Jaggy Splinters

by Christopher Brookmyre

  If the ELHH practices alternative medicine, then it would be fair to say that I have been known to practice what might be termed alternative journalism, and this wee nugget provided the impetus for a wee bit of just that. Before doing anything, though, I ran the idea past my wife, Sarah. Being a doctor, she was able to provide me with valuable contacts and technical assistance, as well as giving the project the ethical once-over. However, being my wife, she couldn’t allow herself to be nothing but helpful, and found it imperative to throw down a familiar condition.

  ‘You are not allowed to go breaking into this place, Jack,’ she told me, and not in a smiley, jokey, but-I-know-you-will-anyway-you-irascible-sexy-thing-you kind of way.

  Busted – but not all the way back to the drawing board. Rather, Sarah’s insistence led to a fairly inspired refinement to the scheme, so I was able to give her my solemn promise. Besides, she only said I wasn’t allowed to go breaking into the place.

  It took only a few weeks to get place b. up and running, with the choice of décor and furniture the most taxing aspect of the start-up process. Fortunately, you don’t need any kind of licence or indeed any authorised credentials whatsoever in order to set yourself up as an alternative therapist. As of this year, you’re not allowed to make specific claims about your practice without proof of therapeutic effectiveness, but nobody in this business is dumb enough to do that. Keep it vague, that’s the key. Never tell them what you’re trying to achieve and the punters can never claim you didn’t deliver. Look at Boots – they’re flogging packets of homeopathic pills bearing the keys-up, cannae-catch-us phrase: ‘without approved therapeutic indications’. It tells you on the fucking box that it doesn’t work, but it’s proving no impediment to sales. That’s Boots as in Boots the chemist, though perhaps it ought to now read Boots the shameless, whoring, snake-oil peddlers.

  I took out some ads in local papers and a few carefully selected publications, while Sarah got some GP friends of hers to make some referrals. The patients they recommended me to were not misled about anything other than my name. They were informed that this was an experimental therapy, that I was not medically qualified, that the remedies I was likely to prescribe were not clinically proven, and that nor would any of it come cheap. All of these warnings proved as effective a disincentive as the admission on the Boots packets. The plan was that I would front this charade one day a week. In practice, I found myself opening three and could have filled the diary for five. The thought that I was in the wrong business did cross my mind a few times as I overheard my friend Laura, who was posing as my receptionist, speaking on the telephone politely turning new patients away.

  Sarah’s connections allowed me to furnish myself with a generous supply – a super-abundance, in fact, despite my clinic’s popularity – of official, clinical test-standard placebo pills. However, cheap as these came, it always pays to shop around, so I also set up an account with Sucrosanto and placed orders for several of their signature products. Being an enthusiastic, new and locally based customer, I felt I ought to introduce myself personally to my new supplier, and suggested the ideal time to do so might be on a guided tour of their facility. Sucrosanto’s sales manager Sandy Gifford heartily concurred.

  The operation was accommodated within a compact little two-storey compound, a brand new construction largely surrounded by Seventies-built low-rises in varying states of disrepair or demolition. On the rainy Tuesday morning when I visited, Sandy was showing the ropes to a shy but eager young trainee lab technician named Carol. I was accompanied by Laura’s boyfriend Michael, posing as a student doing work experience at the clinic. He was dressed in a suit and tie for the occasion, but this only served to make him look even more like a student because of the sheer incongruity the effect conveyed. Michael is doing a PhD in astronomy, and his normal dress sense reflects the fact that he and his peers spend a lot of time hanging about in the dark.

  Sandy convened us initially in his office, where I asked him to walk me through the company’s ordering and shipping procedures. He showed me the place b. orders on his computer screen and explained the serial system that let them track precisely which pills went to which client, down to the individual packet, which bore the corresponding number.

  ‘It’s industry standard for British National Formulary pharmaceuticals. Homeopathic remedies aren’t required to comply with those regulations, but some of us believe it’s only a matter of time before they’re either accepted on to the BNF or just forced to toe the same line by new legislation. Either way, we prefer to be ahead of the game.’

