agree you disagree
Posted: Sun Jun 28, 2009 4:36 pm
I am new to this list and really dislike seeing so much negativism. Agree to disagree and move on.
From: minutus@yahoogroups.com [mailto:minutus@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of John Harvey
Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2009 9:40 AM
To: minutus@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Minutus] definition [was: New media attacks on homeopathy...
Shannon: Irene asked to treated as an intelligent human being by deliberately hedging on the word "proven" for the sake of mere convenience in the attempt to disguise Irenopathy as homoeopathy, a ploy that deserves whatever response interprets the same word to her best disadvantage. I don't apologise for Irene's deliberate abuse of the language or its results for her argument.
No more do I apologise for yours and its. You long ago invited treatment of the same rigour, by invoking the same tactic. It is only the compassion due to those apparently without any capacity that has kept many of us (believe me, we've discussed it) from being quite frank with you about how incredibly stupid you make everybody appear who would even discuss with you the gelatinous notions you throw around in the name of homoeopathy. But your fiendishly clever sophistries have made clear that you're much more intelligent than you like to show, and that these confusions of yours are not accidental. I'm genuinely sorry that exposing your specious arguments has caused you grief, but it's time you woke up to reality.
The reality is that things are not what you wish they were simply because you wish, or even because you're clever enough to make others believe your fantasies.
For the sake in particular of Tanya and Liz, let me briefly restate yet again that -- since the topic of this discussion is not good practice or acceptable practice or good medicine or acceptable medicine or good homoeopathy or acceptable homoeopathy but simply what homoeopathy constitutes -- what I think or anybody else thinks of either the merits or otherwise of combinations, or the usefulness of "cured" symptoms has nothing to do with the topic of what homoeopathy is.
For their sakes in particular too, let me restate it in another way: whether it's great medicine, maybe even superior medicine to homoeopathy, to prescribe a complex or to prescribe on the basis of your last million prescriptions is totally irrelevant to whether it's homoeopathy.
Shannon, it is true that many remedies have not had adequate provings and that they therefore cannot be prescribed homoeopathically on the basis of the indications they've acquired through use. That fact is not glossed over rather than acknowledged, however, by insisting upon use of the term homoeopathy to cover their prescription when it quite clearly is not. It is a well-intended prescription, no doubt, that prescribes Calendula in wounds the symptoms of which it has never evoked (despite the appearance of its vulnerary symptoms under the remedy in the repertory -- wounds it clearly did not cause!), to prescribe unproven nosodes, to prescribe by the fall of a pendulum, and so on. On occasion, if we're supremely lucky, the result will be homoeopathic enough to have a good, or a great result. We all acknowledge, however -- that is, all of us but about four -- that we did not prescribe that remedy via its proving similarities to the patient, but simply via what has worked on past occasions or somebody's recommendation in a particular circumstance. And we all -- except for you to whom this is so critical -- acknowledge that this seemingly good practice is not homoeopathy as such.
So what's the difficulty?
Homoeopathy is one practice of many that invokes the presumed special powers of potencies; but in homoeopathy we have a particular method by which we prescribe them that is not used in any other method. Hahnemann gave that method the name homoeopathy long before he stumbled on the potencies, which discovery made no difference to what homoeopathy was.
Your solution to the problem of wanting to call every variety of medicine that you approve of (even if you will no longer admit practising them all) homoeopathy but knowing that all other practices fall into an entirely different class is to subdivide homoeopathy into categories, as if at one and the same time you can be prescribing on the basis of symptom similarity but not prescribing on that basis. It's the classic dilemma of wanting to keep your cake and eat it too. The "discussion" you want, strangely, is not about the relationship between homoeopathy and other practices; it's only about your one message, repeated ad nauseum: that in the house of homoeopathy, there's nobody home any more, so we must start charging the squatters rent and sort out which bedrooms they are to occupy. That's not much of a discussion concerning the rights of the rightful occupants, is it.
