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