Re: WAS (Fluid in the inner ear)
Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2011 4:39 pm
Dear Teresa (and barrackers),
The principle of homoeopathy is simplicity itself. But nobody would claim that it is always easy in application. Even well-seasoned homoeopaths find themselves stumped on occasion. I count myself amongst those who consider that, for that reason alone, discussion of alternatives is relevant and useful, regardless of whether that alternative be obviously different, such as allopathy is, or perhaps less obviously, such as acupuncture is. Discussion of alternatives is quite a different matter, though, from blurring all definition between them. It is that that we recalcitrate against.
I'm sorry if the post you've replied to struck you as sarcastic. In fact, it wasn't sarcastic; every word of it was sincere. And I'm sorry that you and Sue have chosen to respond to the efforts of some of us to maintain some honesty about the meaning of homoeopathy, once again by interpreting those efforts as attempts to censor discussion of alternatives. We've tried time and again to clarify that discussion of alternatives is not at issue and that their misrepresentation as being homoeopathy is.
Some of the alternatives to homoeopathic practice fall, broadly speaking, into a class of methods that we may rightly call guesswork. As I've pointed out on several earlier occasions, there are many useful styles of guesswork that may usefully supplement a strictly homoeopathic basis for prescription. When we've reached the limits of the known, then guesswork or intuition (as Jean has just ably illustrated) or something else may suggest a choice we'd otherwise have absolutely no basis for making. And as I've said also, I don't know of a homoeopath who never needs to rely on some method that is not homoeopathic in order to arrive at a prescription decision.
That auxiliary method may be intuition -- the kind of thing that results from many years' close experience in the relevant field of knowledge. This -- what I'd call genuine -- intuition is not guesswork but a gestalt, a way of perceiving at once a relationship between a host of interconnected pieces of knowledge.
The auxiliary method may be something else -- also called intuition -- that arises not from the connection of pieces of prior knowledge but merely from random association, a feeling, a guess, a coincidence.
Jean's example neatly illustrates both of these. Stimulated by the coincidental passing by of a cat, Jean remembered the medicinal substance Lac felinum. That was merely happenstance and illustrates the value of being open-minded. What immediately followed, however, was something else entirely: Jean's mind rapidly perceived connections between pieces of knowledge of the medicinal substance Lac felinum and pieces of knowledge of her patient. That instantaneous perception is the stuff of genuine intuition.
But Jean's example also illustrated something else, something central to homoeopathic practice: she used that genuine intuition not to guide her to her prescription but to guide her to the materia medica. Therein, she checked the substance's similarity to her patient. In the course of her doing that and comparing the substance with other remedy candidates, her gestalt knowledge, gained through decades of disciplined practice, played another role: it enabled her to weigh in a holistic manner the degree of homoeopathicity of this particular substance to the patient against that of other substances, and to determine that Lac felinum was the best match she had so far found. Such an ability is not inherent to any practitioner; it comes about only through many years of disciplined work doing those comparisons longhand.
Aside from genuine intuition (which, though it arrives in the consciousness all of a piece, is susceptible of rational explanation to another person as though it had been deduced in sequential fashion) and pure guesswork (including that other form of "intuition" that is distinguishable from all other guesswork only in being unquestionable!), there are varieties of what amount to educated guesswork, "guesstimation", and illumination by association. Such, for instance, are the sympathetic magic of Sankaran, the periodic-table interpolations of Scholten, and all presumptions based on taxonomic relationships.
(It's worth noting that "guesstimation" is the basis too of the points assigned various gradings in computer-based repertorisation. The resultant scores are not inherent; they are nothing more than an artifical means of attempting to overcome unreliabilities inherent in the repertories -- unreliabilities due foremost to inadequacy of pathogenetic trials.)
The value to the homoeopath of all methods of guesswork (even scoring remedy candidates in repertorisation) lies not in their leading to a prescription. It lies in using them as Jean used both the coincidence of seeing a cat and her instantly recalled knowledge of Lac felinum: to stimulate consideration.
