I appreciate that you imagine that the debate about combination medicines
focuses on their appropriateness. In fact, it centres on the misuse of the
term "homoeopathy" to describe the practice of prescribing medicines of
unknown effect.
Homoeopathy is not, as you allege, an experience. Neither is it a
philosophy, a belief, or a fact. It is not a discovery, a truth, or a
possibility. Certainly it is not a value, or, in *method*, a happy
accident.
It is a single, simple principle of medical practice that most certainly
and readily distinguishes its genuine practice from all imitators.
That principle requires something that no other medical practice (not even
an imitative one) does, and it is the one tiny spark that distinguishes
homoeopathy from every other medical practice.
The principle, or requirement, is that the choice of medicine be made on
the basis of matching knowledge of the patient's symptoms of natural
disease with knowledge of competing medicines' effects in the healthy in
order to choose from amongst the latter the one most similar to the former.
The principle fulfilled, no matter how one goes about it, one is practising
homoeopathy.
It can be fulfilled in various styles and with various tools. What it
cannot be fulfilled with is combination medicines.
Every defence of combination medicines rests on obscuring that simple
contradiction between homoeopathy's unique requirement -- *knowledge *of
pathogenesis -- and combination medicines' eternal inherent limitation
-- *ignorance
*of pathogenesis. When the hysteria and the dust settle, what remains to
prevent the prescription of combination medicines from occurring *on the
principle of homoeopathy* is this simple limitation: ignorance of the
effects of the medicinal agent *upon the healthy*.
It's true that a two-century tradition of using rabid self-interested
accusative hysteria has attempted to pass blatantly ignorant
prescribing off as homoeopathy. Such a tradition offers lazy
ignoramuses no moral basis, however, for levelling further self-interested
accusations. It behooves the ignorant to study rather than to uproot and
destroy.
Kind regards,
John
On 22 December 2011 06:45, Wendy Howard <wendy@smeddum.net> wrote:
> Since this discussion epitomises exactly why I stopped participating in
> the homeopathy lists the best part of a decade ago, I'll have my say
> (somewhat lengthy - apologies - but hey! you won't have to read any more
> than this from me) then disappear back into oblivion again ...
>
> To paraphrase Anne Lamott quoting a priest, "You can safely assume that
> you've created Homeopathy in your own image when it turns out Homeopathy
> excludes all the same people you do."
>
> How is it SO much time and energy is expended on perpetually going round
> in the same circles?! Shouldn't the singular failure of this debate to
> advance so much as one step forward in ... what, 200 years? ... be telling
> us something fundamental and axiomatic about this question?! That, to quote
> Einstein, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness
> that created it."?
>
> Homeopathy does not exist in isolation. It utilises exactly the same
> universal principles used in many systems of healing. It's one among many,
> there are all manner of shades of grey in between and we don't know the
> half of it yet. If we don't even know the mechanism by which the practice
> of homeopathy actually achieves a curative reaction, then the theory
> remains just that: theory, guesswork and post hoc rationalisation based on
> circular logic. To believe otherwise is to mistake the map for the
> territory.
--
"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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