Minutus

You do know very well that the purpose of a manufacturer, and of a distributor, is to sell, not to educate or cure.
Some started with good intentions, so that homeopathic remedies could be available easily to everyone but had to comply with rules and regulations that apply to OTC "medicinal substances" like composition, and a clinical indication because this is the law. They ended up creating a "this for that" situation enhanced by certain very well known "advocates of homeopathy" selling and pushing those products on their shops and websites.
As you are well aware, I do use complexes and chord/plasma potencies specifically prepared for an individual patient and have no problem to use that when needed and indicated.
My question and problem is: how are you going to reverse what is a commercial enterprise without have strict and stringent regulations around the practice of homeopathy that most of the professional homeopaths are reluctant to see in place and that would be extremely difficult to create in the first place, as we know from the events on this list and others that many professionals have different definitions and rules of practice?
We must be aware that in order to achieve that, we risk a total implosion of the profession, which is probably what the other side is trying to achieve.
Therefore we are back to the original question of having a wider definition of homeopathy, albeit with restrictions and caveats, same question that provoked, as you well remember, huge dissension, anger and even hatred on this list a few months ago.
Do you want another go at that? Or can it be done in a professional, civilised manner, without sneers, arrogance and despicable remarks?
Joe.
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

Joe, you make an interesting point concerning the historical origin of this farce: a legal requirement for indications. Perhaps doing away with that requirement in time would have prevented a few problems of clarity.
I don't think, though, that either the matter of definition or the problem of territoriality will be solved by attempting to smudge the boundary between homoeopathy and not-homoeopathy. That boundary is based on pathogenetic trials and their use in selecting a medicine. With all the caveats in the world (and who could agree on them? and who has the right to subvert the common and accurate understanding that homoeopathy is based squarely on pathogenetic trials?), an understanding of homoeopathy that forgets its basis in pathogenetic trials has no basis at all for not including all kinds of allopathy.
The solution rather lies, I think, in interdisciplinary tolerance, based on a clear appreciation of the relationships between (and the differences between) disciplines. But such tolerance remains a distant ideal while criticism of vagueness is interpreted as criticism of what is not and can never be homoeopathy -- as is bound to occur here once again for the convenience that lies in misrepresenting the topic.
Cheers!
John
You do know very well that the purpose of a manufacturer, and of a distributor, is to sell, not to educate or cure.
Some started with good intentions, so that homeopathic remedies could be available easily to everyone but had to comply with rules and regulations that apply to OTC "medicinal substances" like composition, and a clinical indication because this is the law. They ended up creating a "this for that" situation enhanced by certain very well known "advocates of homeopathy" selling and pushing those products on their shops and websites.
As you are well aware, I do use complexes and chord/plasma potencies specifically prepared for an individual patient and have no problem to use that when needed and indicated.
My question and problem is: how are you going to reverse what is a commercial enterprise without have strict and stringent regulations around the practice of homeopathy that most of the professional homeopaths are reluctant to see in place and that would be extremely difficult to create in the first place, as we know from the events on this list and others that many professionals have different definitions and rules of practice?
We must be aware that in order to achieve that, we risk a total implosion of the profession, which is probably what the other side is trying to achieve.
Therefore we are back to the original question of having a wider definition of homeopathy, albeit with restrictions and caveats, same question that provoked, as you well remember, huge dissension, anger and even hatred on this list a few months ago.
Do you want another go at that? Or can it be done in a professional, civilised manner, without sneers, arrogance and despicable remarks?
Joe.
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

Yes, I agree.

I don't subscribe to the idea that these things should be called homeopathy as that is what the bulk of the world believes anyway so therefore there should be a new definition of homeopathy and so on and so on ...

Such an argument does not stand up to scrutiny or challenge. Instead it leaves the whole practice of homeopathy up to attack and ridicule by those who would like to harm it.

I have now come to think that this will be a good thing. If we don't have the interest in cleaning up our own backyard (do other countries have that expression?) there are others who will either make us do it or do it for us!