But, since you claim to be concerned to help your confused non-patients to understand the relationship between prescription of polypharmaceutical drugs and other unproven medicines, I have proposed a solution to your problem with which you should be equally at ease and that I'm certain will upset no real lovers of homoeopathy either. I posted it under the subject line "The campaign against spring fever, and a better alternative", a subject that may not have made obvious that the post was addressed specifically to you, Irene, and Luise in an attempt to resolve this matter to the satisfaction both of those who wish homoeopathy to be accurately portrayed and of those who wish the nature of its association with complex and other unhomoeopathic prescribing of potencies to be made clear by some common terminology.
Liz: many lines of evidence suggest that you are fundamentally mistaken in thinking that proving symptoms are deducible from those symptoms that a remedy has "cured". Just one of them is an amusing conversation I had on this list with Shannon in June 2007, in which exactly that assumption led her to declare that penicillin that "clears up" a child's suppurating middle ear must have worked homoeopathically -- and therefore must, by logical extension, cause middle-ear infections (which, by the way, it has never been known to, in reasonably extensive provings). This is the sort of "homoeopathy" that you invite confusion of real homoeopathy with for as long as you remain unclear as to what does and what does not constitute homoeopathic practice.
Or are you going to tell me that you agree with Shannon's conclusion? I ask because I don't see that you can have it both ways. If it's not homoeopathy, then there must be a reason it's not. I suppose you could always take the next conjectural leap and claim that it must be the case that no potentised remedy could remove a symptom except curatively; but I don't take you for such a fool.
Cheers --
John
2009/6/28 Shannon & Bob Nelson >
John,
I do think your discussion would be more productive, as well as more palatable, if you can stick with the simple facts, without belittling ("... silly interpretation," etc.). But in any case--
"... had a proving" is of course a different thing from "been proven in practice..." Neither terminology is incorrect, they're just saying different things.
Agreed that "proven in practice" is different from "had a proving"." However, clinical effectiveness is, and has long been, another basis upon which some remedies are used, even in absence of a proving. So this is another examples of a way that *common* practice by many homeopaths is technically at odds with what Hahnemann wrote. When I was in homeopathy school there was another school nearby which was very strict "Hahnemannian", and one of that school's instructors mentioned a list of some remedies in very *common* usage by homeopaths, which people in that school would not use, because they had not had formal provings. I do wish I'd kept a list, because it was rather sobering (and removed some of what I would consider very important tools from their arsenal). I wonder if anyone here happens to know what some of those would be?
Experience is not conjectural.
...
The present discussion's topic is whether it is desirable to change the definition of homoeopathy to suit all those whom Shannon and Irene are busy re-educating to understand the term to include anything that they wish to practise in that name;
Okay, this is another example of where ridicule leads to inaccuracy in a way that, in addition to being juvenile and potentially offensive, also dilutes and distracts from the supposedly intended topic of the discussion. Please get your dignity back; draw it 'round you like a mantle of mannerliness, benevolent yet incisive, and please stick to "the facts, ma'am; only the facts." Thanks.
If it's anything other than those masters' administration of Sepia on basis of information gathered strictly from the provings, then yes, it is topical.
Again, if you could just stick with the facts...
*My* patients know (at least the ones who care do; others don't care, so I haven't tied them down and forced them to listen!). But the shelves full of "combination remedies" and the numerous types of practitioners who call *themselves* homeopaths, while practicing with Dermatrons etc., and prescribing various assortments of remedies based upon various latter day theories, says that yes, the name "homeopathy" has loooooooong been taken out of your hands (or mine or Irene's).
But you want to keep arguing that your definition (and Hahnemann's) is the only one that counts, despite the fact that huge swaths of the rest of the world have moved on. That's okay, it's fertile field for a *discussion*. But clearly (as it it wasn't clear already) nothing I have to say about it will make a whit of difference to you. You're wedded to your conclusions, and all attempts to discuss alternate viewpoints (by which I mean, "all attempts to discuss the situation as it *is* today, in the broader world) are going to just devolve into childish taunting. Once again I'm out; I'm happy to discuss the *ideas*, and I'm really, really bored with trying to be polite and "topical" in response to rudeness and personal ridicule.
Best wishes,
Shannon
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer."
