DILUTING THE HOMEOPATHIC APPROACH
Rory Hafford talks to Homeopath Mark O’Sullivan about the latest attack on the therapy and hears that, despite everything, it is alive and well…
A LEADING figure in the world of complementary therapies has just launched a scathing attack on homeopathy. It is the latest in a long line of similar attacks – all claiming that homeopathy doesn’t work.
Edzard Ernst is a Professor of Complementary Medicine. He plies his trade at Exeter University in the UK. And he says that homeopaths who fail to tell their patients that homeopathy is worthless, are lying to them.
Writing in the journal Biology, Profesor Ernst said homeopathic treatments could be dangerous if “people choose them over conventional medicines with proven benefits”.
Homeopathy is a system of healthcare which involves treating the patient with highly diluted substances, with the aim of triggering the body’s natural system of healing. It is based on the principle of ‘like with like’. For example, if you drink too much coffee it can cause insomnia. According to homeopathic principles, you can treat insomnia with smaller, dilute forms of coffee.
Mark O’Sullivan is a Dublin-based homeopath, who runs a successful clinic. He has successfully treated a wide range of both physical and psychological conditions, including depression, IBS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, recurrent cystitis…and much more bedsides.
Big Shadow
“The first thing to say is homeopathy is alive and well all over the world. As many as 1-in-4 Europeans use homeopathy as their primary healthcare choice; and one-hundred-million Indians swear by it,” Mr O’Sullivan tells Health News Ireland.
He says that what casts a great light will also cast a big shadow and that’s one of the reasons why homeopathy attracts so much negative attention. But it’s not as simple as that.
“There is a vested interest in a lot of these attacks on homeopathy. A lot of the negative comment is coming from people and organisations that are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and by Public Relations companies who work for the pharmaceutical industry,” says Mr O’Sullivan.
One of the chief critics of homeopathy is the scientist Richard Dawkins. His Foundation for Reason and Science was set up to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition and intolerance.
Richard Dawkins claims that the rationale behind it is unfounded and “demonstrates that the magnitude of dilution required is so great the patient is practically imbibing pure water”.
Mark O’Sullivan takes up the challenge: “Okay. Just because something is implausible doesn’t mean that it can’t work. There is a bit of scientific arrogance at play here as well. We can’t know everything. But I will tell you this: when homeopathy works it can achieve amazing results.”
Colin Griffith is an authority on homeopathy. He has written several books on the art, the latest of which is the highly acclaimed The Companion to Homeopathy.
“Scientists who would be so well placed in the public mind’s eye to undertake research into the principles of homeopathy are at a disadvantage: there is almost no commercial incentive to do so; in fact, the opposite is true.
Viable System
“The medicines used in homeopathy are so comparatively inexpensive that it is highly unlikely that any pharmaceutical company would ever fund the work.
Furthermore, in seeking to understand it themselves, rationalist scientists would be faced with the fact that there is a viable system of medicine that contradicts fundamental beliefs in what disease is and the way that medicine should be practised in order to combat it.
“To the trained rationalist mind homeopathy is both too simple and without a sound basis of logic,” says Mr Griffith.
He argues that the forces of nature that make homeopathy possible are electro-dynamic and, like magnetism, are seemingly easy to prove through demonstration but very hard to prove through repeatable experimentation.
“It is not the doctors who are wrong about the research. It is the methodology of the research itself that needs to be adapted. Homeopathy is simply not susceptible to the usual double-blind trails that so convincingly provide orthodoxy with its statistics and data.”
A LEADING figure in the world of complementary therapies has just launched a scathing attack on homeopathy. It is the latest in a long line of similar attacks – all claiming that homeopathy doesn’t work.
Edzard Ernst is a Professor of Complementary Medicine. He plies his trade at Exeter University in the UK. And he says that homeopaths who fail to tell their patients that homeopathy is worthless, are lying to them.
Writing in the journal Biology, Profesor Ernst said homeopathic treatments could be dangerous if “people choose them over conventional medicines with proven benefits”.
Homeopathy is a system of healthcare which involves treating the patient with highly diluted substances, with the aim of triggering the body’s natural system of healing. It is based on the principle of ‘like with like’. For example, if you drink too much coffee it can cause insomnia. According to homeopathic principles, you can treat insomnia with smaller, dilute forms of coffee.
Mark O’Sullivan is a Dublin-based homeopath, who runs a successful clinic. He has successfully treated a wide range of both physical and psychological conditions, including depression, IBS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, recurrent cystitis…and much more bedsides.
Big Shadow
“The first thing to say is homeopathy is alive and well all over the world. As many as 1-in-4 Europeans use homeopathy as their primary healthcare choice; and one-hundred-million Indians swear by it,” Mr O’Sullivan tells Health News Ireland.
He says that what casts a great light will also cast a big shadow and that’s one of the reasons why homeopathy attracts so much negative attention. But it’s not as simple as that.
“There is a vested interest in a lot of these attacks on homeopathy. A lot of the negative comment is coming from people and organisations that are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and by Public Relations companies who work for the pharmaceutical industry,” says Mr O’Sullivan.
One of the chief critics of homeopathy is the scientist Richard Dawkins. His Foundation for Reason and Science was set up to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition and intolerance.
Richard Dawkins claims that the rationale behind it is unfounded and “demonstrates that the magnitude of dilution required is so great the patient is practically imbibing pure water”.
Mark O’Sullivan takes up the challenge: “Okay. Just because something is implausible doesn’t mean that it can’t work. There is a bit of scientific arrogance at play here as well. We can’t know everything. But I will tell you this: when homeopathy works it can achieve amazing results.”
Colin Griffith is an authority on homeopathy. He has written several books on the art, the latest of which is the highly acclaimed The Companion to Homeopathy.
“Scientists who would be so well placed in the public mind’s eye to undertake research into the principles of homeopathy are at a disadvantage: there is almost no commercial incentive to do so; in fact, the opposite is true.
Viable System
“The medicines used in homeopathy are so comparatively inexpensive that it is highly unlikely that any pharmaceutical company would ever fund the work.
Furthermore, in seeking to understand it themselves, rationalist scientists would be faced with the fact that there is a viable system of medicine that contradicts fundamental beliefs in what disease is and the way that medicine should be practised in order to combat it.
“To the trained rationalist mind homeopathy is both too simple and without a sound basis of logic,” says Mr Griffith.
He argues that the forces of nature that make homeopathy possible are electro-dynamic and, like magnetism, are seemingly easy to prove through demonstration but very hard to prove through repeatable experimentation.
“It is not the doctors who are wrong about the research. It is the methodology of the research itself that needs to be adapted. Homeopathy is simply not susceptible to the usual double-blind trails that so convincingly provide orthodoxy with its statistics and data.”
- For more information on treatment options log onto www.homeopathy.ie