This is how you use the Belladonna one . . . you hold it upside down . . . then you twist . . . then you pop it in your mouth! . . . It tastes just like sugar.

Update:  Kids & Homeopathy has been taken off-line.  However, I had been careful to save a copy.  Here are a couple of stills, edited to protect the child’s privacy:

“...you hold it upside down...”

“...then you pop it in your mouth!”

How many ethical issues does this raise?  In my opinion, the video steps over the line by…

1. Marketing medicine to children,
2. Using the pills’ similarity to candy to sell them,
3. Blurring the distinction between medicine and candy,
4. Promoting a culture of pill-popping and keeping a medicine cabinet full of “remedies” at all times to children,
5. Teaching children how to circumvent a child-safety device,
6. Teaching children to self-diagnose instead of turning to a parent or guardian,
7. Blurring the meaning of dangerous poisons such as Belladonna,
8. Focussing on the symptoms instead of the underlying problems:  Why does she have headaches frequently enough that she knows what “medication” she prefers for them?  Is there some underlying problem that’s going ignored while she self-diagnoses and self-medicates?
9. Marketing a disproven therapy (homeopathy) to children,
10. Harming this particular child through the inculcation of these values.

Did I miss anything?

Update

1. The video’s creator responds.
2. Another problem with the video’s concept occurred to me:  As can be seen in the screenshot above, the girl takes medication on camera even though she’s not experiencing any health problems.  This is both questionable (further teaching that taking meds is a lighthearted & fun activity), and odd (evidence that homeopathic medications maybe really aren’t.)

But I recently stumbled onto his blog post, Pit Bulls….  It’s short; just two paragraphs long.  The first is decent; he describes how, even though a pit bull attack caused no serious physical harm,

. . . the attack could have been much more serious. If everyone hadn’t run to the defense of the boy so quickly, and if the boy’s mother hadn’t done exactly the right thing (lying down, with her body covering the boy) the boy could easily have been badly injured. The attack was horrifying, even if no one was seriously hurt . . .

But then the concluding paragraph is wrong on its face:

. . . part of the rhetorical arsenal of those who get hysterical about Pit Bulls is to pretend that every dog bite is a medical catastrophe. . . . [But] more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites—which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.

[Emphasis mine]  I mean, really? He really believes (and thinks he’s proved) that people, or at least owners of pit bulls, are more likely to bite you than their dogs are?  My friend Morgan pointed out that this goes against our own experience:  We could each remember numerous times we’ve been bitten by dogs, but we’ve never been bitten by a person.

Where Gladwell goes wrong

His logic violates conditional probability which is based on this central idea:  It can be the case that if A happens, B occurs too.  Yet this does not imply the reverse: That if B happens, then A will occur.

Here, Gladwell’s premise is, when people land in the hospital due to a bite (A), it’s probably due to a non-dog animal (B).  He then draws the erroneous reverse conclusion:  When encountering a human and a dog (A), it’s more probable that the human, rather than the dog, will bite you, sending you to the hospital (B).

And another thing

I have to also say that his “those who get hysterical about Pit Bulls” characterization is B.S.  In my experience, pro-Pit Bull people (they exist) and Anti-BSL advocates often get hysterical.   However, I haven’t seen this in advocates for BSL.