Vol. 20 No. 2 April 2000

A grumpy old newspaper editor banned headings ending in a question mark from his pages. Our job is to inform and entertain readers, he said, not quiz them.

Homœopathica, on the other hand, has lots of questions for readers – as well as informing and entertaining them, we hope. Here are some questions raised in recent issues that bear thinking about. Please write promptly if you feel you have solutions, or even a portion of an answer. You will be paid for your effort if published. In this issue, page 9, we have a report on the homœopathic prevention of a chicken embryo virus developing. How wonderful! But the same series of experiments demonstrated that two remedies, in all potencies tested, increased evidence of viral activity, that is, made the “patient” worse.How often do homœopathic medicines given to human patients encourage bacteria, fungi or viruses to multiply? Is this an aggravation that will be followed by amazing improvement? If Typhoidinum 200c, Hydrophobium 1M, Tuberculinum 1M, Nux vomica 200c and Malandrinum 1M were all 100% effective in stopping the chicken virus from multiplying, does this mean that a wide range of remedies with very different symptom pictures will all work successfully on a human patient?

The authors of the chick embryo experiment think they have evidence that the remedies that proved beneficial stirred a virus- fighting reaction in the tissues of the chick. This, of course, goes along with the claim often seen in homœopathic literature that remedies stimulate the body’s own defence and self-regulating mechanisms. But consider the experiment, rather like the chick one, in which homœopathic medicines were put in contact with fungi growing on non-living nutrient medium in petri dishes (see Homœopathica, November 1999, page 5).

Does this not prove conclusively that the body’s, or the plant’s for that matter, own defences are not necessarily involved in the successful use of homœopathy?

And yet another question, a big one, is raised by the long article by Georg von Keller on page 13 of this issue.

Why do so few people who call themselves classical homœopaths and who would assure you they are familiar with the Organon and Hahnemann’s ideas generally in fact practise a form of homœopathy far removed from that approved by Hahnemann? Why do not students of homœopathy not see this great gap between what Hahnemann and Bönninghausen did, and taught, and the weird stuff taught as classical homœopathy today and seek an explanation from their teachers, or seminar-holding, globe-trotting gurus, etc?

Please give these questions the attention they deserve; simply glossing over or ignoring fundamental questions that go against the grain only make homœopathy a pseudo-science and delay its progress towards being universally considered a valid branch of medicine.

Bruce Barwell