Fri, 08 Jan 2010
Educated Stupidity
There's a campaign to discredit homeopathy underway in Great Britain. Like all public relations campaigns it follows a pattern: repetition of a few talking points by authority figures and attempts to cast your opponents as bad people acting in bad faith. Anyone who follows American politics should be very familiar with it. I've mostly ignored it, except when reporting on it in my homeopathic news summary, but the sheer stupidity of the attacks bothers me. So I've decided to start commenting on them. The post that bothered me tonight is Professor David Colquhoun's comment on part of the curriculum at a homeopathic college. Much of the post is given over to the supposed "contradiction" between the Society of Homeopaths' code of ethics and the curriculum of the college. The supposed contradiction is that it is considered unethical to advertise that you cure disease and yet the curriculum teaches how to cure disease. This is just so stupid that it has me shaking my head in disbelief. Surely the professor understands the difference between doing something and advertising that you do something? And that while curing cancer and teaching people how to cure cancer are praiseworthy things, advertising that you cure cancer is not? And surely the professor understands the reason for praising the first and condemning the second? This has nothing to do with homeopathy, this a simple exercise in logic. Simple, but too complex for our professor.
Yes, homeopaths treat chronic disease, including serious chronic disease. Part of this treatment is coordinating care with other forms of medical treatment, including allopathy. The details of this process are too complex to discuss here, but it's done all the time, properly and ethically. Though I doubt that any homeopathic treatment would please Professor Colquhoun.
