I can see where you're coming from and what you're reading into what I've written, but from your responses it's clear you haven't understood where I'm coming from in what I'm saying. This is beautifully illustrative of the point I was making earlier about Kent.
Kent believed that his view of Hahnemann's work was truly Hahnemann's own interpretation. Yet he was looking at it through his Swedenborgian lenses and didn't realise that the distortions those lenses produced belonged to his perception, not what he was looking at. In his later years he was very fond of tearing Bönninghausen's method to shreds, criticising it in much the same sort of dismissive language as you're using here. But a closer examination of what his criticisms are about reveals he doesn't actually comprehend Bönninghausen's method because it's incongruent with the Swedenborgian filter in his thinking. Hahnemann himself is on record as saying that of all his followers, Bönninghausen's perspective and practice was closest to his own, so how on earth could Kent lay claim to representing Hahnemann's view if he couldn't even understand Bönninghausen's?!
My point was that we all do this. Note that I'm not making any sort of exception for myself here. We all have our individual perspective and approach that we bring to bear on everything, not just homeopathy. We read others' positions through our own filters, judge that THEY, not we, are 'wrong', draw a line in the sand and create 'sides' - 'us' and 'them', inclusive and exclusive - puff ourselves up to make ourselves look bigger, employ judgemental authoritarian language and big words while being dismissive of the other 'side', try to make them look smaller and undermine their positions, call in the 'support' of an army of opinions that appear to roughly coincide with our own, use all kinds of inflammatory emotive divisive language to artificially polarise the discussion way past the position of the other 'side' ... it's a grand game, to be sure! And after a year spent playing it with homeopathy's main detractors 'face to face' (so to speak), believe me there isn't a trick in the book I don't know about! But it goes absolutely nowhere, convinces no-one, contributes nothing but bad feeling, advances our knowledge not one jot and is ultimately just tedious and boring. So if you're expecting me to play along John, forget it! My main purpose in contributing to this thread was to suggest possible ways out of this perpetual cycle of behaviour ...
But given that this IS the reality we find ourselves in, how do you imagine it's possible for there to be consensus about what homeopathy represents ...?!!
We all contribute to discussions from our own standpoints. If we're willing and able to shuffle about in each others' shoes for a bit, then maybe we'll achieve some understanding. If not, the debate will go on for another 200 years or until we destroy the planet, whichever is the sooner ...
The truth, beauty, spirit and elegance that we each perceive in homoeopathy comes from the truth, beauty, spirit and elegance of the underlying natural principles which we glimpse through it. Those principles are universal and not confined to homeopathy. If we do as Hahnemann did and learn our lessons from nature, then maybe we'll all be able to coexist peacefully, stop destroying the planet and stop wasting so much time and energy going round in unproductive destructive circles. Personally I don't give a fig for what anyone chooses to define as 'homeopathy'. It's a label. Labels don't change truth, beauty, spirit and elegance, nor effectiveness. Labels are just labels.
And as for combination remedies, I have no idea how effective they are or can be because I don't use them. If I don't know then I can't make a judgement about them. (Which is hardly being 'enamoured' of them, John! - can you see how ludicrously wide of the mark your description of my position is?) If I can't make a judgement then I can't make a judgement. Full stop, end of story. And the point I was making is that nobody else here appears to be able to either. Nobody is presenting solid data. It's all supposition and theoretical projections based on the circular logic of single remedy prescribers. Which, as I said, is an identical logical process to that of the sceptics looking at homeopathy and displays exactly the same qualities we can identify only too clearly in their perspective.
Wendy
On 22 Dec 2011, at 13:21, John Harvey wrote:
>
> Dear Wendy,
>
> 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.
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> 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.
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> Kind regards,
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> 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.
>
> --
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> "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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