HOMOEOPATHY- A CLINICAL SCIENCE STOFF Jesse A (BHJ. 72, 3/1983)

In these misguided days of testing a specific homoeopathic remedy against a specific allopathic drug, it is important to take a step back and look at the question in its entirety. To gain an insight into homeopathy it is necessary to begin with a holistic image of being of man and that we suspend our dogma of western biological science.
The reductionistic approach taken by western medicine leads to a superficial description of the chemo-mechanical workings of cells, organs and body. Operations under purely chemo-mechanical assumptions has proven self-limiting because its own standard of research methods show that living physiological systems are not in chemical equilibrium but are maintained, while alive, in a steady state non-equilibrium metabolism. Western science fails to describe the mechanism whereby these living systems are maintained.
The biological organism is the comprehensive entity whose purpose (essence) exerts an influence on the operation of all or its various organs. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.
The biotic sciences must, in other words, assess the state of the organism against a concept of the healthful operation of all its functions, the body’s operational principles. From the holistic perspective the major operational principle of life may be characterized as that creative energy which orders the entropic patterns of matters in accordance with its own rhythmic processes.
Every organ serves some function in the maintenance of the healthy operation of all activities in the organism. Every cell and every molecule has been permeated with the unified aims of the whole biological being. Working with man in a holistic way, we endeavour to understand the unfolding, circulation and balance of this creative energy within the microcosm that is each of us. An imbalance in the creative functional level (Hahnemann’s ‘vital force’) of man causes a skewing of the normal inter relationships and results in a state of disease. Illness once recognized and accounted for correctly, leads on to appropriate therapeutic measures.
Holistic physicians have realized that symptoms are merely the body’s best attempt at demonstrating and correcting a supersensible imbalance. Unless the imbalance is worked with on the plane from which it originates, and not just suppressed on the physical level with drugs ( drugs may be life saving but are rarely curative), a deeper, more severe illness will result.
The homoeopathic remedy thus being a rarefied therapeuticum, correctly applied, relates to the creative functional level of man and therefore has the potential to root out the cause and right the imbalance. This then raises the question of how to correctly apply the medicament. Hahnemann proclaimed “Similis similibus curentur”. Through his comprehensive philosophy of STEINER we can now begin to explain more accurately how potentized medicines act on the metaphysical energy system of man.
As homoeopathy is a clinical science, each problem that a patient presents with must be looked at in the context of the individual affected. Homoeopathy is more than any remedy, it is an approach. Any well designed research project must test within the sphere of that which is being tested. In the context of Homoeopathy, that means following patients over a period of time while they are appropriately treated and managed by the homoeopathic physician. The length of time necessary for follow-up would depend upon the type of illness and the remedies involved, as some are said to take longer than others to begin to work. Who can say that a patient’s good responses to a second remedy given was not because of the first remedy, although possibly showing ‘little’ physical evidence of a response, actually prepared the patient for the improvement ( one must obviously take into account the length of time a remedy is said to work for, once it is no longer given). Such problems as ‘proper clinical trials’ are not new to homœopathy; those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat its failure.
It is highly questionable scientific practice to dismiss a body of significant imperical evidence (such as homœopathy ) simply because the underlying philosophy, which rationally interprets such results, assumes foreign to those currently accepted.