— Sir Humphry Davy, in "An Account of some Galvanic Combinations", Philosophical Transactions 91 (1801), pp. 397–402 (as quoted by David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power, Cambridge, 1998, p. 87)
From: minutus@yahoogroups.com [mailto:minutus@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of John Harvey
Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2009 9:40 AM
To: minutus@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Minutus] definition [was: New media attacks on homeopathy...
Shannon: Irene asked to treated as an intelligent human being by deliberately hedging on the word "proven" for the sake of mere convenience in the attempt to disguise Irenopathy as homoeopathy, a ploy that deserves whatever response interprets the same word to her best disadvantage. I don't apologise for Irene's deliberate abuse of the language or its results for her argument.
No more do I apologise for yours and its. You long ago invited treatment of the same rigour, by invoking the same tactic. It is only the compassion due to those apparently without any capacity that has kept many of us (believe me, we've discussed it) from being quite frank with you about how incredibly stupid you make everybody appear who would even discuss with you the gelatinous notions you throw around in the name of homoeopathy. But your fiendishly clever sophistries have made clear that you're much more intelligent than you like to show, and that these confusions of yours are not accidental. I'm genuinely sorry that exposing your specious arguments has caused you grief, but it's time you woke up to reality.
The reality is that things are not what you wish they were simply because you wish, or even because you're clever enough to make others believe your fantasies.
For the sake in particular of Tanya and Liz, let me briefly restate yet again that -- since the topic of this discussion is not good practice or acceptable practice or good medicine or acceptable medicine or good homoeopathy or acceptable homoeopathy but simply what homoeopathy constitutes -- what I think or anybody else thinks of either the merits or otherwise of combinations, or the usefulness of "cured" symptoms has nothing to do with the topic of what homoeopathy is.
For their sakes in particular too, let me restate it in another way: whether it's great medicine, maybe even superior medicine to homoeopathy, to prescribe a complex or to prescribe on the basis of your last million prescriptions is totally irrelevant to whether it's homoeopathy.
Shannon, it is true that many remedies have not had adequate provings and that they therefore cannot be prescribed homoeopathically on the basis of the indications they've acquired through use. That fact is not glossed over rather than acknowledged, however, by insisting upon use of the term homoeopathy to cover their prescription when it quite clearly is not. It is a well-intended prescription, no doubt, that prescribes Calendula in wounds the symptoms of which it has never evoked (despite the appearance of its vulnerary symptoms under the remedy in the repertory -- wounds it clearly did not cause!), to prescribe unproven nosodes, to prescribe by the fall of a pendulum, and so on. On occasion, if we're supremely lucky, the result will be homoeopathic enough to have a good, or a great result. We all acknowledge, however -- that is, all of us but about four -- that we did not prescribe that remedy via its proving similarities to the patient, but simply via what has worked on past occasions or somebody's recommendation in a particular circumstance. And we all -- except for you to whom this is so critical -- acknowledge that this seemingly good practice is not homoeopathy as such.
So what's the difficulty?
Homoeopathy is one practice of many that invokes the presumed special powers of potencies; but in homoeopathy we have a particular method by which we prescribe them that is not used in any other method. Hahnemann gave that method the name homoeopathy long before he stumbled on the potencies, which discovery made no difference to what homoeopathy was.
Your solution to the problem of wanting to call every variety of medicine that you approve of (even if you will no longer admit practising them all) homoeopathy but knowing that all other practices fall into an entirely different class is to subdivide homoeopathy into categories, as if at one and the same time you can be prescribing on the basis of symptom similarity but not prescribing on that basis. It's the classic dilemma of wanting to keep your cake and eat it too. The "discussion" you want, strangely, is not about the relationship between homoeopathy and other practices; it's only about your one message, repeated ad nauseum: that in the house of homoeopathy, there's nobody home any more, so we must start charging the squatters rent and sort out which bedrooms they are to occupy. That's not much of a discussion concerning the rights of the rightful occupants, is it.
But, since you claim to be concerned to help your confused non-patients to understand the relationship between prescription of polypharmaceutical drugs and other unproven medicines, I have proposed a solution to your problem with which you should be equally at ease and that I'm certain will upset no real lovers of homoeopathy either. I posted it under the subject line "The campaign against spring fever, and a better alternative", a subject that may not have made obvious that the post was addressed specifically to you, Irene, and Luise in an attempt to resolve this matter to the satisfaction both of those who wish homoeopathy to be accurately portrayed and of those who wish the nature of its association with complex and other unhomoeopathic prescribing of potencies to be made clear by some common terminology.