  Sandy then took us into the lab, where he talked us through the whole process, ‘With apologies to Mr Litton, who is bound to be a lot more familiar with this information than young Carol here.’

  ‘Don’t take anything as read on my account,’ I assured him. ‘One can always learn something new. Besides, the theory behind homeopathy is something I never tire of hearing,’ I added truthfully, though neglected to elaborate that this was because it gets funnier every time.

  ‘The father of homeopathy was a German physician by the name of Samuel Hahnemann. The term comes from the Greek: homos meaning similar and pathos meaning suffering, giving the principle that like cures like. This principle wasn’t Hahnemann’s, though: it was first suggested in ancient Greek times by Hippocrates, and given that he was the founder of the world’s first hospital, we can safely say that he knew what he was about.

  Sandy directed his words mainly at Carol as he warmed to his theme with the alacrity of a proud father telling his kids about the family business.

  ‘Now, back in the 1790s, a trusted remedy for malaria was cinchona bark, which is a source of quinine. Hahnemann was intrigued by the fact that this bark, when taken by a healthy person, caused symptoms similar to malaria, and experimented by taking small doses of it himself, precipitating fever, thirst and palpitations: all associated with malaria. From this, he devised his Law of Similars, as he called it, whereby diseases can be cured by substances that precipitate the same symptoms.’

  ‘Such vision,’ I said, smiling and shaking my head with apparent awe, ‘to devise such a wide-reaching law on the basis of that single observation.’

  Yeah, sarky me, but I had to say something to cover the fact that I was trying very hard to suppress a laugh. Hahnemann took a tiny quantity of cinchona bark – his reports state four grams, making the active ingredient utterly minute – and had a very nasty reaction to it, but it never struck the boy that he may simply have been allergic to quinine. Thus was overlooked a simple, rational explanation for the symptoms he experienced, and instead we now have an international pseudo-scientific movement whose founding principle is in fact based on one man’s misreading of his own unusual pathology.

  ‘Hahnemann was way ahead of his time,’ Sandy went on. ‘He understood that these substances could trigger the body’s ability to heal itself. You could say he anticipated modern immunology, though he took a different route. Immunology uses small quantities of the disease itself to stimulate the immune system, but the principle is the same, and he pioneered it. Though it’s not strictly true to say it was all on the basis of his work with cinchona bark. Hahnemann further experimented with giving people small doses of other substances known to cause disease-like symptoms: arsenic and strychnine, for instance.’

  Carol’s eyes bulged at this point. ‘He gave them poison?’ she asked.

  ‘In small doses – ever decreasing doses, in fact, Carol, and you have actually nudged us towards the most amazing discovery at the root of homeopathy. Hahnemann’s patients experienced some understandably unpleasant side effects as a consequence of what they were taking, so he began reducing the dosage by dilution. And the astonishing, utterly counter-intuitive result was that the greater the dilution, the fewer such symptoms the patients suffered. Diluting the medicine made it more, rather than less, effective, and thus he came up with his Law of Infinitesimals.’

  Michael and I nodded as soberly as we could, but
Carol’s expression was one of naked incomprehension, wondering did she hear right, wondering perhaps if her faculties just weren’t up to grasping this complicated stuff. No, Carol, pet, you heard right and your expression indicates your faculties are serving you well. Break it down: Hahnemann gave people poison, which made them ill. When they took smaller doses of poison, they felt less ill. Contra-intuitive or what! Eat less poison – feel better. What were the fucking odds? And when that’s the level of observation and deduction it started from, it’s no surprise that homeopathy later progressed to frequently prescribing the same substances to treat completely conflicting maladies. Constipation and diarrhoea, for instance, are both treatable by sulphur, as we are told on Boots’ homeopathy website.

  Sandy directed us to a machine housing a number of transparent cylinders filled with clear fluid.

  ‘Dilution enhanced the therapeutic properties of Hahnemann’s remedies, and it therefore holds that the more they are diluted, the more effective they become. You follow?’ he asked Carol.

