This book review was emailed to us from Tim Shannon, ND
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Homeopathy: How It Really Works
By Jay W. Shelton, PhD
Amherst NYP: Prometheus Books 2004. ISBN:1-59102-109-x. Paperback. 319 Pages
Reviewed by Tim Shannon, ND
Firstly, I am a homeopathic physician, thus my bias is clear. At first read of this book, it appears that the author is really trying to give homeopathy a fair look. But his thesis as to what really happens in homeopathy is entirely conjecture. What I mean is there is essentially one chapter that could be argued is "scientific" - the one where he discusses the studies about homeopathy. However, there are now hundreds of scientific studies, many of which are well done and positive for homeopathy. His review of the scientific literature about homeopathy is way too brief and superficial to be taken seriously.Don't get me wrong, I don't understand how homeopathy works myself. But this is also true for many common drugs on the market. What I see in the clinic day in and day out can't be explained by this author's nicely packaged ideas. I and many homeopaths could cite cure after cure of infants, animals, and chronic intractable diseases. Of course anything can be explained away, but when you see something and experience it on a daily basis it becomes impossible to explain away with such simplistic theories.
The thrust of the book is that 100% of all homeopathic outcomes are due to everything BUT the homeopathic medicines. He offers up the placebo theory or that chronic diseases go away on their own. He is being sloppy here, because many of his theoretical explanations apply to all forms of medicine. He never approaches how homeopathy really exists in the clinic, but how he assumes it does. What I mean is he never explains how homeopathic vets get the results they do. Or how long term cures of chronic diseases happen on a regular basis in a homeopathic clinic.
His explanations of how homeopathy works is limited to whatever he could reason, or figure out in his head, or explain away. But it is all cerebral and theoretical. It is like trying to understand how something works without every really experiencing it or interviewing anyone who has. It's not hard to make up explanations when you have no actual experience - you can make up whatever you want. This author has gone to great lengths to devise all kinds of interesting theories - but they are just that, theories.
I see many patients who have been chronically ill for decades. They've been through all the best that modern medicine has to offer - often with minimal results, no results at all, or modern medicine only exacerbates their condition. Yet homeopathy has helped them again and again and again. This is not true of all my cases - of course I also have many disappointing failures.
Yet, I've seen patients with severe PTSD who have had insomnia for decades begin to sleep within weeks of the beginning of treatment. Patients with bulimia for eight or more years abruptly stop bingeing and purging within a month or two of the beginning of treatment. I've seen children with Asperger's syndrome with very unfortunate symptoms resolve most of their severe symptoms and limitations. I've seen patients with severe daily panic disorder who've had complete resolution of all their symptoms - the same exact results with severe clinical depression. Adolescents who've been cutting on themselves or punching themselves - completely stopped. I could go on and on. These are not rare or isolated results, but common in my practice as well as my more experienced collegues.
All the results above were patients I treated for years, the results held for many years and became self sustaining. The author would say all the above were because I changed their diet or lifestyle - But I don't do any diet or lifestyle counseling - only homeopathy. He would theorize that all results were due to placebo. But if this was true, how come patients didn't get any placebo results from conventional medicine - despite years of taking the drugs? Most of the above patients were true believers in the conventional approach. In addition, many of my patients were very skeptical of homeopathy. They were only coming because everything they tried previously failed. For most, they had to pay out of pocket as their insurance won't reimburse them. Obviously the drugs failed, but how come they didn't get a placebo response from conventional treatment in all those years?
The authors next theory would be that they'd been sick so long, that finally the disease simply burned itself out and self resolved. If chronic intractable cases were resolving as an isolated phenomena, than this theory would make sense. But these are daily outcomes in many homeopathic clinics. He would then say my counseling skills made these diseases and disorders resolve and not return. However, I do almost no counseling with my patients. I mostly only listen and ask some questions about their fears, where the pain is located, etc. Besides, can counseling make 20 years of insomnia go away, reverse hypothyroidism, bulimia, chronic hypertension or migraines?
If he or modern medicine would take the time to actually sit down in a few busy homeopathic clinics and really watch what was occurring, then they'd be very hard pressed to explain everything so simplistically. But this is highly unlikely, as it is much easier to simply assume something you don't understand is false, and then explain it away from an intellectual standpoint.
Of course this is not unique, I do this, we all do this. Where this gets us into trouble, however, is when we close our minds about something as important as healing, then there can be unfortunate consequences.
Unfortunately, the author cloakes his close-mindedness under the guise of "science." He presents his work as a scientific analysis, but in fact, it is merely assumptions and guesswork. I expect that many readers will be influenced by this and assume there is something solid in his approach - that is ashame. It is when we abdicate thinking for ourselves and ingest pseudo-science that humanity pays.
To recap, if this author had taken the time to sit in on several homeopaths sessions and see for himself what REALLY happens in a homeopathic practice, he would have come to very different conclusions. Unfortunately, the author decided that homeopathy can't possibly work, then he devised theories to justify his belief. That is essentially what this book offers.