Even lower on the scale of methods than pure guesswork is pure randomisation: just throwing a die to choose between three difficult alternatives, for instance. Again, though, even randomisation is of some value if it simply helps us to consider things properly. Its least value lies in simply helping us to arrive at a medical decision.
So there's no shame in discussing alternatives to homoeopathy on this list, and no shame in discussing the usefulness of some form of adjunctive guesswork in arriving at a prescription that holds a good chance of being the most homoeopathic we can find.
What none of the alternatives to homoeopathy -- methods that do not use the law of similars as their basis -- can be, however, is homoeopathy. And it is in explicitly or implicitly including them under the head of homoeopathy that, in particular, the polypharmacists, the sympathetic magicians, and the materia-medica interpolators find themselves at odds with the homoeopaths.
Polypharmacy is an especially clear case in this respect. Polypharmacy ever and always falls outside the bounds of homoeopathy, and not just because Hahnemann ruled it out for use in homoeopathic practice (and in fact for use by any rational physician). It falls outside homoeopathy because it is inherently incompatible with the homoeopathic principle, the law of similars -- and with a principle even more fundamental than that law.
So it is especially dumbfounding to those who do understand homoeopathy's principle that allopathic "homoeopaths" should cite polypharmacy as a special case of homoeopathic prescribing. And that is no less true simply because they have done so from Hahnemann's day to this.
If I have been harsh in my criticism of Jeff's blather, it is not only because he has failed (if indeed he has failed) to understand the extremely basic -- I'd say unmissable, by any wakeful body -- incompatibility between any understanding of homoeopathy on the one hand and any form of polypharmacy on the other.
It is not even due simply to the rank dishonesty of changing his position without acknowledging doing so -- hedging -- and claiming simultanously two contradictory positions both of which serve him at the expense of denigrating homoeopathy.
Such stupidities merely certainly contribute to the temptation to clout Jeff about the ego.
No, what makes clearest that gentle remonstrance has served simply to entrench Jeff's contempt for homoeopathy is that, despite clear argument (argument that he has never addressed) to the contrary that has come from homoeopaths all the way back to Hahnemann himself, and following exactly in the footsteps of earlier polypharmacists on this list, Jeff cites two baseless (and, as it happens, incompatible) presumptions as reason to denigrate homoeopathy.
The first baseless (and disproven) presumption is that a mixture of many (in the present case, three) medicines, prescribed on a purely speculative basis and making no reference to the fundamental homoeopathic principle, may be judged "intuitively" to be a prescription homoeopathic to the patient (i.e. one that accords with Hahnemann's meaning of the term homoeopathy: it mimics the patient's symptoms in producing its own derangements in the healthy).
The other baseless presumption (also disproven) is that Hahnemann's confinement of homoeopathy to a basis requiring knowledge of a medicine's pathogenesis and taking into account the patient's entire state of departure from health was based on ignorance of the benefits of polypharmacy.
Having long been granted the benefit of some doubt as to whether such baseless certainties had arisen through blameless ignorance of what homoeopathy actually is and how Hahnemann had arrived at its discovery, Jeff has already received gentler remonstrance over such matters in previous conversations on this topic -- apparently, though, to no lasting effect, as his instantaneous response to Soroush demonstrates.
In this particular round of the conversation, Soroush asked Jeff which of the three medicines prescribed had "worked" and how he would rationally assess follow-up of such a prescription. Honest replies by Jeff would have acknowledged that he had no least idea which (or whether any) of them had "worked", and no least idea how one might follow up such a prescription. From there, the conversation might have proceeded constructively to polite discussion of whether polypharmacy offers any advantages at all over selection of a single medicine and vice versa.
