Dear WO'N: As I said long ago, my grandfather graduated from a medical school that taught homeopathy, but he used it only for patients who requested it. Some of the tenets are really impossible for me to swallow. The section on it in my encyclopedia is so long it would bore you to tears, but here is a sample that I think is nutty as hell:

"Hahnemann established this principle when he investigated cinchona, the bark of a tropical evergreen tree and a natural source of quinine used to treat malaria. He observed that a healthy person who took cinchona developed symptoms of malaria, and decided that the effectiveness of the drug came from its ability to cause symptoms similar to those of the actual disease."

People who take quinine do not develop symptoms of malaria. I think that it was quite a few years after Hahnemann made that statement before the cause of malaria was discovered, and the parasites could be seen on a stained blood smear with the microscope. Before that, other fevers were wrongly called malaria.

And the other wacky idea in homeopathy is that really tiny amounts of medication can be more effective than the conventional doses. Some of the new ideas are equally absurd.



"Homeopathy," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.