Homöopathie für Skeptiker

In 1946, at the ‘Cornell Conference on Therapy’, medical researchers in the United States declared that the study of the placebo is the most important step to be taken in scientific therapy to rationalise away the ‘enormous success of homeopathy’, as can be read verbatim in the protocol of that meeting. Once it is clear that a scientific methodology has been implemented to disqualify homeopathy from the scientific discourse, it seems to me pointless for the homeopathic community to try to conform to such a standard. Even more so, when we experience how goalposts change when homeopathy actually does well according to the requirements of Evidence-Based Medicine by producing valid trials that show that the success of homeopathic treatments is not explicable by the placebo effect, Evidence-Based Medicine is then turned into Science-Based Medicine, which declares that homeopathy cannot work because its mechanism is ‘implausible’.

Given that situation it should be clear that homeopaths should not waste their time to convince those whose job it is not to be convinced by anything that conflicts with their preconceived assumptions, for example the sceptics. Therefore, this book can never succeed, however persuasive, lucid and well written it is.

Anybody who has been involved in debates with sceptics knows that they are not convinced by any positive argument, whether it relates to double placebo-controlled trials, meta-studies, surveys evaluating the experiences of thousands of patients with homeopathy, elementary research into the properties of water and some other rather fascinating and as yet inexplicable quantum phenomena. And all of these points are addressed in this book with great patience and with clearly a belief in the rationality of the participants in the debate pro and contra homeopathy.

The author(s) give the opponents of homeopathy the benefit of the doubt by, it seems, truly believing, that they will be swayed by good arguments. The arguments pro homeopathy are put forward well, the arguments against homeopathy are cogently deconstructed (e.g., the so-called Shang trial), but there is nothing new or different to how homeopaths have argued again and again over the last few years without making any headway (not even with Wikipedia, which completely relies on its impartiality for its reputation).

But the book is not only addressed to sceptics, as there are chapters on different schools of homeopathy, on its historical development (chapters on Boenninghausen and Hering), Kent's production of the repertory, etc. which clearly can be of no interest to the sceptics. So, is it of interest to those who are already familiar with homeopathy? Not really, unfortunately, because there is nothing new in the presentation of these aspects. The book, moreover, makes a strong case for what the author, together with others, calls ‘Quellenhomöopathie’ (denoting a homeopathy, which assumes that patients can access their own inner source from which all aspects of their life, including their disease, originate, and that the naming of this source articulates at the same time the remedy the patient needs).

The authors present engaging case histories, but unfortunately do not name the remedies prescribed (which would have given the reader a better idea what is meant by source). Some statements are put as irrefutable, such as that Scholten's discoveries are based on a rigorous method, and that they have opened a whole new field of reliable remedies, where in fact they are very much debated in our profession, and some would not view this as progress, but as reverting back to an empirical use of a therapeutic approach, based on theories and speculation, which Hahnemann fought so hard to drive out of medicine.

The authors combine a knowledge of medicine, science and the arts (it is a collaboration between a doctor mother and historian son), which is a very useful combination of skills and insights to can bring to the debate, and the book is clearly infused with a vision of a humane medicine. But the authors could have gone a step further by pointing out that medicine is not a theoretical science, and never will be, but only a practical science, which applies its skills and knowledge in concrete, individual, therapeutic contexts. Any attempt to reduce medicine to a science to be tested in the laboratory is doomed to fail. What needs to be questioned is not whether homeopathy can do well in gold standard trials, but whether the latter are capable of capturing real-life events. If there is no willingness by participants in the debate pro and contra homeopathy to reflect on these fundamental issues, which can only be done by bringing disciplines from science and the arts, the debate will bear no fruits.

Although the book offers nothing new when it comes to the debate with sceptics, nor to those familiar with homeopathy, it is a book, which could sway those who are undecided about homeopathy, and have an open mind about it. It is also a book for readers who are not familiar with this debate, and want a readable and fairly comprehensive overview of the various topics. The style of writing is often conversational, a good part of the content is anecdote based, which makes reading it a pleasure. The book is a stylish hardback, has great paper quality and a font which is kind to the reading eyes.

Supplementary Material