The magic bullet of "classical" homeopathy

Other articles from HARMONI-expo:
Introduction: A Trip Through The Human Mind
The New Time Energies and AuraTransformation™: A study on modern delusions and gullibility


Let's go back over two hundred years in time, to the time before germ theory, penicillin and vaccination. Much of the current medical treatments are still in large derived from Hippocrates' vitalistic principle that deceases are caused by inbalances in the four bodily humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm).
A visit to the doctor is rather than cure you more likely to kill you, since the main methods of treating these inbalances are bloodletting and the distribution of laxatives and/or emetics.

ENTER Samuel Hahnemann, founder of homeopathic medicine. I will omit the history lesson, but it was basically revealed to him that a substance that causes a healthy person to exhibit a particular set of symptoms will in turn, if excessively diluted, cure a sick person showing the very same symptoms. The substance is diluted so seriously that scarcely a molecule remains in the dose when it is distributed to the patient.
Needless to say, giving magical water to a patient ought to be more beneficial than for example draining her of blood. It must be granted that not dying at the hands of your doctor sure has some appeal.

We now return to the twenty-first century. In light of the success of modern medicine with its randomised, double-blinded and placebo-controlled studies, do these pre-scientific notions of wishy-washy magical thinking still persist? Turns out they do. Homeopathy is still alive and quacking.

As a consequence of a hard night's drinking, me and Mr. Reed arrived a couple of minutes late to the lecture, entitled nothing but "Improve your health with classical homeopathy."
As we entered the room our fears of having to stand due to a shortage of seats dissipated. Apart from the lecturer, a woman about 50 years old, the room contained approximately five other persons, all women in their forties.

After a rather pleasant introduction the lecturer quickly started to rail against the government's suppression of her wonderful discipline. The specific piece of Swedish legislation popularly referred to as "the quackery law" caught most of the woman's frantic barrage. The law, in short, prohibits unlicensed medical practitioners (such as herself) from treating children under the age of eight and pregnant women.
It also makes clear that cancer and diabetes should be treated by real doctors. The lecturer contended that both these conditions have been successfully cured by homeopaths in other European countries. She did not present any sort of evidence for this claim, so I guess we'll have to take her word for it.

She launced the next salvo against the sinister vaccination conspiracy. Vaccination supposedly weakens us and immobilises our immune system, making us fair game for just about any infection you can imagine.
One woman who wanted to know how to undo the horrors of injecting a (for all practical purposes) dead virus into her kids' bodies got the disheartening answer that the process couldn't be reversed. What is done is done. Even the homeopath admitted that, although she was quick to offer homeopathic treatments for mitigating the effects of said vaccination.
The wonderful thing about homeopathy is that it can cure everything, should you not arrive "too late."

The combined oral contraceptive pill too, she argued, is another method the government uses to keep the populace (women in this case) under Big Pharma's thumb. Not only is it the cause of mental illness but also numerous other maladies, all stemming from those scary hormones. Just for the record: No one is claiming that taking "the Pill" is without risk - all real medical interventions have side-effects.
This was also the only time during the lecture that she addressed us directly, saying something like "Aren't you lucky, guys?" I was terrified and struggled not to meet Medusa's gaze, lest I be struck down by her fury. So Mr. Reed and I just smiled and nodded, purposely avoiding to look at each other knowing full well that it would have resulted in us bursting into laughter.

As I left the lecture, I was more enraged than amused. To my mind, the whole experience was almost indistinguishable from an episode of "The Twilight Zone." For the past half hour we had been fed the most outlandish medical claims I had heard for at least a day. I also feared not just that people believed her (vainly, since they were there because they wanted to believe her), but also that they would heed her call and waste precious time, money, and even lives on age-old superstitions.