This is the second chance I take to talk in a LMHI Congress. Last year, my paper was about Method, Science and Medicine. My intention was to remind, in the context of the main subject, The Evidence-Based Homeopathy, that science and evidence are patterns of reality in the way scientists, living in a determinate social ruling system, imagine reality.

Sciences are not ontological truths, but just functional understanding and means of organizing “reality”. Evidence based medicine is not a matter of truth but an institutional “rational” convention.

Today, as you will see, I insist on reminding you MD Practitioners, that homeopathy is an historic and institutional fact, or at least, it should be. It seems a paradox, I insist on the historic and institutional quality of knowledge while the Congress’ name insists on a timeless quality.

I talk to you as an independent observer. Since no one in the LMHI has asked for my remarks regarding the way I, as a sociologist, see homeopathy’s state of affairs, I appreciate that you are listening to me.

Anyhow, the intention to speak meaningfully in words should not be confused with the intention to communicate that meaning to the hearer. When we communicate to people, we succeed in producing understanding in them by getting them to recognize our intention to produce that understanding.

That’s why, I ask that you do not stop at words and keep going with the reasoning, even if you have never heard some terms I must use, unavoidably, in my academic account.

I’m inviting you to build up a more comprehensive image of homeopathy, in which it can be understood from a sociological viewpoint.

Aim & Procedure

Indeed, my aim is to motivate stakeholders in homeopathy to see themselves in the epochal change we all live in, that I call Post-Modern Times, and to formulate some hypotheses pertaining to the future of their everyday practices or businesses.

My intention is to take you through some of Post-Modernity’s phenomena of representation of the world, as for instance, reification, money as subject and society as its predicate, considering ways in which these “patterns of reality” have affected, are affecting and will affect homeopathy.

To take you through our social time, I will use a theoretical framework that refers to the Post-Modernity Theory, as conceived by Bewes, Lyotard and Baudrillard, and to the Construction of Social Reality Theory, as formulated by Searle.

Digression – Speaker Standpoint

Indeed, I make my assumptions clear-cut. Even when one describes phenomena in third-person terms, there are always first-person epistemic assumptions. Definitely, while reasoning about any topic, there is always an assumption that affects the whole examination: the subject – of which the reasoning is an attribute, the analyst, generating any agreement or any divergence.

Even by making clear all these usually unspoken assumptions it does not mean I will communicate my message to you. Indeed, Communication means the action of mutually accepting a position concerning common or contrasting interests, gathered around a ratio or balance. In case the interlocutor does not agree with the speaker standpoint, there is hardly any likelihood the interlocutor comprehends, takes with him/her the message, or the speaker communicates. From this viewpoint, communication builds up a delimitation of common interests and an understanding about what people concerned do not share.

From the viewpoint of this digression, one realizes that, in this paper concerning homeopathy in Post-Modern Times, one does not argue about ontological entities or truth but about statements, phenomena descriptions and such, depending on the observer/speaker’s epistemological standpoint.

From a sociological viewpoint, any definition of homeopathy represents an expression of the interests concerning the subject who formulates the definition. Pretending to define a concept outside the context it lives in and of which it is an expression, represents an error in perception. Since there is a conflict of interest among different subjects engaged with the idea of homeopathy, there are many positions and definitions regarding it.

For this reason (conflict of interest and many positions), what homeopathy means changes from one generation to another, from one context to another… even if its meaning as “healing with an artificial morbific similar a morbid affection” remains as orthodoxy.

Theoretical Framework

As I have already mentioned, to take you through our social time, I will use a theoretical framework that refers to the Post-Modernity Theory. When you present a case, you should use a protocol shared by your community and even if unspoken, you are supported by some theoretical assumptions. I do something similar. In my examination of homeopathy in present times, I use the guide of Bewes, Lyotard, Baudrillard and, specially, of Searle, regarding the Construction of Social Reality Theory.

Let me introduce to you my first theoretical assumption with a contrasting peculiar example.

Unlike a river, whose stream running stream through a town populated by common people subsists independently from personal opinions, unlike an earthquake, which ontology is also independent from the single’s point of view, homeopathy belongs to social realities, to the world of “institutional facts”, i.e. to the level of realities built up by consensus, by agreement.

That means “homeopathy” is not “an entity in nature” but a “connection” social subjects agree to realize in the phenomenological world, related, by a method, to health – disease and substances. That means, also, those social subjects accredit or certify their observations and practices according to institutional conventions.