What Soroush received instead were replies that conveyed in condescending fashion Jeff's adamant certainty (his "intuition") that all three medicines were necessary to the prescription because -- and here's the crux of the matter -- what Jeff had relied upon was the very factor that removes polypharmacy forever from the possibility of homoeopathic prescription, the very factor that renders mixtures incapable of pathogenetic reliability: the phenomenon of medicinal synergy.
Jeff expressed utter certainty that he had succeeded, not in prescribing one correct and two incorrect medicines, but in "intuitively" prescribing the exact combination of three medicines whose synergistic effects would perform the task he had set for them.
Evidently Jeff is quite a guy: he tells his medicines what to do, and they just go ahead and do it. This describes precisely the wonderfully robust self-confidence that underlay late-eighteenth-century allopathy, and it was its grounding in just such baseless certainties that caused Hahnemann to forgo its practice altogether in the years preceding his discovery of the law of similars.
Altogether, Jeff's prescription -- the right mixture, designed to effect exactly the right changes upon command, without unpredicted or unwanted effects -- sounds, and is, very much like an allopathic magic bullet. But the resemblance becomes more striking when you realise that Jeff had never intended for the unknown and unknowable synergy of these three medicines to be homoeopathic to the patient's condition. There was no suggestion in his replies that Jeff even recalled that the primary effects of the medicine must resemble the state of health of the patient if the prescription is to invoke a similar primary response and a reactionary secondary response.
If one thing is clear from his admissions, it is that he had prescribed the three medicines together merely in the hope that, between them ("synergistically"), they would offer similarity to a single symptom sufficient to remove that symptom. Jeff's prescription abandoned all thought of the patient's entire state; all necessity for knowledge of the medicine's entire effect; and all consideration of the relationship between the entirey of one and the entirety of the other, and sought instead the disappearance of a single symptom.
Read that last sentence again, and read it again, until you understand its significance to the question of what topic we are discussing in the endless mindless discussion of polypharmacy: whether it is the topic of what is suitable for discussion or the topic of what is and what is not homoeopathy. Despite what some of the old hands at sowing confusion here would have you muddle, they are two entirely different topics.
Having, apparently, succeeded in his quest to remove a single symptom, Jeff now congratulates himself upon having cured the case and advanced the art of homoeopathy -- oh, and having also advanced beyond it. And from there he quickly and baselessly criticises those (in the present case, Soroush and Kerry) who would gently suggest to him that he's overlooked something.
Of course, Jeff has been overlooking something; not just some thing, in fact, but the entire thing. Jeff has overlooked the homoeopathic prescription's basis in the homoeopathic relationship; that relationship's basis in knowledge of patient and knowledge of pathogenesis; and all basis for gauging the effect of the initial prescription.
Soroush made his points subtly, by asking questions to which Jeff might have replied in all academic humility. But Soroush's points, made more gently than I made mine when I did finally weigh in, did nothing to dent Jeff's impregnable certainties that he has both advanced and outmoded homoeopathic practice with the polypharmacy he believes himself to have pioneered and to understand in some way that exceeds such limitations as the requirement to know the medicine's effects upon health.
Perhaps the next polypharmacist readying him- or herself to attack the homoeopaths on this list for their recognition of Hahnemann's distinction between homoeopathic and all other medical practice -- the distinction that is the law of similars -- will be kind enough in doing so to take these fundamental matters into account. Inclusion of the least spark of critical thought could make the interminable recycling (two centuries and counting) of the "discovery" of polypharmacy and its promotion as a novel form of "homoeopathy" a good deal less tiresome.
Failure to consider the single feature that distinguishes homoeopathy from all other medical practice has, after all, left polypharmacist opponents of homoeopathy, from Cullen to Tikari, unable to give reason or evidence for the polypharmacy they have now been promoting for the past two centuries in the face of a clearly (if mysteriously) practicable and effective monopharmacy: homoeopathy.
