This book review is reprinted from Volume 10, 2004 Edition of The American Homeopath with permission from The American Homeopath.
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Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy
By Amy Lansky, Ph.D.

Portola Valley, CA: RL. Ranch Press, 2003

Reviewed by Begabati Lennihan, RN, CCH

What book do you recommend when a patient or friend asks for the best introductory book on homeopathy? For years I have had a stable of favorites, topped by the practical "how-to" books authored or co-authored by Dana Ullman. For those who first want to know "what" and "why," I have suggested Timothy Dooley's Beyond Flat Earth Medicine, a brief and friendly welcome to homeopathic principles and the experience of being a patient. For those wanting to convince a skeptical scientist partner, Bill Gray's Homeopathy: Science or Myth? clearly and convincingly summarizes the research. And for the psychologically inclined, apt to be fascinated by the concept of remedies as personality types, Catherine Coulter's Nature and Human Personality (excerpted from her Portraits of Homeopathic Medicines) provides the perfect enticement.

Not feeling the need for yet another introductory book on homeopathy, I ignored Impossible Cure when Dana Ullman first showed it to me "hot off the presses" a year ago. But when I finally cracked the elegantly designed cover, I realized I had found a new favorite. Amy Lansky's book quickly became the one book I want all my patients to read. (Roger Morrison said the same about Richard Moskowitz' Resonance in his Homeopathy Today review. I find Resonance incomparably eloquent yet much of the material more suited to first or even second year students.)

Lansky, a Stanford Ph.D. and former NASA computer scientist, became a devotee of homeopathy when her son Max was "miraculously" cured of autism. She left the world of conventional science to study, then practice and write about homeopathy. The book carries the weight of authority - with its 300-page heft, its crisp typography, Lansky's highly readable style, and her obvious familiarity with conventional science. Lansky manages to be clear and convincing without ever sinking to polemic. She addresses the most potentially contentious subjects - the dangers of vaccinations and allopathic suppression, the high death rate from allopathic treatment, plus nosodes and miasms - in a matter-of-fact style that is always eloquent, never strident.

Lansky's clarity of style enables her to cover a tremendous range of subjects, giving each only a few sentences or a few pages, yet leaving the reader feeling satisfied with her explanation. It ranges from Hahnemann's life and the development of homeopathic principles, through the popularity of homeopathy in the US and multiple reasons for its subsequent eclipse, through the current situation, even including information on the health freedom laws. While primarily propounding classical homeopathy, including the LM potencies that cured her son, it also covers the Doctrine of Signatures (balanced with a note on the importance of provings), compound remedies, Bach flower remedies, and the use of pendulums and diagnostic machines. One chapter reviews the research on homeopathy and different possible mechanisms of action. The next covers everything a professional homeopath might want a prospective patient to know about how the process works, including an injunction to stay with the process and be willing to be deeply self-revealing. A final chapter covers the current legal and licensure situation for homeopathy, including an argument in favor of health freedom acts; Lansky was part of the successful drive to pass such an act in California.

She weaves the personal with the scientific and historical, providing a balance of information and interest. Just when my eyes began to glaze over, in the chapter on research, she roused my flagging interest with a chapter of "miracle cure" stories, with a scientist's explanation of how the cures could not be attributed to the placebo effect. And she has made her information highly accessible: not only is the book well-indexed, its table of contents includes a string of subheads to each chapter heading, making it easy to find discussions of a particular theme.

The only element that left me cringing was her mention of her son Max's curative remedy, Carcinosin. Mentioning any remedy name in this situation could tempt other readers to dose their autistic children with the same remedy. This is especially a concern with a nosode, given how easily consumers can order remedies on the internet. And the one thing the book does not even attempt to cover is "how to."

But there are plenty of good "how-to" books: Dana Ullman's ubiquitous guides, the Reichenberg-Ullman's simple and user-friendly Homeopathic Self-Care, Asa Hershoff's concise and thorough Homeopathic Remedies. I believe that readers of The Impossible Cure would want to immediately pick up one of these books and start experimenting. I imagine that years from now, we will find a generation of homeopathy students and practitioners saying that Amy Lansky's book started them on their path.

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Begabati Lennihan is a classical homeopath practicing in Cambridge, MA and Director of Teleosis School of Homeopathy.