My second theoretical premise is that science and knowledge are humankind ideations. Their meanings and consequences subsist and fade away in the various societies where the social subject that generates them as its attribute and predicate, lives in. Science and knowledge are not eternal abstractions or independent truths living by themselves. They are languages, i.e. historic means humans use to express their account of the world life, as it appears to human subjectivity/objectivity, and their consciousness of themselves.

That means that homeopathy can be also considered as a social historic account of the world of life as it has appeared to Hahnemann and to homeopath MDs’ subjectivity/objectivity, and it is an expression of their consciousness. It is its truth and limit (falsehood).

My third theoretical assumption is that science, as language does, produces only exact propositions, obtained from the premises that have been anticipated.

The practical consequence of this epistemic primes is as follows: The homeopathic method approach to the question regarding disease and health, indeed, simply means to arrive at that result (hómoios-páthos) that the anticipant method has produced.

Consequently, the assumption regarding the method as exact propositions based on anticipant propositions, drives us to claim that any medication depends on the presumed character of the affection and on the supposed action the medication would perform.

A fourth assumption in this elucidation regarding homeopathy in post-modern times is that the right meaning of a functional knowledge, like homeopathy, is not a matter of logic. Logic has meaning only within a system. The meaning of an idea does not depend on the elucidation of its sense but on its social life and historic death.

Consequently, the meaning of any functional knowledge is a historic fact and is understood by considering the social circumstances that produce, conserve, transform or vanish it.

This assumption implies that if homeopathic medicine has a meaning, it cannot be separated from the social circumstances in which it has effect on reality.

The reasoning now shifts, indeed, to the sociological and anthropological point of view, to cast light on the question whether and how homeopathy’s idea, i.e. healing a suffering using a similar artificial suffering, still bears any functional useful sense in post-modern times.

The fifth most significant assumption of my examination regards the definition of Post-Modernity. On methodological basics I consider that the term “Post-modernism” denotes a set of ideas that stands for the complex phenomenon of experiences and representations regarding the idea of reality, space, time and truth after Modernity dies away. Those ideas can be found in social, cultural and economic patterns.

As a result of the previous assumption I must consider man lives in patterns of reality, indeed, and if one wants to reach, efficiently, something in reality, for instance, to widespread homeopathy, one has to know how patterns (representations) of reality work.

Widening my assumed definition of Post-Modernity I must say that the term “Post-modernism”, in addition to its meaning of an aesthetic movement that rejects the modern standards of how art should be made, consumed and what it should denote, means a further rejection of Descartes’ design of reality or a refusal of the Enlightenment’s representations (intelligibility of the real world and our capacity to comprehend the world) and its rigid distinctions.

To this point of my theoretical framework excursus I must add some main features of Modernity and Post-Modernity’s Representations. Indeed, do not forget, we are not talking about “ontological entities” but about representations.

The Modernity’s representations are interested in the idea of totality, gazing at fragmentation as something tragic, Post-Modernity accounts, in contrast, rather celebrate discontinuity.

The Modernity’s representations are dominated by the classical physics, those of Post-Modernity by quantum mechanics, by prediction of probabilities in situations where classical physics predicts certainties.

To conclude these notes about the theoretical framework that support my examination of homeopathy in Post-Modern Societies, we might agree to define them as entire social formations interested in marketing, selling and consuming commodities, with specific philosophical, political and ethical ideas which provide consensus.

After having delineated my theoretical framework, we can move now through the social processes that have affected, are affecting and will affect homeopathy. Let’s start reviewing …

Modernity’s Turning Points: Secularization And Reification

Secularization

Instead of worrying yourself for the terms I’ll be using, I ask you to follow the examples I set, so that you might get the understanding I want to communicate to you regarding the “secularized” representation of the human being.

While secularization in Modern Times brings God’s death in civil life under the voice of right to auto-determination, liberating the human being from considering him/herself a god’s creation and allowing he/she to think of him/herself as an ostensibly evolutionary self-conscious being with auto-determination faculty, Post-Modernity, as a paradox, does not constitute a human being centred age, as Christianity and Renascence were, but a human decentred era where attention is paid to lifestyles.

This secularized representation of the human being, however, signals a turning point in Western medicine: the 2nd largest secularisation of health and body in Western societies. In this new cultural environment, Hahnemann’s Discourse, regarding the “physician as a moral person subject to religion”¹, might be considered a sort of dogmatic or pre-modern position.

After the end of theocracy, between the 18th and 20th centuries, and with the consolidation of the alliance technocracy and plutocracy during last decades, the sickness and, consequently, the health state, have been secularized further, they have been progressively handed over from the divinity’s power to the civilian power.

