In a few months the New Zealand Council of Homœopaths, Incorporated, will be formed. Its foundation members will be people belonging to the practitioner register of the New Zealand Homœopathic Society, the Institute of Classical Homœopathy, and the homœopathic section of the New Zealand Natural Health Practitioners Accreditation Board. The organisation will have considerable status, insofar as it will be recognised as an official body by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the International Council of Classical Homœopaths. This degree of official recognition is very valuable of course, cloaking professional homœopaths in a mantle of status and respectability I had not thought I would ever live long enough to see.
The downside of this is that it does not alter in any way the right everyone has to call themselves homœopaths (whether they are properly trained or not, or belong to a professional body which could monitor them) and treat people.
It is, therefore, very important to ensure that the overall quality and status of professional homœopathy in New Zealand is raised by pressing those people trained in homœopathy who have not bothered to join a register to do so promptly, and those who have not completed their training or been inadequately trained to do something about this deficiency so that they may apply to become members of the NZCH, or if they move swiftly they may apply to join one of the existing registers before these registers become extinct at the end of this calendar year.
What I have written so far applies to practitioners - what does this mean for patients and people interested in homœopathy? Well, I think they should press practitioners who have not done so to become registered, and encourage would-be patients to go only to registered practitioners.
I do not want to foment a witch-hunt, but obviously giving whole-hearted support to those practitioners who have put themselves out to get the best training they could and who have voluntarily placed themselves under the control of a body with a code of ethics and rules of practice which could discipline them for breaches of these rules, and giving the cold-shoulder to the others, will be the best thing for New Zealand homœopathy in the long term.
Bruce Barwell