Barking mad … or up the wrong tree?
In which: I learn about homeopathy (and prejudice), reflect on temperaments, witness mutual hostilities, question the dogma, and experience the magic.
I gather it was Homeopathy Awareness Week recently. Ooops, too late. But I am reminded to polish up this piece, which I drafted a while ago.
“That’s a HOMEOPATHIC dose!”
Fellow medical student Sebastian was good at scorn. He was confident he knew his drug doses, so it was a safe way to bolster his place in the pecking order, when a dose I guessed at was on the low side.
His implicit condemnation of homeopathy was more than confident. It was assumed, built-in, axiomatic. Medical thinking, particularly at University College Hospital, was so physiological, the dose-response curve was a holy sacrament. The notion that you could make a drug more effective by diluting it was sacrilegious (apart from vaccines of course). Yet that is exactly what some doctors were doing.
I had met a doctor who practised homeopathy on my acupuncture course. He had explained: “in the 19th century a German doctor called Samuel Hahnemann discovered that a dose of a poison that caused a certain set of symptoms, could be used to cure the same set of symptoms. In…
