One of the arguments which some homeopaths advance to 'support' their cause is that some famous people use homeopathy. Quite a few famous people are also clearly idiots, so why this line of argument should be treated as persuasive is beyond me. However the argument quite often fails to even get off the ground to start with. Here is a blog post by Sue Young, Homeopath.
Sue Young is one of the homeopaths who likes to try to claim the support of famous people for homeopathy. She's an ally of Dana Ullman in this. This particular post is particularly weak, she points out that P. G. Wodehouse wrote a short story called 'Homeopathic Treatment'. She doesn't appear to have read the story however, which is unfortunate for her post, in which this is the only evidence of any kind she offers to support her seeming conviction that he was a fan of homeopathy.
Here is the story.
As you may notice if you read it, there isn't actually a single mention of homeopathy. It is based on the homeopathic premise that 'like cures like' (just one of the potty ideas behind homeopathy), but otherwise is a fairly simple story about life in a boys boarding school. It's not one of his better stories either.
Sue Young's site is full of spectacularly weak posts like this. I don't think this is a bad thing though, hopefully the more people who go and read her site with their eyes open the more people will start asking themselves if the evidence for homeopathy itself is as weak as the evidence for her blog-posts. I mean, if that's the best she can do...
Edited to add: I should point out here that I commented on her blogpost long before I wrote this. I didn't keep a copy, but my comment was something like: "Have you read the article you refer to by Wodehouse? I can't find it online anywhere, only the title. Given that he was a humourist it might not have been entirely supportive of homeopathy, obviously it might have been but if you can show me the article then we'll know for sure." She deleted my comment and quite obviously didn't do any more research.
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2 comments:
I wish that I could say that this represents a new low but it is par for the course. You really can not hold a rational discussion with people who treat 'evidence' like a lucky-bag or something they can create by deciding that something is so - but then again, that probably has a lot to do with the actual origins of homeopathy.
I find Sue Youngs web site extremely interesting as I do homeopathy. Its a fantastic healing tool. It certainly helped myself and others where allopathic medicine failed. Isn't it great that more and more people are turning to homeopathy, acupuncture, chinese medicine etc as a way to recover their health rather then becoming brain dead and dysfunctional entities that are feeding drug companies.
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