How Can You Criticise Homeopathy When You Have Never Studied It?
Anyone who has ever entered into a debate with a homeopathy about the nature of their trade will have sooner or later bumped into this objection to their arguments. At one level, it is a simple deflection away from whatever point you were trying to make and an attempt to turn the conversation to your apparent lack of credentials and authority to question the subject. Without doubt, the homeopath will have paid for their three or four years of correspondence courses, or may even have obtained a BSc from a minor UK University. They have letters after their name and certificates on their walls. You do not. So shut up.
There is much talk now about how homeopaths are not busy enough to make a living; the reason given is recent media hostility aided by powerful, organised lobbying from a rabble including pseudo-scientists, journalists and a not-so-good magician.
Instead of a coherent and credible voice we are steadily turning into a veritable dawn chorus of approaches, systems, methods and madness that sit uncomfortably under the umbrella we call ‘homeopathy’. It is a cacophony of noisy speculations, so singly indefinable that it is almost impossible to raise a critical objection to anyone, and if so, the questioner risks being taunted and accused of obstructing other people’s views by being critical, right-wing, right-brained and probably paid by Swiss drug companies to boot. We should be careful. Ironically, the veneer of that all embracing, ‘lovey-dovey, kisses and cuddles’, Californian approach, that so marks the alternative scene, actually masks a hidden and tyrannical agenda.
That tyrannical agenda is most obvious in how organisations like the Society of Homeopaths treat outside critics. My own experience of their legal threats can only be described as distinctly abusive. But importantly, in this passage we start to see why homeopathy cannot be taken seriously as a body of knowledge that one can become expert in. Homeopaths have no yard stick by which to determine what is right and what is wrong. All the competing ideas are equal within the body of homeopathy. Sure, some may disagree with others’ methods, but there is no mechanism by which the superiority of one approach may be discovered. Objective evidence is rejected and criticise too far and you will be seen as being a threat, as former homeopath Edzard Ernst is seen.
Nothing is quite so dictatorial and controlling as the rendering of meaning into meaninglessness. There are two types of dictatorship; one form controls and regulates a rigid inflexible system; the other is so fluid and undefined that it is impossible to oppose or criticise because it has absolutely no substance. It is like trying to catch the mist. The latter is so open that anything goes but nothing can change or progress. The unwritten rule is not to be critical or try to define. No one has to publicly burn the books; you simply deify the inane and render critical thought unfashionable. Politically, this is a sophisticated form of authoritarianism; medically and clinically, it is the seeds of psychosis.
It is becoming quite hard now to define the word ‘homeopathy’ with any kind of precision. More worrying, either no-one wants to or we’re scared to. Some trends in homeopathy defy substantiation or any clear rational on the basis that logical thought is a little passé. Unless a prescription is ‘intuitive’ or whispered in the ear by a spirit guide then no one’s interested. If the spirit guide dares suggest a polycrest rather than a small unproven remedy then he’s likely to get the sack and be replaced by a brave from another tribe. (I am not suggesting that spirit guides are male, by theway.) This is not an indication of a spiritually evolved practitioner but evidence of a necrotic brain.
It is very difficult to treat madness and even more difficult to point it
out but, as a profession, if we are to survive, we need to.
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