  ‘Eh, yeah, okay,’ she stumbled.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Sandy assured her with a smile (as well as a knowing look to me). ‘We all find it hard to get our heads around at first. A lot of things in science are counter-intuitive. But as long as you follow the principle.’

  ‘Less is more,’ she suggested.

  ‘Very good. And by extrapolation, a lot less is a lot more. Following Hahnemann’s method, we take an extract of a substance, which we call the mother tincture, and we dilute it in ten parts water.’ With this, he pressed a button on the machine and we watched a small quantity of fluid siphon from one chamber into another. A second button caused the receiving chamber to suddenly vibrate, the cylinder shaken back and forth about a central vertical axis.

  ‘According to Hahnemann, this succession process is crucial, because it releases dynamic forces within the solution which are intensified with each further dilution.’

  ‘So it’s very much a case of shaken, not stirred,’ I offered.

  ‘Very good, Mr Bond,’ Sandy accepted with an approving chuckle. ‘And of course, we then repeat the process, taking the new solution and diluting an extract from it by the same ratio.’

  ‘With the therapeutic effectiveness increasing by a corresponding degree?’ Carol asked.

  ‘Indeed. Which is why when we talk about homeopathic solutions, we describe the degree of dilution as their “potency”, and the higher the degree of dilution, the higher the potency.’

  ‘How high does it get?’ Carol asked.

  ‘Homeopathic dilutions are by the hundredfold, which is why we denote the degree of dilution by the letter c, giving us a 1c for one part in a hundred.’

  ‘And 2c would be two parts in a hundred, or one in fifty?’ Carol asked.

  ‘No, 2c would be the 1c solution diluted by the same degree, giving you one part in ten thousand. So you can imagine how potent the solution must be by the time we reach 30c, and some remedies come in at 100c!’

  I could vividly imagine how potent the solution would be at 30c. At 24x – that’s diluting by a ratio of a mere one in ten, not one in a hundred, twenty-four times – you reach what is known as the dilution limit, meaning that the chances of there being a single molecule of the original substance in any given sample of the solution are very close to zero. At a ‘potency’ of 30c – that’s a one with sixty zeroes after it, by the way - a helping of tincture the size of a teardrop would need to be dissolved in a quantity of water one hundred million times the size of our galaxy.

  ‘But surely, at that level of dilution—’ Carol began.

  ‘There can’t be any of the tincture remaining?’ Sandy anticipated. ‘Yes, this is the part that baffles the scientists, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re having trouble grasping it. The problem the scientists have is that they are entrenched in thinking about these things in molecular terms. This phenomenon may force them to reconsider a few of their own certainties, something they are unsurprisingly reluctant to do. Truth is, nobody is quite sure how it works, but it is believed to constitute evidence that water has a kind of memory, that water in fact functions almost like a liquid hard drive, and somehow stores information about what has been dissolved in it through changes in its own structure.’

  So, to recap, we’ve got a solution containing no molecules of the original tincture, but this is explained by a hypothesis – with no supporting evidence whatsoever – postulating that water has a memory. But if water has a memory, then what else might water be remembering? We are seventy per cent water ourselves, after all, and statistically speaking, every breath you take contains at last one atom previously breathed by – and therefore previously constituting a part of – Albert Einstein. That’s a far higher concentration of Einstein in your body than concentration of tincture in a homeopathic remedy. Problem is, in the case of homeopathy advocates, the Einstein molecule is diluted entirely in pure-strain pillock, and the paradoxical dilution-improves-efficacy principle doesn’t appear to be making these people any smarter. Like cures like, and less is more. I notice, however, that nobody’s selling a homeopathic contraceptive. Surely according to Hahnemann’s principles, if somebody had a wank and they diluted the sperm… or should they get a wee bit of a baby – maybe the umbilical cord – and dilute that?

  Sandy led us out of the lab to the automated production line, where trays of pills were being conveyed on a belt beneath a machine dispensing individual droplets.

