The Basic Errors of
Homeopathy1
Discovering how homeopathy
began is crucial to understanding why it is a false method of diagnosis
and treatment. Homeopathy was developed by Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843).
In 1810 Hahnemann published his Organon of the Rational Art of
Healing,2 the "Bible" of classical homeopathy.3
Editions today are frequently titled Organon of
Medicine.
Hahnemann was a physician who
had wisely rejected many of the somewhat barbaric medical practices of
his day, but this left him without a profession. In order to support his
family, he resorted to translating books into German and practicing
other vocations. Nevertheless, he always retained his interest in
medicine; for example, he experimented with drugs and conducted other
research.
One day he was translating a
book which had described the effects of quinine or Peruvian bark on
malaria. Out of curiosity, Hahnemann took the drug himself and
discovered that it appeared to cause symptoms similar to malaria:
general malaise, chills, fever, etc. Hahnemann was struck with a
revolutionary thought: The possibility that a substance which causes
symptoms in a healthy person might cure those symptoms in a sick person.
He therefore continued testing this idea on other substances using
himself, his friends, and his family as subjects. Believing the results
confirmed his theory, he developed the basic theory of homeopathy: "like
cures like." In other words, any substance producing symptoms in a
healthy person similar to those symptoms in a sick person will cure the
sick person.
The word "homeopathy" comes
from two Greek words which reflect this basic idea; Homoios,
meaning like or similar and pathos meaning pain or suffering.
Homeopathic medicine, then, is that substance which produces similar
pain or suffering in a healthy person to that experienced by a sick
person. In Hahnemann’s own words:
By observation, reflection
and experience, I discovered that, contrary to the old allopathic
method, the true, the proper, the best mode of treatment is contained
in the maxim: To cure mildly, rapidly, certainly, and permanently,
choose, in every case of disease, a medicine which can itself produce
an affection similar to that sought to be cured!
Hitherto no one has
ever taught this homeopathic mode of cure, no one has
carried it out in practice.4
Hahnemann proceeded to
conduct experiments on other people by examining and recording their
"reactions" to a wide variety of different substances. These were termed
homeopathic "provings." Once a particular item was given to a person,
everything that happened to that person for a number of days or weeks
(physically or mentally) was carefully observed and recorded as a
supposed "effect" of that particular substance. Hahnemann also culled
the literature of his day to see if similar effects had been noted by
anyone else.
Over time, Hahnemann and his
followers conducted an endless number of "provings," administering
minerals, herbs, and other substances to healthy persons, including
themselves, and recording the alleged "actions" of these items. Each
substance, of course, produced a large number of symptoms; according to
Hahnemann’s research, the lowest was ninety-seven different symptoms,
the highest being over fourteen hundred symptoms! With each new edition
of his Materia Medica Pura the symptoms increased. As one
biographer observed:
The number of medicinal
manifestations he noted and recorded increased daily. While the first
edition of his Materia Medici Pura contains information
about six hundred and fifty proved reactions to belladonna, the number
rises to 1422 in the second edition. In the same way, the figures for
nux vomica mount from 961 to 1267, and the first edition’s 1073
citations for pulsatitia become 1163 in the second.
This method of homoeopathic
practice remains a unique psychic phenomenon. It goes far beyond the
frontiers of what may be learned, and demands an almost
oriental capacity for absorption and concentration.5
Eventually these records were
compiled into a reference book, the homeopathic Materia Medica
(Latin for "materials of medicine"), which lists the substances or
"medicines," giving a detailed account of the physical and mental
symptoms they supposedly cause and will therefore supposedly cure.
But Hahnemann’s "discovery"
of homeopathy was flawed from the start in at least eight
major ways.
Misinterpretation
First, Hahnemann had
apparently misinterpreted the symptoms he experienced after taking
quinine. He thought they were symptoms of malaria, but they weren’t. "Hahnemann
had taken quinine earlier in his life, and it is quite probable that his
experiment had caused an allergic reaction, which can typically
occur with the symptoms Hahnemann described. However, he interpreted
them as malaria symptoms."6
Thus, not surprisingly, the
particular symptoms described have been unique to Hahnemann and a few
other homeopaths. Those researchers outside of homeopathic ranks who
tested quinine for similar symptoms have never been able to produce the
effects that Hahnemann claimed. In other words, experiments using
healthy test persons have never produced the symptoms Hahnemann claimed
should be produced.
Lack of Independent
Verification
The second problem was that
the "provings" conducted by Hahnemann and other homeopaths and recorded
in the Materia Medica have also never been capable of
replication by non-homeopaths. In fact, only homeopaths appear to be
able to produce the symptoms cited in their Materia Medicas. For
example, as long ago as 1842, one hundred and fifty years ago,
homeopathic "provings" were tested and failed to produce the symptoms
homeopathy attributes to them. In a critical lecture series delivered in
1842, "Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions," the famous Oliver Wendell
Holmes, M.D., for thirty-five years an eminent anatomy professor at the
Harvard Medical School, observed:
Now there are many
individuals, long and well known to the scientific world, who have
tried these experiments upon healthy subjects, and utterly deny that
their effects have at all corresponded to Hahnemann’s assertions.
