Homeopathy
- Min Ji
- Dec 25, 2022
- 3 min read
Homeopathy, created by German Physician Samuel Hahnemann, is the treatment of disease with small amounts of natural materials that would generate disease symptoms in a healthy individual. It assigns therapies to individuals using a distinct diagnostic system and detects clinical patterns of signs and symptoms that differ from those used by traditional medicine. One of the reasons for its endurance is that homeopathy was far less invasive and harsh than other extreme therapies of the time, and it did not injure people.
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As a result of its survival, homeopathy has constantly clashed with science and contemporary medicine: according to current, evidence-based medicine, it is ineffective and should not be practiced. However, its believers and practitioners maintain that homeopathy is successful, employing various, often using paradox arguments to prove its legitimacy. They twist and distort data to show that homeopathy has an influence beyond the placebo effect and demand that the scientific and medical communities recognize it. The placebo effect is when a placebo medicine or therapy has a positive impact, it can't be attributed to the placebo's inherent qualities; instead, it must be the patient's faith in the treatment. Adherents of Hahnemann's technique, on the other hand, are ready to dismiss science and evidence-based medicine as insufficient to explain its impact. This has actual and grave consequences, and it's not simply one of many examples of cognitive biases. Refusing medical care in favor of homeopathy can prolong illness and suffering or even result in death for patients or their parents. It squanders limited healthcare resources that could be used elsewhere. Additionally, undermining research and the scientific method contributes to the alarming spread of anti-science and anti-truth ideologies that gradually erode public confidence in scientific institutions and science itself.
The basic presumption of homeopathy:
The underlying presumptions that underlie homeopathy are, in the opinion of the scientific community, either disproved or implausible. First, there is no current scientific proof or support for the prescientific concept known as the principle of similarity. Hahnemann, like the other doctors of his generation, was greatly affected by the different manifestations of the old similarity principle, from the earliest "magic of similarity" through the central idea of Middle Age medicine and the early modern era. In essence, the similarity is an anthropocentric and teleological concept: comparable human categories were "sensuously" associated with the external similarities of objects that exist in nature. Since the walnut's form is similar to the human brain, it must be useful in treating brain illnesses. Beans were also believed to have the ability to treat renal conditions. Even simple name resemblances were enough to combine contexts of meaning. In pre-scientific eras, man's innate propensity to contextualize seemingly unrelated events was a characteristic attempt at rationalization to safeguard one's self-image from seeming utterly random.
The concept that a substance that causes sickness in a healthy person should be able to cure the same disease in a sick person was derived by Hahnemann from these early variants of the likeness principle. This school of thinking was not new; William Cullen and John Brown, as well as Michael Alberti's De curatione per similia (Treatment according to the resemblance principle), had already made arguments regarding the usefulness of similia for medications. Without a doubt, Hahnemann was greatly influenced by Paracelsus as well. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Hahnemann founded his theories on a misunderstanding of an experiment that might have led to his obsession with the concept of similarity: He had the same symptoms after consuming cinchona bark that was typically treated with quinine.
Testing medicines on healthy subjects was a wholly novel concept that is based on the principle of resemblance and is another tenet of homeopathy. Hahnemann believed that all that was required to diagnose a substance's side effects was to test it on healthy volunteers. As a result, he would surely come to the conclusion that this chemical would work just as well as a treatment for those who had the same symptoms.
Given the fallacious assumption of the principle of resemblance and the fact that the chemical hasn't been evaluated for treating pathological symptoms, this doesn't demonstrate a cause-and-effect link. However, these medication trials also fall short of today's norms. The test subjects often consume the drugs over a longer length of time while documenting all changes and symptoms at all concentrations for future analysis. Large-scale testing versus placebo, in fact, has not shown any relationships between test subjects' reports.
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