Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future–Part III
“Symptoms,” Continued Part II of this blog† introduced the homeopathic understanding of “symptoms” as they pertain both to “provings” in healthy subjects (now called “homeopathic pathogenic trials” or “HPTs”) and to histories elicited from patients. Hahnemann conflated “symptoms” and every random itch, ache, pain, sniffle, feeling, thought, dream, pimple or other sign, and anything else that might occur to a subject or...
Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future – Part II
Part I of this blog† summarized the origin of homeopathy, invented in 1790 by Samuel Christian Hahnemann. It discussed Hahnemann’s first two “homœopathic laws of nature,” similia similibus curantur (like cures like) and the “law of infinitesimals,” and showed that his rationales for each have long been refuted. Hahnemann proclaimed a third doctrine, the “law of psora” [“itch”], said by him to...
Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future – Part I
Either homeopathy works or controlled trials don’t! —Scottish homeopath David Reilly at the 2001 Harvard Medical School Complementary and Integrative Medicine Conference. Reilly based that assertion on his own series of four small studies of homeopathic treatments of hay fever, asthma, and allergic rhinitis, the outcomes of which had been inconsistent and largely subjective. (1) Later he explained that small-minded skeptics in...