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?

  • Nougat@fedia.io
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    5 months ago

    Water is water. Get the “not water” stuff out of it, and you have … water. Add back in some “stuff that probably should be in potable water,” like minerals and fluoride, and there’s no problem.

    You can build a bush filter with grasses, rocks, sand, and charcoal from your campfire which will catch most of the particulate, then boil it to make sure you kill all the parasites. The only thing a municipal filtering station might add to that would be removal of heavy metals and actual testing.

    • Thavron@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      Water has memory! And while the memory of a long-lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, it somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

      • isles@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The number of people who believe in homeopathy after it’s explained to them is TOO DAMN HIGH.

        • LordTrychon@startrek.website
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          5 months ago

          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.

            • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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              5 months ago

              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.

            • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              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

        • Deway@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          The fact that it’s not zero is so weird.

          • “Sooo here’s a scam, proved to be a scam, based on a scam”
          • “Oh so it’s natural, so it works!”
        • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I have a beautiful unicorn pin with a magnet back on my fridge that says “Homeopathic means pretend” from the podcast Sawbones. It makes me smile.