Page 7 - Spring 20

Last week I had a long chat with a representative of the European homeopaths. We both are concerned about some of the complaining in relation to conventional medicine that is too often present in homeopathy circles. The complaining goes from being undignified what colleagues and drug companies do to the Obstacles to cure cause by conventional medicine. This raises the question: do we practice homeopathy, because we are against conventional medicine? Or do we practice homeopathy, because we are for homeopathy? Is homeopathy so weak, it cannot overcome (or at least minimise) the side effects of modern chemical medicines? Do we have to obtain pure cures? These are important questions to examine.
My personal experience is that regardless of whatever medicine or vaccines that may well have happened, I can still help my patients using homeopathy. Oh yes, maybe, things are not perfect but, we need to live in the real world, and help whatever case is put in front of us... and not complain about it.
Are we lacking in confidence in the capacity of homeopathy? One of the main limiting factors is the
homeopath. We have to always remain very humble in the face of this difficult reality. By being a bit too purist, we can also make our clients feel guilty about whatever conventional treatments, they may have used in the past. This helps nobody and may well work against homeopathy becoming a mainstream medicine.
There is another issue (I’m on a roll here.) We humans like to ‘explain what we do and why we do it and how it works’. We are all educated in the basic premises of modern medicine. This basic premise is: if we examine the diseased and understand the disease, we shall be able to find a cure using reason. This originated in the enlightenment period that started in the 18th century = beginning of both modern medicine and homeopathy. This premise contains the promise (often confused with duty) to explain, why we do something and how it will help. There is always a danger that we will try to do this, when we practice homeopathy: use some knowledge of physiology and health and disease to justify or explain our prescriptions. This is a dangerous trap for homeopathy.
Homeopathy is only about similitude and that is it: find a
remedy that has a similar action in the healthy patient as the picture of the patient to be treated. For this to work well, we have to look for what is unusual in the case. This is exactly the opposite of giving an explanation as to why such or such a remedy is best used. Trying to be ‘scientific’ about homeopathy, to make it more acceptable to colleagues and clients, is also something that may backfire. Leave that job to be done by researchers.
Of course, we do use what may be named as semi- explanations to help us in the very difficult process of selecting the most appropriate remedy for each individual case. These semi-explanations have resulted in numerous techniques proposing how to best come to the most appropriate remedy for the case.
There is: experience, repertorisation (with many different repertories and techniques), classification techniques (Scholten, Sankaran, ..), miasma explanations, Masi (AFADH), Marc Brunson, predictable homeopathy, Luc de Schepper, Morrison, Kollistch.... There are ‘complete’ materia medica and synthesised materia medica. Each proposing their view, take and explanation on how to best approach the patient and/or disease. Or propose a way to make prescribing easier. Because we each shall feel more comfortable with one or more of these techniques, we each will retain an explanation for our approach.
We use this explanation because we feel comfortable with it: it appeals to our individuality; it gives us confidence. It is important to have confidence to be able to prescribe. But we have to ask ourselves whether we do not use a specific explanation to justify what we do? The line between these last two can be very thin.
This takes me to my last point. Last October in Bogota, I presented a case of anal sac carcinoma. The patient had been operated twice, was given a bad prognosis and was
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