Why are people so squicked out about "Toilet to Tap" / reclaimed water when it basically already works that way?

Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 124 points –

Background Info:

Recent events and news about water scarcity got me thinking about this. So the question is essentially the title. Or am I missing something?

If you live anywhere that uses a sewer system rather than septic tanks, isn't it already doing that?

In my area, the water company pulls in from the river, filters and processes it, and pipes it out to homes. It gets used in the homes, discharged into the sewer to a treatment plant, treated, and then pumped back into the river.

Even if your water company's intake is before the sewage treatment plant, the next town's intake is downstream. So if you're not drinking your neighbor's processed toilet water, you're drinking that of the town upstream.

Is getting mixed with river water simply enough to "dilute" the ick-factor here, or is there something I'm missing?

54

You are viewing a single comment

I thought for the longest time that homeopathy was just a generic name for alternative medicines or something. Wasn't for me regardless so I never gave it a second thought or dug into it.

Someone recently explained what it was to me and I just started laughing. Hilarious. Kinda. I had no clue.

So what is it?

It's the idea that water has memory, and that memory-water has healing abilities. I'm not going to explain it more than that but there's no shortage of online sources to both explain it and disprove it.

Don't forget the idea that diluting the original substance in water until literally none remains supposedly makes it stronger.

I didn't, but as I said, I don't feel like explaining it more than I did.

It’s a term that refers to any medicinal strategy which includes providing small amounts of the same pathogen or another substance which causes the same symptoms.

homeo = matching the
pathy = disease

Two examples of mainstreamed homeopathic treatments are:

  • the administration of a rabies vaccine to someone suspected of already being infected
  • the use of capsaicin creams to treat chronic pain

It’s differentiated from “allopathic” medicine, which is when you use something that the opposite or indices opposite symptoms.

allo = opposite of the
pathy = disease

Most mainstream medicine is allopathic medicine:

  • taking an anti inflammatory drug to reduce inflammation

  • taking beta blockers when your blood pressure’s too high

  • using lenses which produce -3.5 diopters of focus when your eyes have a +3.5 diopter focus deficit

In a drive to provide supply for the desire to make fun of people, the internet has decided homeopathy refers to mega-diluted water potions. It’s classic straw man shit writ large, fur the satisfaction of mocking people.

Homeopathy = pushing the same direction as a disease, to trigger the body’s own anti-disease mechanisms

Allopathy = pushing back against the disease with the medicine, because the body’s anti-disease mechanisms are exhausted or absent

That was very detailed thank you