Lord Of The Ring Around The Bath Tub

"In the late 1700s, Samuel Hahnemann invented homeopathy, a system of medicine which is reputed to be very effective for treating ailments in hobbits, elves, dwarves and other creatures of Middle Earth. Unfortunately, despite centuries of practise, this 'healing modality' does not work for humans.

While this may seem surprising, the reason for this is quite clear when considering that the modern-day homeopathic materia medica reads like a witches’ recipe book. It contains potions concocted from a wide variety of substances, ranging from the narcotic to the poisonous and the plainly bizarre.

Examples include: Latrodectus Mactans made from whole black widow spiders; Tuberculinum Bovinum from the pus of a cow’s tubercular abscess; Nux Vomica from the highly poisonous seeds of the strychnine tree and Magnetis Polus Australis made from the south pole of the magnet. Apparently Magnetis Polus Australis is an excellent treatment for ingrown toenails.

Now, this nonsense should long ago have been relegated to the rubbish heap of superstitious, infantile thinking but surprisingly it has not. In fact, vast amounts of time and money have been spent training homeopathic practitioners, making and selling homeopathic remedies and even researching the effect of this treatment.

But why would humans take hobbit medicine?"

-- Richard Kaplan, underplaying the danger for the cheap laugh - which is fine - because I kinda like hobbits for some odd reason, and homeopathy's a joke, and jokes ain't expected to be accurate or anything, even for The Thought Leader.