT, Pleo-NOT, Pleo-STOLO, Pleo-NOTA-QUENT, and Pleo-EX.
The company website says they are derived from various fungi of the Penicillium family but hastens to say they aren't antibiotics or anything like that. Perish the thought!
But the FDA says the products might contain small amounts of penicillin or penicillin derivatives, which could be dangerous to people with an allergy to the beta-lactams.
So some poor shmoe might take his homeopathic remedy and, in contrast to the poor homeopath in the joke, die of a literal overdose -- of something that's not meant to be there.
And that would not be funny.
Culture Shock is a blog by Michael Smith for readers with an interest in infectious diseases.