okay, here goes:
developing an appreciation of homeopathy, in the sense that i am familiar with the term, is more like learning a foreign language, or getting into something sort of internally consistent but weird to the point of incomprehensibility from the outside
such things include the musings of the late Martin Heidegger or Ludwig Wittgenstein, 20th century atonal music, accupuncture, meditation, certain types of religious ideas, or pure maths
or, come to think of it, some forms of (psycho) therapy or counselling for which, science insists, there is no solid evidence, but which, practitioners insist, is still onto something essential about the nature of humans and hence profoundly interesting and worth doing
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the experience i am talking about goes something like this:
1. come up against something that appears obviously intricate, complex, but totally pointless
2. begin suspecting that there may be something there
3. bang head against, ask existing practitioners how to get into this thing
4. get head around to some extent, become a novice practitioner
5. find it surprisingly and shamefully difficult to discuss the thing with people at point 1. above, beyond instructing them to go through the motions
at this point i suspect i have lost some of my audience because some of you have never had this experience and don't even believe in such experiences
it took me 19 years and some trippy higher maths before i understood what all of that was about
if you think that anything worth spending time on could be essentially explained to you in 15 minutes or so, then perhaps you'd best tune out, because, and i try to say this without a trace of condescension, you are not ready for what is coming
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homeopathy is a system of thought, theory and practice of healing
its notions of what it means to be healthy, or not healthy, what it means to heal and what it means to have a theory are quite alien to modern-day institutional science in its ideal form as we know it
it is characterised by wild and creative theory-building (just like science)
it is boringly and trudgingly empirical (just like science)
it is riddled with bogus half-assed practitioners who don't understand the principles and get by somehow, often harming gullible patients by giving them bad advice (just like medical science)
it does differ from science in its standards of evidence and its modes of practice
it is consistently persecuted unfairly by Science(tm) the religious enterprise, which results in its own set of distortions and stresses
and yes, superdiluted substances and even imponderables are involved
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the major differences relative to allopathic medical science: homeopathy is holistic and personal medicine
(in passing, a quote from the etymological dictionary, because words to have their way with us:
medical (adj.)
1640s, from Fr. médical, from L.L. medicalis "of a physician," from L. medicus "physician" (n.); "healing" (adj.), from mederi "to heal, give medical attention to, cure," originally "know the best course for," from an early specialization of the PIE base *med- "to measure, limit, consider, advise" (cf. Gk. medomai "be mindful of,"(...)
be mindful of! - this is sort of the sense still in use in homeopathy)
holistic and personal in that it considers the patients to be _persons_requesting_help_ rather than biological systems in need of repair or maintenance
holistic and personal in the sense also that it has a strong ethical dimension: as double-blind trials involve a degree of planned deception, many homeopaths would not consider doing them on ethical grounds
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so how does it work? the knowledge generated to date by homeopathy is essentially a massive, sort of semi-regulated, but documented body of anecdotal evidence and various, not necessarily mutually consistent 'theories' (in a somewhat prescientific sense) about, on the one hand, remedies (the materia medica) and symptoms that people tend to have (the repertorium)
there is also an element of artistic, creative intuition involved, which we will find hard to deal with, i imagine
the theories and the anecdotal evidence (derived from 'provings' and from homeopathic practice itself) are all about the character, the individual essences that the remedies have (around 4000 today, and new ones are being added all the time)
when a patient turns up requesting treatment, the homeopath will conduct a long initial interview (hour to hour and a half), which, optimally, will cover pretty much all aspects of the patient's life inasmuch as that is possible in that sort of time frame
then the homeopath ponders carefully, selecting for the interesting, the unique, the striking among the things gleaned from the patient's ramblings, and attempts to figure out the remedy whose character is closest to the patients
then the homeopath will also ponder dosage (potency, frequency), and eventually prescribe a remedy
this remedy will be taken typically once or a small number of times, there will be frequent follow-ups, some of them involving possibly even longer conversations than the initial one
and this process brings surprising results
i don't claim to know how, but people with incurable diseases sometimes are cured (happens without homeopathy as well, as i am fully aware)
deeply interesting experiences of what i would call a spiritual or existential nature occasionally happen
people who are hostile to this sort of thing (experiences of the numenous and self-understanding as a profound and deeply moving process) are to a large extent the same people as those who choose to idolise Science(tm)
unpleasantness ensues
in the meantime, the state finances religious institutions, and a large number of other things for which there is no scientific justification (such as the the system of universal compulsory education, to mention only the most obviously un-scientific and harmful one)
but people prefer to cry and cuss about homeopathy instead
i think they are being intellectually dishonest
i think that the real source of the bitter sentiment that frothes forth at every opportunity is not charity or the need to protect reason (as if it needed protecting!)
i think it is closer to what the venerable Dr Reich got so irate about in Little Man
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questions?