What Jeff considers the pinnacle of medical innovation, the very polypharmacy that Hahnemann had succeeded in demoting well before discovering homoeopathy, is nothing more sophisticated than the stratagem of betting on several horses in a single race. His credulous belief that he has discovered something novel might warrant compassion and forbearance had he expressed it in terms either honest or tentative. His regrettable attempt instead to squeeze polypharmacy into a system of medical prescription that he must know it inherently violates; the fleering frumpy he turns on homoeopaths whose understanding his confusions have not touched; and the flagrant dishonesty of portraying his changing and mutually incompatible positions as demonstrating the inferiority of homoeopathy to polypharmacy warrant, however, no such sentiment.
It was not Jeff's use of polypharmacy that finally earned him my most vigorous disapprobation. It was not even his uncritical opinion of polypharmacy as a surer method of "working" on a single symptom than homoeopathy is. What led finally to the "flaying" that some consider Jeff received were his failure to realise that a superior homoeopathy must be compatible with the meaning of homoeopathy; his unthinking attempts to paint polypharmacy (again exactly as his fellow polypharmacists have in earlier conversations) as his own brilliant alternative to homoeopathy; and his unfortunate maintenance, despite their mutual incompatibility, of both positions as representing a single position obviating that most fundamental principle: of learning first the effects of the medicine you're about to prescribe.
It was, in other words, his utter dishonesty rather than his groundless beliefs that earned Jeff a flaying, if a flaying is what he got.
Honest beliefs at least have the virtue of being that: honest. Jeff's contempt for all distinction between homoeopathy and its opposite has unfortunately no such redeeming feature, arising as it does not from honest or even consistent belief but merely from a self-serving ambition apparently pragmatic but actually doomed from the outset by its thoughtlessness, its internal contradictions, and its solipsism. His contempt for homoeopathy and for all who draw a distinction between homoeopathy and allopathy reflects nothing more adult and nothing more thoughtful than wilful stupidity, woeful ignorance, and rank self-deceit, and as such it warrants in turn all the contempt that we may heap upon it in the hope that life may be able as a result to offer some slight dent in the adamantine armour of his precious but ultimately self-destructive ignorance.
Kind regards,
John
The principle of homoeopathy is simplicity itself. But nobody would claim that it is always easy in application. Even well-seasoned homoeopaths find themselves stumped on occasion. I count myself amongst those who consider that, for that reason alone, discussion of alternatives is relevant and useful, regardless of whether that alternative be obviously different, such as allopathy is, or perhaps less obviously, such as acupuncture is. Discussion of alternatives is quite a different matter, though, from blurring all definition between them. It is that that we recalcitrate against.
I'm sorry if the post you've replied to struck you as sarcastic. In fact, it wasn't sarcastic; every word of it was sincere. And I'm sorry that you and Sue have chosen to respond to the efforts of some of us to maintain some honesty about the meaning of homoeopathy, once again by interpreting those efforts as attempts to censor discussion of alternatives. We've tried time and again to clarify that discussion of alternatives is not at issue and that their misrepresentation as being homoeopathy is.
Some of the alternatives to homoeopathic practice fall, broadly speaking, into a class of methods that we may rightly call guesswork. As I've pointed out on several earlier occasions, there are many useful styles of guesswork that may usefully supplement a strictly homoeopathic basis for prescription. When we've reached the limits of the known, then guesswork or intuition (as Jean has just ably illustrated) or something else may suggest a choice we'd otherwise have absolutely no basis for making. And as I've said also, I don't know of a homoeopath who never needs to rely on some method that is not homoeopathic in order to arrive at a prescription decision.
That auxiliary method may be intuition -- the kind of thing that results from many years' close experience in the relevant field of knowledge. This -- what I'd call genuine -- intuition is not guesswork but a gestalt, a way of perceiving at once a relationship between a host of interconnected pieces of knowledge.
The auxiliary method may be something else -- also called intuition -- that arises not from the connection of pieces of prior knowledge but merely from random association, a feeling, a guess, a coincidence.
