This entire thread has got me thinking about the relationship between homoeopathy and real physiology. In doing the stunt, the pill-takers are assuming that the homoeopathic remedy chosen ought to behave like a normal medicine, and that a big dose of something advertised as promoting sleep in a small dose ought to put you out like a light. But then the homoeopaths tell us that a dose is a dose is a dose, whether it be one pill or 80, that an insomnia remedy will have no effect on someone not suffering from insomnia, and in any case the chosen experiment isn't true homoeopathy because there was no case-taking or individualisation. So basically homoeopathy doesn't work like that.
Now, Hahnemann was working at an interesting time. It was just about then that real scientific medicine was beginning to emerge from the mish-mash of empirical guess-work that included the bloodletting and purging much scoffed at by opponents of "allopathy". Medics might not yet have had much idea what worked, but they were beginning at least to have an inkling that most of what they'd been doing was useless. And the pioneers of scientific enquiry were beginning the work that would lead to discoveries such as the germ theory of disease, and the elucidation of the physiology of the body's working.
Hahnemann in contrast went backwards into a cul-de-sac of magical thinking and mysticism. He thought he was making discoveries, but mostly he was making it up as he went along. He revived the old sympathetic magic of like affects like, added some arcane Masonic rituals involving repeated shaking, and in an effort to avoid the toxicities which killed many of his early patients, applied the other branch of sympathetic magic (contagious magic) in the concept of infinite dilutions.
Rather than try to discover the real cause-and-effect behind disease processes, he decreed that such investigation was a sinful waste of time, and reverted to the ancient concept of vitalism to explain all the disorders tha body might suffer from. So, the true cause of all disease was a disordered vital force. Miasms and psora were invoked to elaborate the issue. And all that had to be done was to nudge that vital force back into balance. By his amazing discovery of substances which were physiologically active only in the desired way, and incapable of harmful side-effects - unless you count the healing crises and aggravations and unwanted proving effects but then he didn't count these - he could (at least in theory) cure everything, and cure it safely.
Hahnemann may have known something of nutrition, and certainly knew something of toxicology. However he knew nothing at all about microbiology, or the immune system, or even the basic functioning of the body at the molecular level.
Which was fine, because at that point neither, really, did anyone else.
However, the despised "allopaths" insisted on disobeying the advice of the Profit, and looked closer and closer at how the body really worked, and what the real causes of these diseases might be. And the big problem for homoeopathy (which was pretty embarrassing even in Hahnemann's own lifetime) was that everything that was discovered was in contradiction to his assumptions and teachings.
There's no such thing as the vital force. A great deal of disease is caused by infectious organisms. And once cell membranes and receptor sites and hormones and so on had been worked out, it became blindingly obvious that there was no possible mechanism for the magic sugar pills to have any physiological effect.
There are two ways of approaching this problem.
The purist way is simply to ignore all these discoveries and stick to Hahnemann. Physiology is nonsense, micro-organisms don't cause disease, and the magic sugar pills influencing the vital force is the only way to go. Doing this would enable the homoeopaths to remain internally consistent, and avoid intellectual dishonesty. However, in the 21st century (and frankly for most of the 20th too), it's simply impossible. The evidence in favour of the germ theory of disease, and the currently accepted concepts of the physiology of the workings of the body is simply to compelling and too self-evident to ignore. Taking this line is likely to get you committed, or at least confined to the outermost reaches of crazy crank-land.
So they try to compromise. Yes, physiology works as advertised. Micro-organisms cause disease. They even try to make out that the vital force is simply another way of looking at the immune system, which is about as mad as anything I've heard. But then, homoeopaths know all this, and they know more! While real medicine just plays around with the superficial, and causes more trouble than it cures by "suppressing" disease (I note Barb hasn't made any comment on the list of genuinely curable conditions presented to her....), homoeopathy somehow sees deeper. Fortuitously, Hahnemann was right in spite of knowing nothing about the subject. Underneath all of the physiology and so on it really is the vital force that's the key, so again the magic sugar pills are the way to go.
They're really good at this. I had a thread on H'pathy where I managed to get Leela and David Johnson talking about Addison's disease. It was really an early attempt to get them to say what they'd do if a patient approaching an Addisonian crisis showed up at a homoeopathic clinic as a first opinion, but that got nowhere because they only admitted to seeing patients after they'd already been diagnosed and treated by real medicine, and somehow adding an extra little something on top. So we got into causes.
I started with the high potassium and the low sodium. No, homoeopathy can help because it addresses the deeper cause. I went on to the lack of aldosterone. No, homoeopathy treats the deeper cause. I went right back from the kingdom and the battle to the horseshoe nail of the genetic type which caused the antigen to be present on the adrenal cortex which caused the cross-reaction with the mimicking bacterium which is the presumed trigger to the condition. No, homoeopathy treats the deeper cause.
They didn't deny any of my train of logic for a second. But they simply kept insisting that they knew even more than I did. There was a deeper cause, which the magic sugar pills would address (though not, of course, that they would ever be able to allow the patient to come off the synthetic aldosterone, no....). I politely asked that they explain to me what this deeper cause was, and how the sugar pills worked, in the same clear terms as I'd explained the accepted physiological explanation of how such autoimmune disease occurs. It was at this point that I was told to pack it is as obviously this discussion just wasn't working for me. I was banned soon afterwards and all these posts deleted.
It seems some of them can hold the line - at least, if they're allowed to break off the discussion. Homoeopathy is true, but so is real physiology and so on.
The trouble as I see it is this. Examined carefully, the contradictions and impossibilities become insuperable. If they accept the basis of physiology and medicine as it is commonly understood, it becomes difficult to explain why the quantity of the "medicine" ingested is unimportant. "Homoeopathy just doesn't work like that" starts to raise the interest in just how is homoeopathy supposed to work then, and the bizarreness of the beliefs becomes more and more apparent.
They get away with it to a certain extent by glib phrases such as "we treat the real cause while medicine only treats the symptoms" and "we treat the whole patient while medicine only treats the disease". But scratch the surface (and I do agree that the pill-taking stunt is one way of scratching the surface), and questions have to be asked.
"We treat the mystical and undetectable vital force while medicine only treats the actual body" might be a better way of putting it.
The homoeopaths think their lunacy is in the ascendent. In fact it's only enjoying a temporary respite due to the current popularity of the mystical and the new-age. But the more it becomes identified with such paranormal beliefs and the more real science gets the true workings of the body nailed (especially the genetic factors which are the true "deepest cause" of the susceptibility to disease), the more divorced it's going to become from actual medicine.
Personally, I think it's a cult of the gaps. Back in the 19th century there were quite a lot of gaps. There are fewer now, and there will be fewer in the future. By accepting the reality of the discoveries of biological science I believe the homoeopaths are going to allow themselves to be squeezed into an ever-shrinking corner.
Maybe they ought to start denying the reality of molecular biology while there's still time?
Rolfe.
