Page 18 - Summer 13
P. 18
Ah, the Miasms... by Edward De Beukelaer, UK
Right from the beginning of my contact with homeopathy, Miasms have somewhat puz- zled me. Already during my first sessions of homeopathy training it became apparent that the definitions of the Miasms were different depending on the teacher, who addressed the issue. I then decided not to bother with them until one day I would find a clear answer.
In the second homeopathy school I attended, the Miasms were treated as some- thing dating from Hahnemann’s time used by some and not by others. Later Marc Brunson, the head of the school, published a thorough study on the (his)story of the Miasms. He showed how Hahnemann opened a can of worms by ‘creating’ the Miasms and leaving it to the next generations to resolve the issue. Through the evolution of homeopathy, a number of prominent homeopaths developed each their own very differ- ent ways of using the miasms. Still today, there is wide variety in how homeopaths explain and use miasms and even in the number, they use.
Roland Methner in his article series in Homeopathic Links (1/13 and more so 2/13) concluded that Miasms help some homeopaths and not others and that because there are so many different definitions and views on miasms, they must be a construct of the observer.
Offense
I agree with this conclusion and I can understand, why some homeopaths will take offence at this. It must be understood that this conclusion has nothing pejorative about it. One can compare Miasms with the diagnoses made by conventional medicine. These diagnoses are the results of data collection and agreement between a number of spe- cialists about what is one disease and what is another. The fact that over time the def- initions tend to change and some diseases become subdivided into new diseases shows that they are merely a construct of our observations and our need to give a name to something, we observe. Of course the diseases are real, because patients really suffer with them but the definition of the diseases are nothing more than constructs based on observation, knowledge and agreement at the time. In the same way, Miasms are real,
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