Homeopathy: science or magic?

Homeopathy has been in the news this week, with some senior doctors campaigning to stop it being funded on the NHS. I heard one of them on Radio 4 yesterday morning deriding homeopathy as 'magical thinking' - the astrology to medicine's astronomy, as it were. Shuggy is on their side and normally I would be too, as a fairly rational sort of person, the kind who doesn't regard 'Enlightenment fundamentalist' as necessarily a term of abuse.

But by coincidence, this is also the week that I've had my first personal encounter with homeopathy. I was recently diagnosed as suffering from chronic tonsillitis and told by a consultant that the only alternative to repeated bouts of the disease was tonsillectomy. For various reasons I've delayed making a decision about this, and was persuaded by a colleague (also usually a reasonable, sceptical type) to give homeopathy a go before submitting myself to the surgeon's knife. After months of feeling pretty awful, I'll try anything.

So I've become one of those people who scour the internet for alternative cures for their condition. I've started taking a couple of over-the-counter remedies that seemed to be quite widely recommended and yes, I have begun to notice a difference. Of course, it's too soon to tell, and it may just be the dreaded placebo effect that the senior medics see as the only benefit of alternative medicine. I've also made my first appointment with a homeopath for a couple of weeks' time. I'm not putting myself forward as a clinical trial here, but I'll keep you posted on how it pans out.

Materialism and the mystical

Nick Cohen takes aim at the 'pseudo-science' of homeopathy here, and his opinions tend to be shared by bloggers whose views I normally find sympathetic. If my own attitude is more equivocal, it's partly because (as I reported here and here) I've recently turned to homeopathy in pursuit of a non-invasive cure for a persistent health problem. Has it worked? Well, my homeopath would say it's too soon to tell. There have been some positive signs, but sceptics would probably attribute these to the placebo effect.

I've been surprised, though, by how many acquaintances whom I had categorised as progressive, materialist types (and with whom I had been shy about admitting my own indulgence in alternative medicine) have confessed to using homeopathy, and to believing in its efficacy. In other words, a rational, scientific world-view doesn't necessarily translate into scepticism about alternative therapies.

It's a reminder that the materialist and the mystical have always been curious bedfellows in the history of the contemporary left. The 'moment' that gave birth to the New Left - the events of 1968 or thereabouts - also gave rise to the New Age, and the two have been closely intertwined ever since, with rational political currents not easily disentangled from more mystical, spiritual trends. (All of this is dealt with brilliantly in Sheila Rowbotham's memoir of the Sixties, Promise of a Dream.)

Does the current argument over alternative therapies bear any relation to the renewed debate about 'faith' on the left? Is there a connexion between those progressives who have a new-found respect for belief - and a tolerance of new age therapies? Conversely, does scepticism about 'pseudo-science' coincide with a suspicion of renascent religiosity and a robust secularism?

I'm not sure it's quite so simple. Even among those of us of a secular cast of mind, there's a longing for therapies that offer a more holistic view of mind and body, self and the world, to be 'true', even as our scepticism nags away at us to dismiss them, as Cohen and others do, as mere quackery.

Homeopathy update

I promised to provide regular updates on my encounter with homeopathy. Well, I had my first appointment this week and apparently I'm a 'phosphorus' personality. Normally I'm extremely sceptical of any talk of psychological types - whether astrological or pseudo-scientific, as in Myers-Briggs and the like - but some of this is perhaps just a little bit like me:

Tall, slender persons, narrow chested, with thin, transparent skin, weakened by loss of animal fluids, with great nervous debility, emaciation, amative tendencies, seem to be under the special influence of Phosphorus. Great susceptibility to external impressions, to light, sound, odors, touch, electrical changes, thunder-storms.

Or maybe I'm fooling myself. Anyway, I've taken my first dose of phosphorus and await results...