A recent chat

In response to a a friend's Facebook post, I commented about agrohomeopathy and mentioning how a colleague has used to great success, a friend of a friend commented...'Wow, water with added water. Genius'

I must have been in the mood for a bit of a debate as usually, particularly on twitter, I bless and block and decide I've far more interesting things to do with my life. Still this day I decided to engage. I swam last night and a friend told me how much she loved my responses, so, as we all seem to run into a bit of this here and there, and for some it's a scary element of doing our job, I thought I'd share it here. No one should be afraid of speaking their truth, especially when they are doing great work in the world. Debate is to be encouraged I believe, I definitely learn from it myself, even though at school the debating stuff we did made me cringe and I hated it. My work is better for explaining it, whether that be by teaching it to individuals in clinic, groups, giving talks, chatting with interesting parties about the potential of homeopathy or responding (occasionally!) to people like I did here.

So here goes our wee debate:
 
Me: it’s amazing what water can do, today I’ve seen periods regulated, anxiety hugely reduced, hair regrowing, pmt gone, hayfever managed better than with antihistamines. Oh and rheumatoid arthritis this morning with inflammatory markers down. I am quite in love with water by way of homeopathy. Still to try it with my plants...
 
Them: I suppose if you told people you were just giving them water the fair enough (a fool and his money, and all that). But to dress it up in some pseudo scientific oogly - boogly is just plain cruel. I sincerely hope that you don't encourage people to stop taking actual medication and rely on your nonsense . If so, then shame on you.
 
Me: Thanks ****, if you get a chance to see the film Magic Pills when it’s showing near to you I’d recommend it’s worth a watch. A trial of 2.3 million people in Cuba where vaccine scientists created a homeopathic medicine when they had no time to produce the conventional vaccine produced results which showed it to be very effective. There are countless research trials and I’ll not go on about them here (I’ve fun stuff to do, not go on about work - whilst I’m here tho, of course I don’t encourage people to stop taking actual medication... but plenty of ppl consult me as they don’t want to take medication with side effects, or the side effects are affecting their lives, or they wish to reduce them once they feel better), but if you’re genuinely interested then www.hri-research.org is worth a read. If not then I wish you well, joking aside re water, as far as I see it, it is an amazing substance that is barely understood (at least by me - you may be far ahead of me there) and many of the Water Research Conference films are available to watch on YouTube which I find fascinating, though largely way beyond my scientific understanding. Hoping too you watched this week’s The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs and saw the subsequent links regarding Dr David Healy and his research around actual real medicine and the lack of efficacy of the majority of antidepressant drugs. I’ll dig out a link from a real dr for you so you don’t have to take my word for it. With best wishes, Em
 
https://davidhealy.org/the-greatest-failure-in-what-used-to-be-called-medicine/
 
Them: thanks for the reply. I watched Magic Pills, another by the numbers scare story with very dubious referencing. As for David Healey - an advocate of ECT and insulin therapy? What strange bedfellows you keep. I take your point about things being beyond your scientific understanding (I'm not educated beyond degree level) but at least I know there is such a thing as science. And this is were homeopathy has always failed. There are plenty of individuals who claim it works, but no significant studies that explain how it works. Which is odd, because if it operates as you claim, it up ends a lot of what we know about the physical universe. So where are the Nobel prize winners homeopaths? Such works should surely be at the forefront of scientific research. But its not is it? The debate takes place here, and on the backwaters of the Internet. We could trade references all night. I could direct you to Bad Science by Ben Goldacre or the Enemies of Reason by Richard Dawkins. I'm afraid people like you who propagate such treatments but openly refuse to follow that up with actual scientific understanding belong to the 'gee whiz' school of therapy. And before you suggest we 'agree to disagree' I will quote Richard Dawkins : 'Just because there are two opposing schools of thought, it does not mean that the truth lies halfway between them. Some people are just plain wrong'
 
Me: What I most find intriguing is your patronising tone, I'm assuming you're a friend of ****'s and personally am happy to respect that people have different opinions, and am intrigued by your opinion that anyone outside of that can't be. Having worked with this for the last 11 years in practice, alongside Drs (of both the medic and PhD variety), with a degree in science myself, and seen some amazing things, I'm curious about the fact there may be things 'science', a constantly evolving process, is yet to discover.

The fact we can't explain aspirin fully still, and yet used it for 70 years up to 1971 whilst not understanding any mechanism of action, the fact we're unable to explain anaesthesia and the fact that they're recently discovered a drainage system for the brain that wasn't known about when I studied neuroscience - are those not fascinating and to be explored further and not merely written off? There are plenty of studies, there are also plenty of people who would rather it doesn't work as it's sort of inconvenient really.

My introduction to it was via our horse who had been diagnosed with an incurable recurrent eye disease and was on steroid injections into her eyelid and anti-inflammatory meds, which were adversely affecting her liver. From the real vet. So when the real vet suggested that we remove her eye to fix having to take the real medications that were affecting her, we looked at other routes and managed to find locally a real vet who had discovered that homeopathy added a valuable tool to his tool kit and came, treated her with 5 days of tablets and there was never again any eye disease. Of course our real vet (the first one) told us in was in remission and it could return at any time. It didn't for 12 years. Were we lucky? Perhaps so. Other people since I've talked to have removed one eye, some have then found the second eye developed it and then you have a dead horse. I don't know what happened after 12 years because then she broke her leg and was sadly put down.

Curious how you've watched Magic Pills, as the film is currently in community screenings and film festivals but there may have been screenings near to you, love to know more about which bits you take issue with as of course was fact checked many times. The Queen's Dr features on there discussing research but of course that can be discounted too. As for the gee whizz school, I'm open enough to know that the mechanism of action may be beyond me but I have enough friends and colleagues working on that stuff they'll be sure to tell me about it. Since we're on a plant thread here, I've colleagues seeing that different homeopathic medicines put on plants have effects and you can distinguish the one from the other. Surely that's interesting? A plant isn't going to be duped by our pseudo-science and parting a fool from it's money?!

Having been to research conferences in Rome and Malta and looking at heading to one in London this summer (https://thesciencetheevidence.co.uk) where 2 Nobel Prize winners are speaking who both support the theories behind homeopathy, I feel am open minded and aware there are realities and mechanisms beyond me. I'm very happy to see what I do in practice, babies getting better when conventional medicine failed them and parents seek me out as a last resort, adults after years on antidepressants using homeopathy (one example of Abby who sent me this short film - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xem8kjpPzmk) and actually feeling content and happy for the first time in their lives. This is real people, real lives and the lab work is interesting but what ''people like you'' may be doing is denying people a chance to find something that actually makes them better. Enough of the 'shame on you' business. Always happy for a respectful debate but patronising and insulting isn't my style. Have a great Sunday, Em

So there it ended, until they decided to have a chat on my Facebook work page. But that's for another day.

Do let me know what you think.

Hold your head up high, 

With love,

​Em x