Homeopathy from a users side

Why it doesn’t matter if homeopathy is provable or not. A report from the point of view of a patient

As the manager of an international company, I was permanently on the road throughout Europe. My wife, daughter of a publisher of homeopathic literature, always tried to convince me that homeopathy helps — but I was critical of it.

After some complaints kept recurring and the painkillers only fought the effects and not the cause, I went to a well-known Munich homeopath. She conducted a homeopathic questioning (so-called anamnesis) with me and created a kind of profile from me.

When I was again on one of my business trips, I suffered a spontaneous flu-like affect and called the homeopath. She prescribed me two remedies, either one or the other would help. I got the remedies and about 30 min after taking them, the ailments became noticeably less, after 2 hours they had disappeared and I was convinced of the effect of homeopathy.

Review

Over the next 20 years of my life, this approach became the perfect solution to numerous ailments. No lengthy appointments, no waiting times, medicines without side effects — perfect. This is how I came to homeopathy.

Many who use homeopathy today came to homeopathy through one or another key experience (usually equipped with a rather critical opinion of homeopathy. but also often with some disappointment of previous medical treatment).

Samuel Hahnemann

Hahnemann had studied the effect of homeopathic remedies with self-experiments more than 250 years ago. The teaching went to the USA and India, where millions of patients are treated daily with homeopathy. In our country, too, it has become an integral part of the health care system. If you look in the handbags of today’s mothers of young children, you will often find the most important homeopathic globules. A large percentage of the population would seek treatment from a homeopath. So are they all blinded and guided by a placebo?

There are always doubters and there will always be doubters. And actually, I think the discussion about the mode of action is long outdated. For example, a new book by a homeopathic doctor recently came on the market in which she expresses great disappointment about the non-provable effects of homeopathy. The main point of contention is the poor detectability. Is everything placebo? Even in babies, animals or plants?

Conclusion

I am not interested in whether the homeopathic effect can be proven according to certain criteria. It works for me and for many millions of people and animals all over the world.

I myself, as well as many of my environment, have made the experience that not all homeopaths are equally good. Homeopathy is an experiential medicine, which means that the therapist needs experience, sound knowledge of the homeopathic medicines, knows how to use them and is good at interpreting the patient’s symptoms. When all these factors come together, this healing method can work. Obviously, one or more of these factors does not apply to Ms. Grams in your daily practice. That is fine as far as it goes. What bothers me, however, is the extreme public attention of our journalistic media. A coach whose team is relegated is not necessarily a bad coach. But no one would say that soccer is to blame. And I don’t think (and hope) that anyone will be deterred from continuing to trust homeopathy just because a former homeopath falls away from the faith. Because everyone probably knows someone by now for whom homeopathy worked — demonstrably or not.