HOMEOPATHY – Fact or Fiction?
Homeopathy is perhaps one of the most contentious areas
in holistic medicine, with opinion polarised into two camps:
those who think it is scientifically impossible for homeopathic
medicines to work and those who know from direct experience
that they do work, we just don’t have a verifiable
means of explaining how, as yet.
Homeopathic preparation of medicines involves so much dilution
that not even a molecule of the original substance remains.
Some scientists, even those openly hostile to Homeopathy,
have shown that the dilutants can have ‘a memory’
of the original substance and this may explain how it works.
Their findings have been ridiculed and the nay-sayers insist
that any benefit derived must be purely down to placebo
effect.
Placebo effect is undoubtedly a powerful tool against illness.
If someone is convinced a medicine, even a sugar pill, will
help them it generally does. Unfortunately, this effect
fails to explain why animals, babies, small children and,
best of all sceptics, all respond beautifully to a well
prescribed homeopathic medicine or why a poorly prescribed
medicine has little lasting effect.
To recap from last week:
Homeopathy = Greek for ‘similar suffering’.
So a substance can only be truly homeopathic if it can make
a healthy person suffer similar symptoms to the person who
is ill.
Many of the trials of homeopathy, including those who found
it was beneficial, have so far been unsatisfactory, because
the experimenters design double blinds, where the first
group takes sugar pills and the second group all take the
same homeopathic medicine (e.g. diluted grass pollens to
treat hay fever). This is not true homeopathy. A homeopath
would interview each member of the second group about the
precise symptoms they get and prescribe each with a different
medicine accordingly.
Scepticism is healthy, but not if it means you ignore empirical
evidence from hundreds of thousands of people who attribute
their return to health to Homeopathy. If for over two hundred
years that many people kept telling you there was a unicorn
at the bottom of your garden, no matter how fantastic that
seemed wouldn’t you want to check it out? The healthiest
mind is an open one…
© Mary Aspinwall
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by Mary Aspinwall
