Get up, Stand up (Bob Marley)

by Carol Boyce CCH, RSHom (NA)

If there was ever a time that called upon us to make a choice, it’s now.

Do we truly trust in the effectiveness of homeopathy? In the power of its transformative process – for the individual, for global health, for the consciousness of the planet itself?

If yes, then we must confidently say so, without any apology or justification. We should not let the weight of the opposing force, currently pressing down on us, to deter us from what we know to be true.

We can claim Hahnemann as the father of experimental pharmacology, responsible for the first double blind trials in his provings, ironically the basis of the Randomized Cotrolled Trials (RCTs), that are now being used as a weapon to ‘prove’ that homeopathy is no better than a placebo.

The redefinition of the term anecdotal evidence allows hundreds of millions of cured cases to be dismissed as irrelevant – when anecdotal evidence - evidence from clinical practice, is integral to Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). It is the evidence that calls a true scientist to investigate further.

In true science, even if the mechanism of action remains unknown, it is the evidence that holds sway. Science is duty bound by its very nature, to investigate those things which don’t make sense, which apparently contradict current thinking, even current ‘laws’. To say otherwise suggests an arrogance that we already know everything there is to know about the way the world works – and that’s highly unscientific.

We find Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Prize winner, claiming intellectual terrorism and fleeing to China, after publishing his work on high dilution DNA.

If we look at Hahnemann’s advice on infectious disease, he was decades ahead of his time in the deduction of contagion, and his understanding of susceptibility - confirmed by Pasteur on his deathbed - is a concept still not understood in conventional medicine. His instructions on what was necessary for health: fresh air, nutritious food, exercise and good sanitation seem so obvious now, but were light years ahead of his time.

And most recently with the newly discovered field of epigenetics, we find that Hahnemann was right again. That the genetic code is not fixed after all, but is malleable, and affected by environment, by life events like trauma. He understood predisposition, and with miasmatic prescribing, he developed a way to change it – so that the ability to improve genetics before procreation serves to enhance the gene pool.

Cuba’s necessity was the mother of invention and, faced with an annual epidemic of Leptospirosis, the Finlay Institute’s prestigious vaccine manufacturer used a homeopathic nosode for 2.5 million Cubans. The rate of infection was dramatically reduced and for a tiny fraction of the time and cost of developing and administering a conventional vaccine. The immediate potential for the developing world is not lost on them.

It needs to be stated again and again that homeopaths are in favour of RCTs and would dearly like more. But it also needs to be stated clearly that RCTs designed to test one conventional medication against another, or against a placebo, for a named disease and over a specific time period, cannot adequately test homeopathy. Homeopathy treats the patient with a set of symptoms that collectively lead to the assigning of a diagnostic label.

Homeopathy is a system of medicine. Things do not happen in an ad hoc fashion – there is an order and a process which depends on natural laws that must be followed. In the resolution of a named condition, a homeopath might have to change the dose, change the potency, or change the medication as they monitor the Law of Cure in action. (Even with this serious handicap, a significant number of trials do show homeopathy as efficacious.)

And it’s important that the difference in the current use of the terms efficacious and effective is understood. Efficacy is the ability to effect a change in the ‘artificial’ environment of a clinical trial, and is different from effectiveness, which is the testing of the same intervention in the real world. Conventional medications which perform well in RCTs often encounter all kinds of difficulties when used in the real world, while homeopathy has no problem showing its effectiveness, but is handicapped to show efficacy in the narrow design of an RCT. And yet showing efficacy in an artificial arena is considered the only valid ‘proof’.

And so back to our choice. It’s simple. We can’t have it both ways and we do ourselves and homeopathy a disservice if we try. Either we are convinced of our own worth and stand confidently (not arrogantly) in the knowledge that homeopathy is a system of medicine that works, is safe, effective, environmentally sustainable and inexpensive, and that we are in the company of half a billion other users.

And that we have truth, integrity, and natural laws on our side, and the truth will always win out. Whether that’s in our lifetime remains to be seen – but we can rest easy knowing that when it was our turn we held the line.

Or we doubt ourselves in the face of the opposition railed against us – in which case, we should stop struggling and seek out another vocation.