Jean's example neatly illustrates both of these. Stimulated by the coincidental passing by of a cat, Jean remembered the medicinal substance Lac felinum. That was merely happenstance and illustrates the value of being open-minded. What immediately followed, however, was something else entirely: Jean's mind rapidly perceived connections between pieces of knowledge of the medicinal substance Lac felinum and pieces of knowledge of her patient. That instantaneous perception is the stuff of genuine intuition.
But Jean's example also illustrated something else, something central to homoeopathic practice: she used that genuine intuition not to guide her to her prescription but to guide her to the materia medica. Therein, she checked the substance's similarity to her patient. In the course of her doing that and comparing the substance with other remedy candidates, her gestalt knowledge, gained through decades of disciplined practice, played another role: it enabled her to weigh in a holistic manner the degree of homoeopathicity of this particular substance to the patient against that of other substances, and to determine that Lac felinum was the best match she had so far found. Such an ability is not inherent to any practitioner; it comes about only through many years of disciplined work doing those comparisons longhand.
Aside from genuine intuition (which, though it arrives in the consciousness all of a piece, is susceptible of rational explanation to another person as though it had been deduced in sequential fashion) and pure guesswork (including that other form of "intuition" that is distinguishable from all other guesswork only in being unquestionable!), there are varieties of what amount to educated guesswork, "guesstimation", and illumination by association. Such, for instance, are the sympathetic magic of Sankaran, the periodic-table interpolations of Scholten, and all presumptions based on taxonomic relationships.
(It's worth noting that "guesstimation" is the basis too of the points assigned various gradings in computer-based repertorisation. The resultant scores are not inherent; they are nothing more than an artifical means of attempting to overcome unreliabilities inherent in the repertories -- unreliabilities due foremost to inadequacy of pathogenetic trials.)
The value to the homoeopath of all methods of guesswork (even scoring remedy candidates in repertorisation) lies not in their leading to a prescription. It lies in using them as Jean used both the coincidence of seeing a cat and her instantly recalled knowledge of Lac felinum: to stimulate consideration.
Even lower on the scale of methods than pure guesswork is pure randomisation: just throwing a die to choose between three difficult alternatives, for instance. Again, though, even randomisation is of some value if it simply helps us to consider things properly. Its least value lies in simply helping us to arrive at a medical decision.
So there's no shame in discussing alternatives to homoeopathy on this list, and no shame in discussing the usefulness of some form of adjunctive guesswork in arriving at a prescription that holds a good chance of being the most homoeopathic we can find.
What none of the alternatives to homoeopathy -- methods that do not use the law of similars as their basis -- can be, however, is homoeopathy. And it is in explicitly or implicitly including them under the head of homoeopathy that, in particular, the polypharmacists, the sympathetic magicians, and the materia-medica interpolators find themselves at odds with the homoeopaths.
Polypharmacy is an especially clear case in this respect. Polypharmacy ever and always falls outside the bounds of homoeopathy, and not just because Hahnemann ruled it out for use in homoeopathic practice (and in fact for use by any rational physician). It falls outside homoeopathy because it is inherently incompatible with the homoeopathic principle, the law of similars -- and with a principle even more fundamental than that law.
So it is especially dumbfounding to those who do understand homoeopathy's principle that allopathic "homoeopaths" should cite polypharmacy as a special case of homoeopathic prescribing. And that is no less true simply because they have done so from Hahnemann's day to this.
If I have been harsh in my criticism of Jeff's blather, it is not only because he has failed (if indeed he has failed) to understand the extremely basic -- I'd say unmissable, by any wakeful body -- incompatibility between any understanding of homoeopathy on the one hand and any form of polypharmacy on the other.
It is not even due simply to the rank dishonesty of changing his position without acknowledging doing so -- hedging -- and claiming simultanously two contradictory positions both of which serve him at the expense of denigrating homoeopathy.
Such stupidities merely certainly contribute to the temptation to clout Jeff about the ego.