In Western culture, the first attempt to secularize disease was carried out by Hippocrates². He is credited with being the first physician to reject divine force causing illness. He separated the discipline of medicine from religion, arguing that disease was not a punishment inflicted by gods but rather the product of environmental factors, diet and living habits. On the Sacred Disease, he is the first to argue that religious explanations arises from ignorance.

In the context of a secularized world, health may be also considered as the ideal transient state one can aspire to by means of the acquisition and use of treatment available on market in order to reach better performances in social profiles.

Catholic and Calvinist controversy regarding health as a god’s gift to man who behaves well is over. Man’s identity and health is now represented separately from a theocratic limit and let to be a choice on the market.

Health becomes a matter of what and how to consume, a matter of lifestyle and income. Man’s life is not represented as a theological design any longer. As an evolutionary self-conscious being with auto-determination faculty, man might even genetically “modify himself”.

As a result of the process of secularization, in the post-modern order, the self is ‘made’, rather than inherited or just passively static, self-identity becomes a reflexive project – an endeavour that the person continuously thinks of and works on. The person creates, maintains and revises a set of biographical narratives – the story of who he/she is, and how he/she came to be where he/she is now.

Self-identity, then, is not a set of traits or observable characteristics. It is a person’s own reflexive understanding of his/her biography. Self-identity has continuity – that is, it cannot easily be completely changed at will – but that continuity is only a product of the person’s reflexive beliefs about his/her own biography.

A stable self-identity is based on an account of a person’s life, actions and influences which makes sense to themselves, and which can be explained to other people without much difficulty. It ‘explains’ the past, and is oriented towards an anticipated future. A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor – important though this is – in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going.

This new conception, regarding an evolutionary self-determined human being, clashes with the prevailing idea in classical homeopathy concerning the human being as a naturalistic creature “born” from an ontological theological design no one should modify.

Regarding this matter, a sort of intellectual silence seems to reign in homeopathy’s realm. The question seems to take the form of a criticism. Homeopathy attacks new ideologies regarding the human being’s possibilities of “modifying her/himself” as a degeneration, since by doing that, the human being does not obey the design nature or god has provided. In such disobedience a part of homeopathy’s theorization identifies the cause of disease.

Even if from a physiological viewpoint one may use parameters somewhat objective to define the state of health, in such a definition there are implicit social dominant values, power relationship. The heart transplant is made available by something else rather than the simple technical progress. It becomes feasible because body – life is now mainly conceived as evolution and not as a god’s possession or creation. Today, regarding lifetime and its content or quality, the definition is made by the civil society rather than the Vatican State.

Reification

Another most outstanding turning point in post-modern society, that has effected and will still affect homeopathy, is the one related to the increasing “reification” process: use-value becomes objects of cult, ideas become increasingly fetishes and any metaphysic and theological reassurance become commodities .

This process of representation involves separating something out from the original context in which it occurs and placing it in another context, in which it lacks some or all of its original connections and still it seems to have power or attributes which in truth it does not have.

This process of alienation, at thought level, is an inherent and necessary characteristic of economic value as it manifests itself in market trade to hide the social relations and the worker, that creates value, by means of relations among objects.

In post-modern times the commodity fetishism reaches a paramount perfect function of replacing inter-human relationships with relationships between humans and objects. Shifting attention to the commodity, for example, the relationship between producer and consumer is obscured.

In this context, producers of homeopathic medicine tend just to highlight their attention to the “product packaging”, regardless who and how will ultimately use it. Similarly, the consumer or patient can only see his/her relationship with the product he/she uses, being unaware of the people who produced that “object” and of the whole theoretical context it belonged to once upon a time. Thus, commodity fetishism or reification ensures that none of the stakeholders is fully conscious of the political and social positions they occupy.

Reification is what occurs, for instance, when we, increasingly, denominate “homeopathy” or “homeopathic” simple pills or drops, made up following a manufacturing process consisting of dilutions according to specific ratios and quantified number of beats of any substance, separating from the context, in which the so-called homeopathic product is used, the connections with the principle of similar, to be exact, separating, from the context in which “homeopathy” is promoted as commodity, the significant connections related to the idea of an artificial suffering, individuated by a proving in healthy persons (pathogenesis), likely to cure a similar suffering in an ill person.

Reification is also what occurs when an abstract concept that describes a relationship or context is treated as a concrete “thing”, for instance, when the principle of similar and the set of correlated principles and axioms are marketed, reified as a tube labeled “homeopathy” on a store shelf or when we market as “homeopathy” what is simply an herbal extracts, as if separating, in this way, the remedy, a medium, from its theoretical support were possible.

