Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

Finding the correct remedy is such a complicated and subtle task that a patient who visited different homeopaths and who underwent different interviews would be likely to receive different remedies. In fact, the process of finding the correct remedy can vary so much that it has led to the emergence of distinct schools of homeopathy. For example, clinical homeopathy simplifies matters by focusing only on the patient’s main symptom and ignoring the more tangential aspects that would emerge during the usual homeopath’s interview. Similarly, combination homeopathy is interested only in the patient’s main symptom, but it relies on mixtures of different remedies that all share the ability to treat this one outstanding symptom. In other words, a patient with migraine would receive a homeopathic mixture of all the remedies that include headache as one of the symptoms that they cure. Another way to prescribe is according to the doctrine of signatures, which places less emphasis on the symptoms in the Materia Medica and instead looks for a clue, or signature, that indicates that a particular remedy is the one that should be adopted. Therefore a walnut-based remedy would be appropriate for various mind-related disorders, such as stress, because the walnut resembles a brain.

With so many approaches and so many possible remedies, some homeopaths employ specific and peculiar techniques for checking that they have found the appropriate treatment. This can include dowsing, whereby a pendulum is held above a shortlist of possible remedies. The direction of swinging should indicate the correct remedy, yet a scientific trial conducted in 2002 showed no evidence for the power of homeopathic dowsing. Six homeopaths were given twenty-six pairs of bottles; one bottle in each pair contained Bryonia remedy and the other contained a placebo, and the challenge was to use dowsing to identify the genuine remedy. Although the homeopaths generally felt that they were selecting with a high degree of confidence, they were successful only 75 times out of 156 trials, which is a success rate of just under 50 per cent: roughly what one would expect from guesswork.

All this ritual — from extreme dilutions to vigorous shaking, from prolonged provings to dubious dowsing — is performed with the ultimate goal of trying to restore a patient’s vital force to its usual, healthy balance. Hahnemann proposed that this vital force, something akin to the spirit, permeated the body and entirely determined a person’s well-being. Many modern homeopaths still believe in the crucial significance of the vital force, which in turn means that they tend to reject many of the principles of conventional medicine, such as the role of bacteria as agents of disease. For example, a homeopath would treat a patient with an ear problem by noting every single mental and physical symptom and then prescribing the most appropriate remedy according to the Materia Medica; the goal would be to rebalance the patient’s vital force. By contrast, a conventional doctor would focus on the patient’s main symptoms, perhaps diagnose a bacterial ear infection and then prescribe antibiotics to kill the bacteria.

Not surprisingly, modern science struggles to accept homeopathy. After all, there is no logical reason why like should be guaranteed to cure like; there is no known mechanism that would allow such ultra-weak dilutions (devoid of any ingredient) to impact on our body; and there is no evidence whatsoever to support the existence of a vital force. However, the sheer oddity of homeopathy’s philosophy and practice does not necessarily mean that this approach to medicine should be rejected, because the critical test is not how bizarre it is, but whether or not it is effective. This can best be decided via the ordeal of the clinical trial, that tried and trusted tool of evidence-based medicine, which is capable of separating genuine medicine from quackery.

The rise and fall and rise of homeopathy

Homeopathy spread rapidly through Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, so much so that Hahnemann’s philosophy became well established during his own lifetime. The idea that ‘like cures like’ and the belief that diseases were ‘derangements of the spirit-like power that animates the human body’ sounded similar to some elements of the still highly respected Greek philosophy of medicine, so homeopathy was greeted with enthusiasm. Moreover, Hahnemann’s ideas were emerging before scientists had firmly established the germ theory of disease or the atomic theory of matter, so the vital force and ultra-weak dilutions did not sound quite so strange as they do today.