[The] distinguished
physician [Andral] is Professor of Medicine in the School of Paris,
and one or the most widely known and valued authors upon practical and
theoretical subjects the profession can claim in any country….
Assisted by a number of other persons in good health, he
experimented on the effects of Cinchona [Peruvian bark], aconite,
sulphur, arnica, and the other most highly extolled remedies. His
experiments lasted a year, and he stated publicly to the Academy of
Medicine that they never produced the slightest appearance of the
symptoms attributed to them....
M. Double, a well-known
medical writer and a physician of high ranking in Paris, had occasion
so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of Homeopathy, to make
experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and several others
took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and the fever it
is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.
M. Bonnet, president of the
Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux, had occasion to observe many
soldiers during the Peninsular War, who made use of Cinchona as a
preservative against different diseases—but he never found it to
produce the pretended paroxysms.
If any objection were made
to evidence of this kind, I would refer to the express experiments on
many of the Homeopathic substances, which were given to healthy
persons with every precaution as to diet and regimen, by M. Louis
Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of the pretended
consequences.7
Lack of Sufficient Controls
A third major flaw was
Hahnemann’s basic method. He wrongly assumed that his own experimental
safeguards proved that the particular substances actually had the
observed effects. But his safeguards were ineffective, and he proved
nothing. All that Hahnemann and earlier homeopaths observed was the
normal variety of "symptoms" that any people would experience over a
period of days or weeks, which were then falsely attributed to the
substance itself.
In essence, the basic error
of the Materia Medica is that the physical and mental
symptoms that people would have normally experienced, even without the
substance, were attributed to the effects of the substance itself.
Remember, the substances themselves were often given in minuscule or
non-existent doses, so how could they produce any symptoms at all?
Further, these "provings" were carried out over days and weeks and the
subjects themselves were told to expect symptoms:
Hahnemann seems to have
somehow overlooked the fact that people regularly experience
"symptoms," unusual physical and emotional sensations, whether taking
drugs or other stimulants, or not—especially if they have been
forewarned that the experimental pills that they have been given
might, nay probably will, cause symptoms and that the symptoms might
be mild and take several days or weeks to manifest themselves. Thus
prepared by suggestion, Hahnemann’s provers were inclined to regard
the morning backache formerly charged to poor sleeping posture as a
consequence of drugs....8
Consider the alleged
"symptoms" of chamomilla as given by Hahnemann in his Materia Medica
Pura (1846, Vol. 2, pp. 7-20): "Vertigo…. Dull….aching pain in
the head…. Violent desire for coffee…. Grumbling and creeping in the
upper teeth…. Great aversion to the wind…. Burning pain in the hand….
Quarrelsome, vexatious dreams…. heat and redness of the right cheek…."9
In fact, Hahnemann listed
some thirteen pages of "symptoms" of chamomilla. Can it seriously
be maintained that this substance will produce some thirteen pages of
symptoms in healthy people? Or that it will cure these symptoms in the
sick?
As medical historian
Harris L. Coulter observes:
The allopathic physician
takes a contrary view, feeling that the measurement of physiological
and pathological parameters are more reliable guides to treatment
precisely because they are "objective," while the "subjective"
symptoms [of homeopathy] are too ephemeral and unstable to be
reliable.10
(to be continued)
Notes:
1
This information is extracted from John Ankerberg, John Weldon, Can
You Trust Your Doctor (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1991) pp.
270-283, 315-319).
2
Samuel Hahnemann, Organon of Medicine, 6th
edition, reprint (New Dehli, India: B. Jain Publishers., 1978).
3
Hahnemann published his first work on homeopathy in 1805, although in
1796 he had published his first paper containing similar ideas (Oliver
Wendell Holmes, "Homeopathy," in Douglas Stalker, Clark Glymour, eds.,
Examining Holistic Medicine (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books,
1985), p. 221.
4
Hahnemann, Organon, p. 80.
5
Martin Gumpert, Hahnemann: The Adventurous Career of a Medical
Rebel (New York, NY: L. B. Fisher, 1945), p. 166.
6
Samuel Pfeifer, M.D., Healing at Any Price? (Milton Keynes,
England: Word Limited, 1988), p. 65.
7
Holmes, "Homeopathy," p. 230.
8
James C. Whorton, "The First Holistic Revolution: Alternative Medicine
in the Nineteenth Century in Stalker and Glymour, eds., Examining
Holistic Medicine, pp. 31-32.
9
Douglas Stalker, Clark Glymour, eds., Examining Holistic Medicine
(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), p. 32; cf. David S. Sobel, ed.,
Ways of Health: Wholistic Approaches to Ancient and Contemporary
Medicine (New York, NY :Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1979), pp.
295-297.
10
Sobel, ed., Ways of Health, p. 297.
