homeopathy -- dilution?

[Leilanae]

Hi Shannon,

Whooops, I just answered this question on another email to another
list, so here is again:
"Included cure of a burn by heat as homeopathic" is this defined as
homeo/similiar pathic/suffering
or "Homeopathic " defined as the name of the system he discovered?

Is one a verb and the other a noun?

Does he actually say cure by homeopathy?

Still trying to figure out what I'm missing.

Leilanae

[Dr. Joe Rozencwajg, NMD]

Homeopathy relates to the Law of Similars.
Single remedy and minimum dose are technical applications of this law as related to medicinal substances.
Does that make sense?
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind".
Visit http://drjoesnaturalmedicine.blogspot.com for some articles and comments.

[Leilanae]

Homeopathy relates to the Law of Similars.
Single remedy and minimum dose are technical applications of this law as related to medicinal substances.
Does that make sense?
Hi Dr. Roz!
Yes, I think so. Heat to a burn is homeopathic, what kind of heat and how much heat are
technical applications????

Leilanae

[Dr. Joe Rozencwajg, NMD]

Here you go, that is exactly what I meant.
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind".
Visit http://drjoesnaturalmedicine.blogspot.com for some articles and comments.

[Leilanae]

Here you go, that is exactly what I meant.
I get it now!!!

Thanks,

Leilanae
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind".
Visit http://drjoesnaturalmedicine.blogspot.com for some articles and comments.

[Irene de Villiers]

I did not say that
That's not an excuse to leave it out.
That's like leaving out flight when defining an airplane:-))

Potency needs to be *included* (as an aspect of homeopathy, without
excluding zero potency).

It was not Hahnamann's discovery that like cures like. His was the
development of that "cornerstone" into an entire building - a health
care system, not just the principle on which it is based.
I stand by my summary that:
to define homeopathy.
Like cures like only defines one of many principles used in homeopathy.

Namaste,
Irene
--
Irene de Villiers, B.Sc AASCA MCSSA D.I.Hom/D.Vet.Hom.
P.O. Box 4703 Spokane WA 99220.
www.angelfire.com/fl/furryboots/clickhere.html (Veterinary Homeopath.)
"Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt one doing it."

[Irene de Villiers]

Hahnemann invented it:-)

Namaste,
Irene
--
Irene de Villiers, B.Sc AASCA MCSSA D.I.Hom/D.Vet.Hom.
P.O. Box 4703 Spokane WA 99220.
www.angelfire.com/fl/furryboots/clickhere.html (Veterinary Homeopath.)
"Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt one doing it."

[Leilanae]

Thanks Irene, Shannon and I were thinking he coined it.

Leilanae

[Irene de Villiers]

Yes but to define homeopathy you need to say how it relates to that law.

After all the law of similars exists in nature, and was observed
independently by many people before Hahnemann's time, starting (as
far as we know) with Hippocrates (ironically as he is also considered
the father of medicine by allopaths) in something like 400 or 500BC,
and the law was also observed and recorded by Dr Stahl in Germany and
by others - all independently. It is after all a law of nature, which
anyone can observe.

Hahnemann STARTED with that known law and built a system of medicine
upon it. So the Law of Similars is just where he started and excludes
all that he added in the development of a comprehensive system of
safe energy-medicine which Hahnemann called Homeopathy. It's not the
Law of Similars that he called homeopathy - it's the entire system he
developed and improved that he calls Homeopathy.

So if we are to define "homeopathy", it is the least we can do to
include Hahnemann's lifetime of work, and not exclude it by merely
stating the law of nature that was known before Hahnemann came along.

So I feel a definition of "Homeopathy" (as opposed to a definition of
the Law of Similars) needs to include Hahnemann's entire and complete
System of energy medicine.

Homeopathy is a side-effect-free system of medicine developed by
Samuel Hahnemann as documented in the six editions of his Organon of
Medicine, using various symptom-specific levels of energy in single
"homeopathic remedies" matched to an individual's emotional and
physical illness to be prevented or overcome - according to the
documented symptoms the chosen remedy can induce in sensitive human
volunteers without those symptoms.

Namaste,
Irene
--
Irene de Villiers, B.Sc AASCA MCSSA D.I.Hom/D.Vet.Hom.
P.O. Box 4703 Spokane WA 99220.
www.angelfire.com/fl/furryboots/clickhere.html (Veterinary Homeopath.)
"Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt one doing it."

[John Harvey]

Some of this discussion overlooks the different functions of a definition from those of a description and those of a manual.
A manual describes in applicable detail various ways in which (so far) the principle has been discovered to be applicable. It might, for instance, describe how to interview a patient; how to understand the healing process in terms of energy or re-experience; how to apply any of the miasmatic theories to repertorisation or follow-up; or how to distinguish degrees of similarity or symptom importance or pathogenetic rankings.

None of these tidbits helps in determining what is and what is not homoeopathy. None of them restricts the practice of homoeopathy.
A description of homoeopathy may not even define the word, though it's certain to narrow it down somewhat. It may include some inessential information, as would appear in an encyclopaedia entry on the subject. This could include details of who discovered and developed the principle; the invention of the technology of trials on the healthy, which enabled its discovery and development; the refinements of its application through the technology of potency and the channel of miasmatic understanding; and other interesting tidbits. None of these tidbits are essential to whether a certain practice is homoeopathic in method; they are simply added extras.

