In a book called Brass Tacks John Renner tells of his life as a homœopathic doctor and the changing nature of homœopathy in America that he witnessed in his long career (he began practice in 1920, and was still working when he died aged 98 in 1989).
He firmly believed homœopathy declined in his country not so much through assault by orthodox medicine, but because of the rise, and eventual dominance, of a homœopathic cult long on theory and short on results.
Unfortunately I see the same thing happening in New Zealand as visiting lecturers make absurd claims unchallenged by an uncritical audi-ence. Some homœopaths reporting on their cases in literature and at conferences are so divorced from the real world of medicine they seem unaware they are claiming to have treated self-limiting conditions or seek credit for the successful cure of patients receiving other treatments simultaneously.
I regularly hear, too, of strange “homœopathy” delivered by users of diagnostic/treatment devices, including a few registered medical practi-tioners, or formerly so. Unfortunately public accep-tance of these prescri-bers as homœopaths is very harmful to the genuine article.
I hope that the establishment of a register of qualified prac-titioners, practising rationally, will provide a bulwark against the rising tide of incompetence and outright quackery.
And I hope, too, that the draft bill for a new Medicines Act-which has been moving very slowly through the legislative pipeline, if not stuck in it (see NZ Listener, 4 April, page 28) will produce a legal definition of homœopathic medicine.
Such a definition (the Homœopathic Society made submissions wanting one) would go some way toward stopping the sale of substances ignorantly or mischievously described as homœopathic; recent radio advertisements have called an Avena-containing aphrodisiac “homœ-opathic”, similarly a range of cosmetics seems to be only “homœopathic” because calendula and hypericum herbs are used.
Remedies generated by psionic-type devices, making no judgement on their validity, will, I hope, be forced by such a legal definition to be called something other than “homœopathic” by their prescribers; it is probably too much to hope that the sales of mixtures of potentised substances making, or implying, therapeutic claims will be halted also, but this is a growing legislative trend in Europe.
Bruce Barwell