  ‘And here, as you can see, are the sucrose pillules, which function as the delivery system. A single droplet is absorbed by each tablet, and allowed to evaporate before we place the pillules in blister packs. This, as you will see next door, is one hundred per cent automated, as it is vital that the pillules are not touched; even the patient taking them is advised to pop the pack and drop the pill directly on to their tongue.’

  Yeah. Like I said: sugar.

  ‘Why?’ asked Michael.

  ‘It’s due to the risk of them being contaminated by absorbing any substances they come into contact with on the skin, which could render them useless.’

  Michael just about suppressed a smirk. I refrained from asking whether sugar’s implied memory was as important as water’s. Meanwhile, poor Carol looked like she was imminently about to have a vocational crisis.

  As Sandy ushered us towards the door to the packaging centre, I announced with an embarrassed apology that I needed to visit the little homeopathist’s room. ‘All this talk of water and solutions,’ I added.

  Michael intercepted Sandy as he offered to show me the way, asking a question about the regulation of the droplet volume. I assured him I knew where I was going, which was true: I was going straight back to Sandy’s office to access his computer while Michael kept him talking.

  With the PC still connected to the local network under Sandy’s log-in, I had full-clearance user privileges. I began where Sandy had left off, with my own account details still up when I shook the PC from its screen-saving slumber. I made a few important alterations to my order, involving a small change to the shipping date and a very large change to the quantities.

  Next, I pulled up the security section and accessed the plant’s CCTV recordings, copying certain files to my flash drive (and when I say copy, I’m talking more ctrl-x than ctrl-c). Thus in a few brief minutes, I laid the groundwork for – but would, crucially, not need to personally execute – the perfect robbery.

  A short time after my visit, I paid Timothy Cullis a visit at the ELHH. The high windows of his dual-aspect office took in the Meadows, the Castle and Salisbury Craig, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much normal sugar you’d have to flog to buy a view like that. Timothy was a nervously earnest individual in his late forties who reminded me uncomfortably of Tony Blair. He oozed a cloying, well-intentioned sincerity as he looked you in the eye, but you got the impression some cold, deeper part of him distrusted you on sight and was counting the seconds until you were removed from his presence.


  ‘I appreciate you seeing me at short notice,’ I told him. ‘But like I said on the phone, this is a pressing matter that I am sure you would want to be made aware of as soon as possible.’

  ‘Yes indeed. Which is why I’m hoping you can be a little less vague now that you’re here, Mr Parlabane.’ As he spoke, he eyed the black folder I had in my lap. We both knew this was the skinny, but I wasn’t cutting to the chase quite yet.

  ‘Certainly. First, forgive me for asking again, but now you’ve had time to look into it, are you aware of any negative effects being suffered by patients here recently, or any downturn in the effectiveness of your remedies?’

  ‘I haven’t really had time to look into it, but very generally, no, everything is running as normal, as far as I am informed. Why shouldn’t it be?’

  I took the folder from my lap and placed it on his desk.

  ‘I received this yesterday,’ I said. ‘And though I’m not obliged to do so, I felt I ought to let you know about this before we run the story.’

  I opened the folder and finally showed him the contents, spreading the pages across the broad expanse of sugar-funded mahogany.

  ‘This was sent to me by an anonymous protest group. These are CCTV stills showing the interior of the Sucrosanto plant in Corstorphine, taken five weeks ago.’

  Timothy stood up and lifted one of the images. It showed two blurred figures dressed in black, ski-masks obscuring their faces, inside the packing centre.

  ‘These close-ups aren’t from CCTV: these are from the intruders’ own video footage of the break-in. As you can see, they have recorded themselves removing the blister packs from serial-numbered Sucrosanto packets and replacing them with blister packs of their own. They were very methodical. They took precise note of the range of serial numbers, which you can see on this page here. According to the accompanying letter, these serial numbers should correspond with your orders last month of Bryonia, Chamomilla, and Aconite, three of your most commonly prescribed remedies.’