Liz: many lines of evidence suggest that you are fundamentally mistaken in thinking that proving symptoms are deducible from those symptoms that a remedy has "cured". Just one of them is an amusing conversation I had on this list with Shannon in June 2007, in which exactly that assumption led her to declare that penicillin that "clears up" a child's suppurating middle ear must have worked homoeopathically -- and therefore must, by logical extension, cause middle-ear infections (which, by the way, it has never been known to, in reasonably extensive provings). This is the sort of "homoeopathy" that you invite confusion of real homoeopathy with for as long as you remain unclear as to what does and what does not constitute homoeopathic practice.
Or are you going to tell me that you agree with Shannon's conclusion? I ask because I don't see that you can have it both ways. If it's not homoeopathy, then there must be a reason it's not. I suppose you could always take the next conjectural leap and claim that it must be the case that no potentised remedy could remove a symptom except curatively; but I don't take you for such a fool.
Cheers --
John
2009/6/28 Shannon & Bob Nelson >
John,
I do think your discussion would be more productive, as well as more palatable, if you can stick with the simple facts, without belittling ("... silly interpretation," etc.). But in any case--
"... had a proving" is of course a different thing from "been proven in practice..." Neither terminology is incorrect, they're just saying different things.
Agreed that "proven in practice" is different from "had a proving"." However, clinical effectiveness is, and has long been, another basis upon which some remedies are used, even in absence of a proving. So this is another examples of a way that *common* practice by many homeopaths is technically at odds with what Hahnemann wrote. When I was in homeopathy school there was another school nearby which was very strict "Hahnemannian", and one of that school's instructors mentioned a list of some remedies in very *common* usage by homeopaths, which people in that school would not use, because they had not had formal provings. I do wish I'd kept a list, because it was rather sobering (and removed some of what I would consider very important tools from their arsenal). I wonder if anyone here happens to know what some of those would be?
Experience is not conjectural.
...
The present discussion's topic is whether it is desirable to change the definition of homoeopathy to suit all those whom Shannon and Irene are busy re-educating to understand the term to include anything that they wish to practise in that name;
Okay, this is another example of where ridicule leads to inaccuracy in a way that, in addition to being juvenile and potentially offensive, also dilutes and distracts from the supposedly intended topic of the discussion. Please get your dignity back; draw it 'round you like a mantle of mannerliness, benevolent yet incisive, and please stick to "the facts, ma'am; only the facts." Thanks.
If it's anything other than those masters' administration of Sepia on basis of information gathered strictly from the provings, then yes, it is topical.
Again, if you could just stick with the facts...
*My* patients know (at least the ones who care do; others don't care, so I haven't tied them down and forced them to listen!). But the shelves full of "combination remedies" and the numerous types of practitioners who call *themselves* homeopaths, while practicing with Dermatrons etc., and prescribing various assortments of remedies based upon various latter day theories, says that yes, the name "homeopathy" has loooooooong been taken out of your hands (or mine or Irene's).
But you want to keep arguing that your definition (and Hahnemann's) is the only one that counts, despite the fact that huge swaths of the rest of the world have moved on. That's okay, it's fertile field for a *discussion*. But clearly (as it it wasn't clear already) nothing I have to say about it will make a whit of difference to you. You're wedded to your conclusions, and all attempts to discuss alternate viewpoints (by which I mean, "all attempts to discuss the situation as it *is* today, in the broader world) are going to just devolve into childish taunting. Once again I'm out; I'm happy to discuss the *ideas*, and I'm really, really bored with trying to be polite and "topical" in response to rudeness and personal ridicule.
Best wishes,
Shannon
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer."
— Sir Humphry Davy, in "An Account of some Galvanic Combinations", Philosophical Transactions 91 (1801), pp. 397–402 (as quoted by David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power, Cambridge, 1998, p. 87)
Okay, I hear ya.
)