Letter

Homeopathy appeals

Dear healthmatters — Steve Iliffe’s description (issue 7) of attempts to validate or refute homeopathic claims to efficacy according to the standards of scientific medicine shows how such attempts consistently miss the point about homeopathy.

Homeopathy is holistic and person-oriented: allopathic medicine is system and disease oriented. Criteria used to judge the latter are not necessarily useful or appropriate measures of the former. There is no once-and-for-all standard by which efficacy can be judged.

Scientific medicine is not known for its interest in subjective experience, yet it is just that which makes people feel well or unwell. This is clearly illustrated by the survey of people after bowel surgery, which appeared to rely on their achievement of normal (whatever that is) bowel function to define recovery.

A homeopathic researcher would ask people how well they felt, how quickly they felt they had recovered/healed generally, how difficult/painful bowel movements were, and about any side-effects of surgery. These are factors which one would expect homeopathy to affect. Did the cited research consider these?

’Quality of life’ is a phrase much used in allopathic medicine. To prevent it from being empty rhetoric, scientific researchers must look further than the end of their microscopes.

The survey by Hill and Doyon which was referred to found that 50% of homeopathic methods ‘worked’. In a similar survey of allopathic treatments, I wonder how many would be found to ‘work’? And is there any record of homeopathic iatrogenesis?