TeaKay's Post-Festive Homeopathic Detox Remedy

We've all indulged to some extent this festive season (as with all festive seasons), and I'd venture to bet that most of us have over-indulged: I know I have. And the post-festive period sees all sorts of ventures, regimes and rituals designed to get you back to your muscular, toned and ready-for-anything self. The thing is, these solutions to festive bloat are all (to varying degrees) expensive, ridiculously complicated and complete bunk.

Here's one that's cheap (barely more than free, in fact), simple (requiring only a small handful of household items) and scientifically well-established.


TeaKay's Post- Festive Homeopathic Detox Remedy
I'm using the base principles of homeopathy to create this wonderful, tried-and-tested detox remedy, and the most basic of homeopathy's principles is the 'law of similars'. This is the idea that 'like cures like' and was coined in 1796 by founding father of homeopathy, German physician Samuel Hahnemann, when he realised that ingesting cinchona bark produced symptoms similar to malaria and therefore must cure it*.

From the same logical basis, one of the main issues with regards to overindulgence during the festive season is that of dehydration: it is the root of much of the headaches, nauseous feelings and general malaise experienced after a bout of prolonged self-inflicted gastric abuse. One readily available substance, salt, is known for being hydrophilic (one reason why you're not supposed to drink seawater, especially if already dehydrated, as it can make the problem worse), so that's what we'll use in our remedy.

You will need:
The next step in preparing a homeopathic remedy is that of serial dilution. I'll explain how this works as we go through the steps of preparing your remedy, but first of all, here's a list of things you'll need:

• Some water. Tap water will do, but if you're feeling flush (no pun intended) you might like to go for something posh, distilled and bottled. You'll need a lot of it.
• Some salt. You'll only need a teaspoon or so.
• Some 1 litre bottles (empty).

Preparing the remedy:

Now proceed according to the following instructions, referring to the footnotes for extra info from time to time:

1. Fill up the 1 litre bottle with water and add the teaspoon of salt. Mix it up thoroughly until all of the salt has dissolved.
2. Measure out 2 teaspoons of the solution you've just made and pour it carefully into a new bottle. Top it up with water until the bottle is full, and mix**.
3. Discard the previous solution. Measure out 2 teaspoons of the new solution, pour into a new bottle and mix with another litre of water***.
4. Repeat step 3 until you have done the whole process 30 times****.
5. Take the bottle (closed) and clonk it on a bit of wood a couple of times. This part of the process is called succussion.
6. Drink a glass of the final solution.
7. Feel thoroughly detoxed.

I've suggested diluting this mixture in this way 30 times as this is what's generally used for over-the-counter homeopathic remedies. According to homeopaths, the more you dilute something, the more potent it becomes. To put this in some kind of perspective, if you dissolved a teaspoon of salt into a ball of water the size of the Sun and then dipped a glass into it, you'd be more likely to get just one molecule of salt in your glass than you would be to find a single molecule of salt in your final bottle of TeaKay's Post-Festive Homeopathic Detox Remedy.

Of course, in a 'real' homepathic medicine, the final step is to take one drop of this final solution, drip it onto a sugar pill, package it up with other slightly damp sugar pills and sell them in Boots*****.


But wait...
Towards the beginning of this post I said that my remedy was scientifically well-established detox remedy!

I wasn't lying: by the end of the preparation, when you carry out step 6 you're actually drinking a glass of water (the statistical likelihood of their being any salt at all in what you're drinking is so low as to be ignored completely). This is one of the best substances you can take to help your body's natural detox mechanisms do their thing. Alongside a well-balanced diet and plenty of exercise, there is no better detox regime (or post-festive weightloss fad, for that matter) to be found.




* This 'law', as with all the best assertions produced by the field of alternative medicine, has remained completely unsupported by scientific evidence right up to whatever time and date it happens to be as you're reading this.
** If you've done this right you should have 10ml of your original salt solution dissolved in 100 times as much 'pure' water.
*** This is equivalent to mixing 2 teaspoons of your original solution with 100 litres of 'pure' water.
**** This step is equivalent to mixing two teaspoons of your original solution with 10,000 litres of water. The step after is like mixing 2 teaspoons of that original bottle with 1,000,000 litres of water. By the time you've done it 30 times you could get the same dilution effect by taking 2 teaspoons of your original solution and mixing it with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water, but this is about 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times how much water there is on the whole of planet Earth. In fact, that much water in a ball out in space would be bigger than the Sun. Much, much bigger than the Sun.
***** Other gullible high street chemists are, unfortunately, available.