People I come across have no difficulty in understanding the difference between potentised complexes and remedies prescribed homeopathically once it has been explained to them.
Yes again. I think explanation and education is more likely to reduce that confusion than to try and ban them outright (as if they could be).
Yes - but equally so, saying that there is no possible way they could work homeopathically only adds to the confusion. People know they often work - they only need to know that it was by educated guesses and fortunate 'happenance'.
This is exactly what I am suggesting and believe to be so. I see no difference to people's response to a complex (when it works - which it works often enough to keep them buying them) than I do to their response to the successful prescription of an acute remedy. One is no more suppressive than the other.
This argument overlooks the fact that in clinic we are often making acute prescriptions. When the acute reflects the underlying chronic state, good and well, the chronic remedy will do good work. when it doesn't, which is often the case, to prescribe the chronic remedy that was needed before the acute flare-up will do nothing but aggravate the situation.
It is no pretence. How do you imagine that they work and work without any further derangement to health. Are you aware of the body of research that shows the effectiveness of many complexes? Do you listen to the anecdotal stories of parents who come to your clinic because of the prior use of a teething complex, or a colic complex that repeatedly provided much needed sleep - and that now they want to use homeopathy for other things because they don't want to use conventional medicines on their precious children? Our remedies either match symptom clusters or they don't - and if they do improvement can be achieved from either random application, educated guess-work, or studious application. If a match occurs, it / they work.

My question and problem is: how are you going to reverse what is a commercial enterprise without have strict and stringent regulations around the practice of homeopathy that most of the professional homeopaths are reluctant to see in place and that would be extremely difficult to create in the first place, as we know from the events on this list and others that many professionals have different definitions and rules of practice?
We must be aware that in order to achieve that, we risk a total implosion of the profession, which is probably what the other side is trying to achieve.
I think the skeptics (bless them) will do it for us.

The only way we can successfully defend the complete practice of homeopathy is to become very clear on what it is and what it isn't. This is the only way we can then effectively explain and argue the other phehomena that we see and experience every day in practice, and the reasons why we choose to respond the way we do to that phenomena.

Without the profession holding to its very clear definition we are open to attack in all directions because there is no way of justifying or explaining the many other things that are currently being squeezed under the name of homeopathy. Those practices, good or bad, will have to defend themselves if they are to survive. The good will be able to do that, the bad ....
T
Kind regards,

Fran Sheffield

Hi again, Fran --
Perhaps. Forgive my skepticism. But it's a pleasure to have these discussions with people, such as you and Joe, who do know the difference between one and t'other.
I think you're interpreting "entire state of illness" to mean chronic state. I didn't mean chronic state; just relevant current state.
While there's no research to support its effectiveness, it's a pretence. While there's no investigation of the long-term effects, it's a pretence. And while there's no way to obtain a predictable pathogenesis, a stable collection of the primary effects, of the mixture of medicines, it's a pretence. Yes, there's research to say that a mixture of this and that was statistically better than placebo in shortening the span of children's diarrhoea or bested placebo on some other measure; but such research is superficial in comparison with the kind of research that allowed Hahnemann to conclude that the homoeopathic relationship is potentially and uniquely curative.

Without careful, deep research into the relationships, the histories, and the sequelae, it's all convenient make-believe.

But that's not the topic; the topic is the value of confusion. Let's not lose sight of that.

Cheers!

John

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"Gofman provides strong evidence that medical technology—specifically x-rays, CT scans, and mammography and fluoroscopy devices—are a contributing factor to 75% of new cancers. In… “Radiation from Medical Procedures in the Pathogenesis of Cancer and Ischemic Heart Disease: Dose-Response Studies with Physicians per 100,000 Population”, Gofman shows that as the number of physicians increases in a geographical area along with an increase in the number of x-ray diagnostic tests performed, the rate of cancer and ischemic heart disease also increases."
-- Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, PhD, "Death by Medicine",

The following is the exact same argument the skeptics use, word for word, against homeopathy.

It doesn't work for them and it doesn't work for you either!

It's not an argument. It's simply an observation. (An argument proceeds from premises to conclusions. I went straight for the conclusion: that without research comparable to the research done on homoeopathy, complexopathy can only pretend to have a similar basis in evidence.)

Evidence for homoeopathy's effectiveness abounds; more importantly, evidence of its long-term effects is crushingly persuasive. Its safety has never been called seriously into question except by close observers (such as Hahnemann) of inordinate repetition. Its effectiveness is truly measured not in terms of days taken from the length of a cold or cough but in terms of radical, long-lasting improvement in total health.

In contrast, what do we know of complexopathy? We know that it makes money, that it's easy to practise and easy to palm off as some "kind" of homoeopathy (just wait for the complexopaths to start on that), and that it "works". Hmm.

Again, let's not lose sight of the topic, though: the essential difference, and the effect of obliterating it.