No, what makes clearest that gentle remonstrance has served simply to entrench Jeff's contempt for homoeopathy is that, despite clear argument (argument that he has never addressed) to the contrary that has come from homoeopaths all the way back to Hahnemann himself, and following exactly in the footsteps of earlier polypharmacists on this list, Jeff cites two baseless (and, as it happens, incompatible) presumptions as reason to denigrate homoeopathy.
The first baseless (and disproven) presumption is that a mixture of many (in the present case, three) medicines, prescribed on a purely speculative basis and making no reference to the fundamental homoeopathic principle, may be judged "intuitively" to be a prescription homoeopathic to the patient (i.e. one that accords with Hahnemann's meaning of the term homoeopathy: it mimics the patient's symptoms in producing its own derangements in the healthy).
The other baseless presumption (also disproven) is that Hahnemann's confinement of homoeopathy to a basis requiring knowledge of a medicine's pathogenesis and taking into account the patient's entire state of departure from health was based on ignorance of the benefits of polypharmacy.
Having long been granted the benefit of some doubt as to whether such baseless certainties had arisen through blameless ignorance of what homoeopathy actually is and how Hahnemann had arrived at its discovery, Jeff has already received gentler remonstrance over such matters in previous conversations on this topic -- apparently, though, to no lasting effect, as his instantaneous response to Soroush demonstrates.
In this particular round of the conversation, Soroush asked Jeff which of the three medicines prescribed had "worked" and how he would rationally assess follow-up of such a prescription. Honest replies by Jeff would have acknowledged that he had no least idea which (or whether any) of them had "worked", and no least idea how one might follow up such a prescription. From there, the conversation might have proceeded constructively to polite discussion of whether polypharmacy offers any advantages at all over selection of a single medicine and vice versa.
What Soroush received instead were replies that conveyed in condescending fashion Jeff's adamant certainty (his "intuition") that all three medicines were necessary to the prescription because -- and here's the crux of the matter -- what Jeff had relied upon was the very factor that removes polypharmacy forever from the possibility of homoeopathic prescription, the very factor that renders mixtures incapable of pathogenetic reliability: the phenomenon of medicinal synergy.
Jeff expressed utter certainty that he had succeeded, not in prescribing one correct and two incorrect medicines, but in "intuitively" prescribing the exact combination of three medicines whose synergistic effects would perform the task he had set for them.
Evidently Jeff is quite a guy: he tells his medicines what to do, and they just go ahead and do it. This describes precisely the wonderfully robust self-confidence that underlay late-eighteenth-century allopathy, and it was its grounding in just such baseless certainties that caused Hahnemann to forgo its practice altogether in the years preceding his discovery of the law of similars.
Altogether, Jeff's prescription -- the right mixture, designed to effect exactly the right changes upon command, without unpredicted or unwanted effects -- sounds, and is, very much like an allopathic magic bullet. But the resemblance becomes more striking when you realise that Jeff had never intended for the unknown and unknowable synergy of these three medicines to be homoeopathic to the patient's condition. There was no suggestion in his replies that Jeff even recalled that the primary effects of the medicine must resemble the state of health of the patient if the prescription is to invoke a similar primary response and a reactionary secondary response.
If one thing is clear from his admissions, it is that he had prescribed the three medicines together merely in the hope that, between them ("synergistically"), they would offer similarity to a single symptom sufficient to remove that symptom. Jeff's prescription abandoned all thought of the patient's entire state; all necessity for knowledge of the medicine's entire effect; and all consideration of the relationship between the entirey of one and the entirety of the other, and sought instead the disappearance of a single symptom.
Read that last sentence again, and read it again, until you understand its significance to the question of what topic we are discussing in the endless mindless discussion of polypharmacy: whether it is the topic of what is suitable for discussion or the topic of what is and what is not homoeopathy. Despite what some of the old hands at sowing confusion here would have you muddle, they are two entirely different topics.
