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The way home from homeopathy (middle ground style) - C C - Apr 19, 2022
https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/the-way-home-from-homeopathy
EXCERPTS: "In your opinion, homeopathy is pseudoscience. But what is the harm, if it brings some relief to desperate, scared patients in situations where allopathy is unable to help them?"
I’ve had variations of this talk with my mother for more than a decade during our regular transcontinental phone calls, so I’m well versed in our clashing views and competing terminologies. (Allopathy is the word homeopaths use to describe conventional modern medicine.)
Homeopathy is a therapeutic system conceived by German physician Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. It relies on allegedly curative solutions of substances that are diluted to the point of nothingness, making them pharmacologically inert; yet it has millions of adherents around the world—including in India, where I was born and grew up.
Once I left home to pursue a career in biomedical research, my studies awakened me to the sheer absurdity of homeopathy. By the time I was a postdoc at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, I couldn’t hold back. Discussions of homeopathy with my mother resembled a tug-of-war.
[...] I think a lot about my mother’s recurring question: “What is the harm?”
For one thing, homeopathic remedies are not necessarily cheap. ... The remedies are not necessarily safe, either. They are regulated lightly or not at all in many parts of the world. As a result, they can contain questionable additives or dangerous levels of their ostensible active ingredients, despite the claimed extreme dilution...
[...] Adding confusion in people’s minds, homeopathy can seem momentarily effective when used to treat conditions with fluctuating symptoms ... When I was a child, Dr. Ganguly “cured” my mumps with homeopathic belladonna. What I didn’t know then was that mumps naturally runs its course in two weeks ... These illusory homeopathic success stories increase the impulse to ignore real treatment when patients face life-threatening conditions.
So yes, there is both tangible and intangible harm in homeopathy, and as a science professional, I feel obliged to confront it. [...] The homeopathy industry has helped stoke latent distrust of modern medicine...
[...] With time to reflect, I began to appreciate the reasons behind my mother’s abiding reliance on homeopathy. The primary of these was her deep personal trust in kindly Dr. Manmatha Nath Ganguly ... the sole physician to three generations of her family...
[...] Without question, Dr. Ganguly provided a level of trust and reassurance that is difficult to find with a doctor in a busy hospital. There was also an unacknowledged level of complexity in the way he worked. Dr. Ganguly was not a pure homeopath... He would flexibly switch to “allopathic” drugs and surgical procedures as needed, drawing on his medical training in England.
Dr. Ganguly’s example suggests a path forward. Practitioners of modern medicine would do well to emulate the concern and warmth that are considered the hallmark of homeopathy practitioners. They can also build trust by accommodating patients who use unproven alternative treatments, so long as those treatments are benign. Trust-building is itself an important part of the cure, after all. ..
For these reasons, medical educators are increasingly emphasizing compassion and empathy as ways to improve both clinical outcomes and patient experiences. The empathetic approach also appears to reduce burnout and enhance job satisfaction among physicians. In parallel, many hospitals in the United States have initiated systematic training to improve physician–patient communication. Such programs show some success in dispelling vaccine hesitancy.
From my refurbished perspective, Dr. Ganguly is a useful role model after all. In health care, the key principle is harm reduction. Every patient who takes a required medication or accepts a life-saving vaccine reaps the benefits—even if the same individual takes a few inert tinctures as well... (MORE - missing details)