Cheers --

John

Let me first address the issue of boundaries.
I just opened Boericke, Clarke and Vermeulen's repertories. For most of the remedies, there is a section called "Clinical".
There is probably the same section in many other textbooks under "useful for...."
That is one of the deepest roots of the this for that prescription. If those great homeopaths give us, the hoi polloi, clinical indications for the use of a remedy, who are we to contradict them.......and that is how the manufacturers and distributors of OTC explain and justify their indications as written on the bottles.
Look at the Reckeweg formulas and the Homotoxicological formulas; they do not claim to be homeopathic, they have their own system of indications and prescriptions (and that seems to be OK with all of us) but when you read their texts, the choice of the remedies has been made based again on the classical homeopathic clinical indications as found in the books.
Same thing with the choice of potentised herbs in Homeobotanical Medicine (which does not claim to be homeopathy), with the addition of the herbal and traditional indications; again we are seeing here clinical, pathological indications, not individual prescription.
Knowing that going backwards is something very difficult, if not impossible, I suggest it would be simpler and more constructive to establish kind of new definitions, like for example:
"In every form of real medicine, the choice of approach and treatment is to be completely individualised, based on a personalised assessment of the health problems, their origins, causes, symptoms, signs and prognosis. Especially when choosing to treat through the methodology of Homeopathy, it is a basic criteria and a requirement that the choice of the remedy be based on the correspondence and similarity of the patient's suffering with the symptoms and signs induced during the assessment (proving) of the remedy. Although other therapeutic modalities do use successfully the remedies prepared according to the methodology of homeopathic pharmacy, those are dynamic, potentised substances but by definition not homeopathic as their prescription has not been made through the aforementioned correlation".
Although this says exactly what you have been defending, it is the wording that , IMO, would make it more palatable to everybody.......well maybe I am delusional, but it is worth a try.
Now the legal requirement: once again manufacturers and distributors are to bear the blame here. If a practitioner, of any profession that administers something to be ingested, either provides the bottle himself or a prescription to be filled by a pharmacy/health shop, the only legal requirement is to bear the name of the remedy, the name of the patient, the date and the indication either "take as prescribed by your practitioner" or the precise dosing if need be.
Understanding of homeopathy. The same way we tell our patients to ask their GPs and specialists to explain their prescriptions and tell about the side effects, we should tell our patients, as we have established a few months ago (your famous "ethical question" John....) exactly what we are doing and why; not that most of them really care according to my personal experience, but then again, a grassroot request for clarity would work a lot better than all the bickering of the world on lists.
And it is very simple: "I am going to give you the remedy R54. Is that homeopathy? No it is a remedy from the Reckeweg series, according to his understanding of medicine, that I find covers pretty well what we must do with you right now. Ah, OK then..."
Again, personal experience.........
Interdisciplinary tolerance.......it starts with knowledge of different disciplines and knowledge of own boundaries, not something I have been witnessing a lot recently coming from the white knights of pure and unadulterated homeopathy......
Joe, who did not realise he was suffering from logorrhea.......
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

Darn, I knew I should have shut my computer down and go for a walk.......
You are again putting in the same bag complexism and salesmanship.
Shortly: a real complex remedy is used for a short time, often as a symptomatic treatment for acutes or acute exacerbations of a chronic problem, when there is a real paucity of symptoms and especially characteristic modalities and concomitants, using as few remedies as possible in a way that covers the actual situation as completely as possible without internal contradictions.
I hope that clarifies a bit the waters.....
Joe.
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

Much of the research I am thinking of is not against placebo (as you mentioned in your previous post) but against conventional prescriptions used for particular problems. You would find them interesting to read.
So we shouldn't measure a single remedy's effectiveness by how well an acute prescription resolves mastitis or a cold or diarrhoea without creating further problems.

You would have really enjoyed Luise Kunkle's comments on this list some years ago (I think she left because of the likes of you and me). I always remember Luise, when making a point about complexes, pointing out that they were the only 'homeopathy' that the bulk of the German population knew, that they were used extensively (much more so than we see in our country), that they had been prepared in the home by family members for generations because they worked, that each family or provider had their own special 'recipes', and that over the period of this extensive and widespread use, the German population was no less well than other groups. I guess the same could be said for the French.

On the occasions I have had French expats visit my clinic I have been boggled at the number of remedies they were taking at the same time and in alternation by practiitioners from their country. Do I agree with this? No, because I don't think it is homeopathy at its best - something I am keen to protect and pass on, but by the same token they didn't seem to be any the worse for wear for it. (And, if I allow myself a small flush of pleasure, I was awfully pleased when a number of times I prescribed a single remedy that dealt with their long-=standing problems that the 'best homeopath in France' had been working on for years.).
Yes, I can understand that this might surprise you but stranger things have happened.