Having, apparently, succeeded in his quest to remove a single symptom, Jeff now congratulates himself upon having cured the case and advanced the art of homoeopathy -- oh, and having also advanced beyond it. And from there he quickly and baselessly criticises those (in the present case, Soroush and Kerry) who would gently suggest to him that he's overlooked something.
Of course, Jeff has been overlooking something; not just some thing, in fact, but the entire thing. Jeff has overlooked the homoeopathic prescription's basis in the homoeopathic relationship; that relationship's basis in knowledge of patient and knowledge of pathogenesis; and all basis for gauging the effect of the initial prescription.
Soroush made his points subtly, by asking questions to which Jeff might have replied in all academic humility. But Soroush's points, made more gently than I made mine when I did finally weigh in, did nothing to dent Jeff's impregnable certainties that he has both advanced and outmoded homoeopathic practice with the polypharmacy he believes himself to have pioneered and to understand in some way that exceeds such limitations as the requirement to know the medicine's effects upon health.
Perhaps the next polypharmacist readying him- or herself to attack the homoeopaths on this list for their recognition of Hahnemann's distinction between homoeopathic and all other medical practice -- the distinction that is the law of similars -- will be kind enough in doing so to take these fundamental matters into account. Inclusion of the least spark of critical thought could make the interminable recycling (two centuries and counting) of the "discovery" of polypharmacy and its promotion as a novel form of "homoeopathy" a good deal less tiresome.
Failure to consider the single feature that distinguishes homoeopathy from all other medical practice has, after all, left polypharmacist opponents of homoeopathy, from Cullen to Tikari, unable to give reason or evidence for the polypharmacy they have now been promoting for the past two centuries in the face of a clearly (if mysteriously) practicable and effective monopharmacy: homoeopathy.
What Jeff considers the pinnacle of medical innovation, the very polypharmacy that Hahnemann had succeeded in demoting well before discovering homoeopathy, is nothing more sophisticated than the stratagem of betting on several horses in a single race. His credulous belief that he has discovered something novel might warrant compassion and forbearance had he expressed it in terms either honest or tentative. His regrettable attempt instead to squeeze polypharmacy into a system of medical prescription that he must know it inherently violates; the fleering frumpy he turns on homoeopaths whose understanding his confusions have not touched; and the flagrant dishonesty of portraying his changing and mutually incompatible positions as demonstrating the inferiority of homoeopathy to polypharmacy warrant, however, no such sentiment.
It was not Jeff's use of polypharmacy that finally earned him my most vigorous disapprobation. It was not even his uncritical opinion of polypharmacy as a surer method of "working" on a single symptom than homoeopathy is. What led finally to the "flaying" that some consider Jeff received were his failure to realise that a superior homoeopathy must be compatible with the meaning of homoeopathy; his unthinking attempts to paint polypharmacy (again exactly as his fellow polypharmacists have in earlier conversations) as his own brilliant alternative to homoeopathy; and his unfortunate maintenance, despite their mutual incompatibility, of both positions as representing a single position obviating that most fundamental principle: of learning first the effects of the medicine you're about to prescribe.
It was, in other words, his utter dishonesty rather than his groundless beliefs that earned Jeff a flaying, if a flaying is what he got.
Honest beliefs at least have the virtue of being that: honest. Jeff's contempt for all distinction between homoeopathy and its opposite has unfortunately no such redeeming feature, arising as it does not from honest or even consistent belief but merely from a self-serving ambition apparently pragmatic but actually doomed from the outset by its thoughtlessness, its internal contradictions, and its solipsism. His contempt for homoeopathy and for all who draw a distinction between homoeopathy and allopathy reflects nothing more adult and nothing more thoughtful than wilful stupidity, woeful ignorance, and rank self-deceit, and as such it warrants in turn all the contempt that we may heap upon it in the hope that life may be able as a result to offer some slight dent in the adamantine armour of his precious but ultimately self-destructive ignorance.
Kind regards,
John
