Vol. 25 No. 3 June 2005

World Homœopathic Awareness Week (10-16 April) has come and gone. The Homœopathic Society gave around $2500 in cash and kind to the New Zealand Council of Homœopaths to help make the week achieve its intention of greater awareness of homœopathy. Fifty copies of the book Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homœopathy, by Amy Lansky, were given to public libraries throughout the country, some practitioners opened their doors to enquirers, displays were staged in libraries, the Council sent out media packs to attract journalists’ interest, and talks were given.Though it is often said that any sort of publicity is a good thing I wish there was some way of assessing what the Week achieved. Amy Lansky’s book has as its core the story of the author’s autistic child losing all signs of autism after the administration of a cancer nososde. Despite the book’s entreaty to consult a qualified homœopath and not blindly give the same remedy I now know of two cases where an autistic child was given Carcinosin under the inspiration of the book – one the parent’s own prescribing, the other with the help of a homœopath. No benefit was achieved.

Giving examples of alleged treatment successes to the media is an exercise fraught with risk. Such case histories are in danger of looking like self-promotion for the homœopath concerned, and no matter how brilliant the cure a journalist will always be able to find a prejudiced medical expert who is ready to assert, for example, that diabetic gangrene often comes right by itself.

I think the best promotional strategy is to increase the number of happy patients and to draw the attention of people interested to the New Zealand Homœopathic Society. Along with this there must be a robust effort to make the public aware of what is pseudo-homœopathy and explore every legal avenue to prevent people, doctors included, from masquerading as fit to prescribe homœopathic medicines. Organisations such as the Charter of Natural Health Practitioners could help in such a project.

Bruce Barwell