You've made here the perpetual error of mistaking a discussion of meaning
for a discussion of value. Nobody here wishes to prevent others from
practising whatever kind of medicine their conscience or unconsciousness
may dictate; and nobody here is, at present, discussing the value of
alternatives to homoeopathy. Thus, it is most unhelpful to slide from
"everyone's perspective is no less valid than anyone else's", which is
fair enough, into suggesting that it's failure to appreciate "the value of
diversity" that has motivated homoeopaths to challenge confusions such as
yours.
If you think that this discussion has concerned the value of other systems,
then you have not been attending properly to it. It has concerned
therapeutic value only incidentally, when other defenders of combinopathy
have insinuated that intolerance of diversity underlies the definition that
homoeopaths insist upon maintaining between one kind of therapy and all
others.
Much as I'm sure I'm not alone in enjoying your gaming with psychological
punning and so on, and although you may be perfectly correct in ascribing
to it and other "mirroring" therapies the power of homoeopathy, there are
at least two very sound reasons for maintaining clarity as to what is, and
what is not, homoeopathy rather than treating anything that's similar to
anything else as (possibly, potentially, conceptually) some "kind" of
homoeopathy.
One reason is that the slide from homoeopathy's actual meaning -- which
rests securely and incontestably in a knowledge of the primary power of
medicinal substances and thorough investigation of the nature of the
patient's malady -- to the plenitude of metaphorical, fancied, and virtual
applications of a "kind" of homoeopathy arising in some "kind" of knowledge
of some "kind" of dynamic agency has unfortunate consequences in a
practical sense: far from liberating the aspiring homoeopathic
practitioner, attempting to confound homoeopathy's meaning -- which rests
upon knowledge of the medicinal tools! -- with anything utilising
similarity to anything else leaves the student and the patient alike
rudderless and uncertain as to whether hard-won homoeopathic knowledge is
just as fanciful as the tricks every snake-oil salesman pulls out of his or
her bag on this list. The analogies dressed as homoeopathy tend to
be confusing, overwhelming, unhelpful, usually unproven, often inaccurate,
generally unreproducible, and without fail unfalsifiable.
In other words, for the purposes of practising according to the
homoeopathic principle, the practices whose champions wage on homoeopathy
the zeal of the desperate amount to nothing: they are not possible to
teach, learn, improve, or test as homoeopathy is. And, by that reason
alone, the confusion you champion leads to intellectual laziness so
extremely debilitating for the practitioner that the practitioner becomes
unable even to distinguish the outlines of a discussion such as the one
whose nature you've mistaken here.
The first reason, then, is fundamentally strategic.
The other reason is not strategic but epistemological and aesthetic. The
truth, beauty, spirit, and elegance of homoeopathy are sufficient cause to
renovate the line between homoeopathy, a medical practice based on the
knowledge of medicines' primary effects, and *everything* else -- every
doddle that resembles or poses as homoeopathy. If any additional reason
were necessary, it may be found in the contrasting speciousness, ugliness,
and artificiality of the methods that snake their venomous way far too
easily into the gentle hearts of the long-suffering homoeopaths who (unlike
me) bite their tongues and tolerate the aggression with which combinopaths
pursue their "tolerance" agenda.
When you've understood what this discussion is about, please do contribute.
But all of those who'd like to discuss *homoeopathy* rather than
the aggressively intolerant presumptions of the wilfully ignorant would
appreciate desistance from the continual assault on it by the attempt to
pass 18th century allopathy off as 21st century homoeopathy. By all means,
discuss any kind of allopathy that takes your fancy, if you can do so
without recourse to the fraud of calling it homoeopathy; standing out as
unusually perceptive, you'll receive a great deal of kind tolerance. But
if you choose to pursue a zealous crusade for acceptance of unknown
medicinal agents as useable in some "kind" of homoeopathy, then understand
that the response you obtain arises not from intolerance of your faith but
from the injury you do to the sensibilities and the intent of those here
who respect and cherish that bright, pure thread that runs through all
homoeopathic practice.
Kind regards,
John
On 22 December 2011 23:09, Wendy Howard <wendy@smeddum.net> wrote:
> John & Irene, I'll repeat ...
>
> > So where do we draw the line between 'homeopathy' and 'not-homeopathy'?
> >
> > The answer is we can't, because the boundary is not a line. It's a wide
> region of fuzziness. No matter how close you pull the boundaries in towards
> Hahnemannian homeopathy, they remain, and will always remain, fuzzy.
> Paradoxical maybe, because to each of us individually the boundaries no
> doubt appear pretty clear, but they're fuzzy because very few of those
> individual clear boundaries exactly coincide.
>
--
"And if care became the ethical basis of citizenship? Our parliaments,
guided by such ideas, would be very different places."
—Paul Ginsborg, *Democracy: Crisis and Renewal*, London: Profile, 2008.
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