Vol. 22 No. 1 February 2002

Just as I was composing an editorial I received this letter

Dear Editor,

I was most interested in the article What is understood by pure homœopathy in the November 2001 issue of Homœopathica. As many of us know there has been great concern internationally about developments which have occurred within homœopathy. At the Society’s monthly talk/discussion last November this issue came up. The question was raised as to what, then, really constitutes homœopathy; where does one draw the line?

Tolerance for various developments was expressed by members of the group, but the answer to the question as to whether one wants to move away from using provings as a fundamental base appeared to be “no”. Now, this is a sticky point because Hering’s clinical observations are well accepted and entrenched in homœopathy, as is the use of unproven bowel nosodes and the prescribing of nosodes and other substances on etiology alone.

Nevertheless, I believe that, at least until an enormous amount of appropriate conventional quantitative research into the efficacy of specific remedies for specific symptoms and complaints is undertaken, provings in the form of pathogenetic trials should form the backbone of homœopathic materia medica. Controversial developments need to be evaluated from this perspective.
Although one can subscribe to any theories or ideas one likes, it appears to me that, as homœopathy inevitably becomes mainstreamed into the conventional health-care system, persons or groups who do not base their practice and teaching on this will be left behind and eventually die out.

Sue Muller
Waitakere

And then I came across a trenchant review by Lois Hoffer of Homeopathy re-examined by Rudi Verspoor and Steven Decker, in which the reviewer says:
It is long past time that homœopaths put reality first and dogma second, and relied on observation and clinical facts rather than on tradition and theory, with the goal being to cure rather than to be politically correct. As Hahnemann himself stated in the introduction to the 2nd edition of the Organon:

Medicine can and must rest on clear facts and sensible phenomena, for all the subjects it has to deal with are clearly cognisable by the senses through experience . . . Its subjects can only be derived from pure experience and observations, and it dare not take a step out of the sphere of pure, well-observed experience and experiments, if it would avoid becoming a nullity and a farce.

The points raised by these three people and printed above match my own thoughts. It is sad to see in this era of critical examination of old practices and ideas in all fields, with the liberal use of expressions like “evidence-based” and “researched”, that homœopathy is, exceptionally, in some quarters going off on flights of fancy to a height never seen before in its chequered history.

There is a great need for bona fide provings and trials demonstrating the efficacy of homœopathy in the treatment of medical conditions identified beyond criticism – diabetes for example, because with that disease improvement is easily seen in changes in blood glucose levels or amount of insulin required.

Bruce Barwell