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In Defence of Homeopathy

I refer to the article by Carl Wyant [Viewpoint, May 1993]. This mishmash of unscientific journalese is unworthy of publication in the Sunday edition of a low-grade tabloid newspaper, much less the Viewpoint feature of a reputable magazine.

To associate the well-established and well-proven medical philosophy and practice of homeopathy with "New Age hokum" exhibits both ignorance and fatuousness. Orthodox allopathic medicine, whose mechanistic, symptom-bashing approach to disease is totally materialistic, fails to understand the subtle differences between curing a medical problem by getting rid of its symptoms and bringing about healing by means of addressing its underlying causes by stimulating the whole organism. The pre-scientific nihilistic school of medicine knew that in instances involving common diseases, about half of the sufferers recovered without medical help of any kind. Compare this with the fact that approximately the same proportion of medical conditions today are iatrogenic in origin, a manifest result of side effects which accompany almost every allopathic remedy.

Homeopathic and anthroposophical medicaments, by contrast, are totally without side effects. As for the disputed efficaciousness of these, arguments against which involve factors which are mainly psychological, and often incurring the "placebo effect", are without foundation. Animals are daily being successfully treated with homeopathic remedies, and the mystique and magic associated with medical practitioners in the shape of veterinary surgeons bypass them entirely.

As for the rest of the article, the contributor does not seem to be aware of the open secret that medical scientists, in their fight to keep one jump ahead of constantly mutating microbes, are riding a tiger. Put another way, Nature is continuously shifting the goal-posts because humankind forces it to, and it does not make mistakes; these arise because Nature is imperfectly understood and therefore unwisely and unsuccessfully responded to. It is not Science per se that makes mistakes, but the scientists, and the trail of abandoned hypotheses that litters the history of this discipline is ample proof that nature is never wrong -- it's the "scientific" investigators and interpreters that make the mistakes. It is the logical-positivist empiricist-materialistic scientists who are on the road to nowhere.

Gilbert Childs DipEd (Bristol) BA(Hons) (Open) MEd (Bath) PhD (Wales) ACP Gloucestershire