Suicidality and Homeopathy
During the discussions and debates on Ireland’s Heads of Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, 2013, campaigners wished to introduce abortion to treat a woman suffering from “suicidality”. This would be a vicarious treatment, far removed from Dr Hahnemann’s ideal of cure; quick, gentle and permanent. Hahnemann should be regarded as a valid voice in the treatment of suicidal dispositions, having found a wonderful substance for suicidality in Aurum met, and being the first in the history of medicine to treat humanely the mentally ill. Just imagine a homeopath recommending such a destructive course of “treatment”, unproven, to a patient. They’d be vilified.
Paediatric Psychiatrist Promotes Abortion
Sweeney Todd, the musical
But amid all the illogic, caricatures, posturing of journalists and the ideology of their allies, Labour, in the discussions and debates on the matter, there is nothing to match the pathological irony of one paediatric psychiatrist campaigning for abortion on the casual grounds of choice. One has to ask: at what point on the path from conception to, say, age 18 or 20, when a child becomes an adult, does the doctor stop seeing the unborn human being as a problem to annihilate, to being a patient worth treating..? All of which brings to mind Sweeney Todd, the fictional barber of Fleet Street, who killed his own clients.
Imagine a lady in distress with a child attending a paediatric psychiatrist. She’s pregnant. The doctor offers to refer her for an abortion. Years later the woman is back with her child looking for advice. The child says to the doctor, “Oh, you’re the doctor who was willing to put an end to me…”
The allopathic paediatrician is not the only one with incongruent thinking. The homeopath Jeremy Sherr, when teaching the remedy Thuja occidentalis, extrapolated from a mix of symptoms from the proving of Thuja along with a collection of eclectic ideas to suggest the soul doesn’t enter the body until the end of the first trimester therefore, he concluded, abortion is allowed until three months.
Aside from the speculative nature of his argument, there are a number of problems with this argument. First, since it would be the soul that gives a human identity, ensoulment at three months means the soul would be entering a non-human body, which is incoherent.
Second, Jeremy is extrapolating from symptoms. Symptoms are pathological, so he is conf-using pathology (of a tree) to explain a healthy human state.
Third, Jeremy commits the fallacy of induction whereby he generalises from a particular to a general. Despite the nature of Jeremy’s claim there was not an ethics module on the Dynamis course.
Further reading
On Hahnemann and suicidality: Caring not killing – homeopathic euthanasia
On Hahnemann the first to treat mentally ill humanely: Revising the Revisionist Histories of Medicine
Psychiatry and Homeopathy
Read my letter in the Irish Times
Unborn more than a “mass of cells”
Hahnemann’s article of 1819 shows his charitableness to suicides: http://wp.me/p4mh1I-ed
Picture credit: Wikipedia