Inversion between object and subject or between means and ends are a common practice in market trade.

Reification implies objects are, intentionally, transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive and determined by the object, while objects are rendered the active, determining factor. This sort of reification occurs, for instance, when the homeopath physician is subject to the reified “product” or when pathogenesis is rendered as universally active and idiosyncrasy of the single ill patient is rendered passive, by attributing an universal and immutable nature to what is just inductive experimental data of proving – a function of the observer or researcher’s epistemic view.

Reification also results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, running into an ontological and epistemological fallacy, as for instance, when an homeopath physician claims that the remedy restores health in a way the ill person, healed, can fulfill the higher purpose of existence.

Reification also occurs when, defining homeopathy, many practitioners assert it is a therapeutic method, a sort of Technical Tool, without considering that it is, first, a set of ideas. This misunderstanding regarding ideas and representations is a matter of consequence. Numerous practitioners, indeed, treat representations as if they were concrete “entities”, instead of abstractions, like science or disease.

This probably happens also in teaching homeopathy, since numerous homeopath physicians tend to confuse “abstractions” with “phenomenological descriptions” or “ontological entities”. Many of them forget the narrative and conceptual level of their practice.

Countless practitioners live in a reification circle in which concepts and abstractions (social facts) that refer to the phenomenological world are thought to be “natural laws”. Unfortunately, reification, effective in propaganda, when used in logical arguments is, as a rule, considered a fallacy.

In this way, in post-modern times, homeopathy, from a set of ideas regarding a method of healing a suffering with an artificial similar suffering (the remedy or agent of an artificial illness), in an ethic prospective to help man to reach the highest purpose of existence, appears as a set of products to support man’s ordinary performances.

I am describing tendencies, picturing patterns of reality, and it means also that not every single citizen in post-modern society is aware of academic and intellectual elites’ conjectures and new mental representations. For the crowd god is still alive. Only the Nietzsche’s Ãœbermensch can stand up by himself without deity. And if the Western multitude get a hint the Semitic god is not breathing anymore, it flees away to get another or imports exotic deities, as many as possible – each icon with its kit of ideas and reveries and lifestyles.

Secularisation, that peculiarly is not a human centred age, presents another paradox. While elites know “delusion” and agree with the idea of regarding reality and truth as conventions and representations (abstractions), the ordinary people, on the contrary, and throughout reification, go on living in a sort of mythological world where things are considered as metaphysical values and representations are taken for “reality”, treating abstractions as they were “real things”, as they had living existences and abilities.

Homeopathy In Post-Modern Times – The Challenge: Deregulation

After having considered in some imperfect ways how the secularization and reification processes of representations affect homeopathy, we can now introduce the deregulation phenomenon to better portray the challenges homeopathy faces in Post-Modernity.

Let’s start by posing some questions. Will Post-Modernity deregulation open the door to homeopathy? Which scenarios could be disclosed if the doors of post-modern consumerism open to homeopathy? Might this openness represent its end?

Indeed, in order to better characterize the challenges homeopathy faces in Post-Modernity it is necessary to consider the Deregulation phenomenon, i.e., the process by which governments remove, reduce or simplify restrictions on business and individuals with the intent to encouraging efficient private market operations and the new areas of trade opening up. The stated rationale for deregulation is often that fewer and simpler regulations will lead to raised competitiveness level, therefore higher productivity, more efficacy and lower prices, with its resulting higher consumerism and human happiness.

Indeed, this deregulation impacts even the professional market allowing new figures to act. It’s already common to see naturopathy courses ads on TV. It means the end of the golden age of doctoring.

This deregulation pervades, inevitably, the health and disease market and, certainly, the ethos of medical practice, the studies program for developing technical and professional know-how, the skillful figures that cooperate or fight in the market of health and wellness, introduced as concept and identified in numerous businesses marketed around the wellness idea. In conclusion Deregulation pervades, inexorably, the whole system of denomination and commercializing medicinal products and related.

In a context dominated by secularisation, reification and deregulation, homeopathy may cease being the idea of healing patient’s suffering with an artificial similar suffering (the remedy as agent of artificial illness), following, with art, Hahnemann’s method, to become, at best, the action of utilizing “products”, denominated by marketing, “homeopathic”, following the most standardised technical means of prescription of a substance or set of substances based on a array of criteria regarding the therapeutic reliability or even following standardized therapeutics indications for auto-prescription.