If the description fails to exclude practices that are not homoeopathy -- for instance, if it restricts homoeopathy's compass only insofar as to say that homoeopathy is a healing practice, which also fits acupuncture -- then it is not any kind of definition and does not contain a definition.
A definition of homoeopathy tells you exactly what is and what is not homoeopathy. The description and manual can come later. First you have to know what it is and what it is not.
As Fran (April 7), Ardavan (April 8), Farbod (9 April), and Shannon (April 9) have pointed out, potentisation is terribly useful (along with miasmatic theory, repertories, materia medicae, and breakfast) to the practice of homoeopathy but does not of itself help one jot in determining whether a practice is homoeopathic. This is so even in any particular case. If the potency is out of whack with the patient, it doesn't make the selection of the substance from which it is made unhomoeopathic! Inversely, the wrong remedy cannot be rendered any more homoeopathic no matter how "right" its potency is.

In other words, potency is irrelevant to the definition.

The function of a definition is to tell you what the term defined excludes as much as it is to tell you what it includes; otherwise it is no more than a description (e.g. "homoeopathy is medicine" -- but so is suppression of discharges by penicillin). An accurate definition of homoeopathy must unambiguously exclude all those things that homoeopathy is not. Without meeting that condition, the definition will be worse than useless.

Fran's refined definition ("A process that exploits Law of Similars phenomena to treat or prevent mental and physical disease by agents capable of producing similar symptoms in those unaffected") in particular will do that, as will nearly all the dictionary definitions I've ever seen.

The only problem I can see with this particular definition is that it will be obscure to any reader who does not know what "Law of Similars phenomena" are. If that law were spelled out simply enough in the definition to comprehend quickly, and if the answer to the question "Similar to what?" were clear, the definition would be technically perfect.

But a technically perfect definition, even one that uses only terms fully understandable to the uninitiated, may have significant disadvantages over one that has slight technical faults but better keeps before the mind's eye the mechanism that homoeopathy exploits: the organism's healing reaction to stimulation of similar symptoms.

For technical perfection of definition, we might want to ensure that it include rather than exclude the homoeopathic application of the interview process, of magnets, of moonlight, and, if it becomes possible to apply homoeopathically, of galvanism (electricity). And for our own internal purposes this may, just possibly, be more useful than not. (Considering the magic, nonsense, and utter confusion dominating these discussions, I have my doubts.)

To the uninitiated, though, a real-life street definition of homoeopathy is there to tell how to gauge whether a treatment is homoeopathy. And if it that suggests those way-out homoeopathic possibilities, it is likely to be worse than useless.

Why? Because by it detaches the definition from the concrete, visible thing that all homoeopaths do in all cases that they treat homoeopathically -- i.e., prescribe the similar remedy -- replacing it by an abstract and unverifiable mechanism that may be operative through a self-help group, mirror-gazing, or the homoeopathic interview itself. And in so doing, it utterly confuses the newcomer -- which is not the intended function of a definition.

Don't get me wrong. I've recently seen a case report (unpublished) in which clearly the interview healed the patient. But the homoeopathic interview was not prescribed as a homoeopathic remedy by the interviewing homoeopath in this case, and cannot be.

If the occasional definition excludes (as the dictionary ones tend to) a far-flung possible outlier, then its correctness is obviously technically compromised. But if inclusion of the oddity were to cause more confusion, distraction, unwarranted criticism, and discouragement than is worthwhile for technical accuracy, then perhaps it's worth sticking to what is comprehensible and practicable by homoeopaths and not worrying about those means (talking, electricity/galvanism, magnets, staring at the sun, etc.) that would not anyway normally fall under the heading of medicine of any kind and those means (talking) cannot in fact be applied in any systematic way as homoeopathic treatment but can only be interpreted in retrospect as a possibility.

This is not to say that a definition is unimportant or that its accuracy is unimportant.

It is to suggest that trying to include every outlying, even outlandish, application of the Law of Similars may be trying to make of a referent already counterintuitive -- adding more of the same problems to the patient that the patient already has! -- a real headache. Pity the intelligent informed practitioner, let alone the average novitiate, who must, in trying to comprehend the meaning of homoeopathy, compass "homoeopathic" applications

• whose basis cannot readily be verified as homoeopathic;

• whose mechanism of action is clearly foreign to the (relatively) straightforward homoeopathic approach to the predictable positive (i.e. pathogenetic) effects of medicines; and

• whose inclusion will thereby add to, rather than mitigate, the difficulties of incredibility, incomprehensibility, and vagueness that presently plague homoeopathic opponent and proponent alike.

Moreover, artificially squeezing talk and sungazing into the concept of homoeopathic medicine will invite both opponent and proponent to indulge increasingly in home-brewed "explanations" and "mechanisms" ranging from "placebo effect", intentionality, and energy-force-signature paradigms to alchymical magicks and the allopathic doctrine of signatures.

A definition that loses the function of exclusion for the sake of inessential information thereby loses its function as a definition. A true (exclusionary) definition that includes everything conceivably "homoeopathic" (i.e. applied on the basis of similars) might be marginally more accurate than the definitions we find in good dictionaries. Even if it were, its disadvantages, I submit, would significantly outweigh its advantages.

Cheers --

John
--
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"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

-- Bertrand Russell