Two years
ago, a medical council in London banned a family doctor from practising
medicine for three months after she prescribed homoeopathic treatment
for a 11- month-old girl suffering from gastro-enteritis.The doctor
was charged with “risking the baby’s health” by putting her own
personal belief in homoeopathy above the patient’s welfare.
Though
homoeopathy is said to be the second most widely used system of
medicine in the world, many have questioned its efficacy. Tennyweeny
sweet pills curing an illness? Difficult to digest but the believers
still keep the faith, arguing that it has fewer side-effects than allopathic
medicines. But internationally, there’s a lot of distrust. Homoeopathy
is banned it in Israel; Hungary banned it in 1948
and then made its practice legal again in 1991. Even Germany, where
modern-day homoeopathy evolved, thanks to physician Samuel Hahnemann
in the 18th century, some homoeopathic remedies containing alkaloids
were banned in 1992. There’s no official for or against policy on
homoeopathy in the US, while in the UK, it reportedly enjoys
some amount of royal patronage.
The principle
of homoeopathy is simple and straight: treat “likewith like”.
The Practitioner considers the symptoms of a patient and then chooses
a remedy that reportedly produces a similar set of symptoms in healthy
subjects. This remedy is usually given in extremely low concentrations.
Some patients reportedly feel worse for a brief period, Dr K K Juneja,
chairman, Delhi Homoeopathy Board, calls it “medicinal aggravation”
and added: “Patients should not be scared of this because it just
happens that in the process of treating the disease, the symptoms get
aggravated but slowly the patient is cured.”
But there
are key questions that are yet to be studied - such as whether
it actually works as a cure and if so, how. Dr Rajendra Tiwari of Dr
Batra’s homoeopathy Clinic, says: “How homoeopathy works is difficult
to explain in a few words for there are entire books on it.”
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