Homeopathy is radical medicine, medicine for anarchists. Historically homeopaths tended to have radical politics, this was reflected in the revolutionary politics of the homeopath in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera‘.

Unfortunately many of today’s homeopaths don’t seem to be cut from the same revolutionary cloth as their brothers from the 19th century. They have retreated into comfortable middle-class hippy-dom – crystal healing, astrology, yoga, vegetarianism… all the stereotypes. While I like these gentle types of people, they seem to have retreated from the world, and from practising effective medicine.

MY homeopathic heros tend to be 19th century homeopathic doctors that fought against the barbaric conventional medicine of the time. These guys had fire-in-their bellies. Many became famous for their successes in treating the epidemic diseases that regularly ravaged large numbers of people throughout that century – the records speak for themselves, over & over the mortality rate of those treated by homeopathic doctors was a fraction of their allopathic competition (in fact the allopathy was so bad, even people who were untreated often faired better!)

I’m on a crusade to bring this type of robust, effective medicine back (in the face of great opposition from within homeopathy!).

So why do I call homeopathy ‘Open-Source medicine’, and why do I think it’s aligned with the values of Open-Source software, Bitcoin, Steemit, cryptocurrencies, decentralisation etc. ?

James Compton Burnett, one of the brilliant 19th Century Homeopaths.

Why is homeopathy ‘Open-Source’? Simply because you can’t patent a homeopathic remedy. Anyone can purchase any remedy at any strength with no restriction (in the UK at least). Anyone can use the books I use and figure out which remedy may help a particular condition – There are two main books used by homeopaths, a Materia Medica which contains descriptions of what each remedy is used for, and a Repertory which is an index of symptoms alongside the remedies associated with each symptom. To find the right remedy, you simply use the repertory to cross-reference the main symptoms someone has – For example:

• Chronic migraine, comes on every 20 days or so,
• Worse in bright sunlight,
• Person loves salt on their food,
• Chronic constipation,
• migraines started 10 years ago after a sudden grief.

Cross reference all those (seemingly unconnected) symptoms & you’ll come up with a remedy called Natrum Muriaticum. Give a few doses of this & the migraine will very likely subside & then disappear (the remedy will cost around $5!). If you had given a homeopath from 1850 the same symptom picture, they’d have also given Nat. Mur! Homeopathy is based on natural laws, it doesn’t change from one decade to the next like chemical medicine.

This is open to anyone & it’s very suited to our wired-world. There are online repertories that can do the work for you in seconds & we now have the ability to compare results across hundreds of thousands of cases, the repertory can become ‘smart’, it can ‘learn’ & improve.

Medicine no longer needs to be a guarded ‘secret’, where very clever people who have studied a lot use lots of long words to baffle & confuse – like the case I talked about in another post of ‘idiopathic hypertension’ which simply means ‘unexplained high blood pressure’, and prescribe patented drugs that can cost $1000s and frequently have dangerous side-effects (like the case of my uncle who’s currently on the waiting list for a new kidney as a result of long-term steroid use).

The artifice of ‘scientific medicine’ is a sham, it’s often simply a front for amoral rapacious multinational corporations to make more money. In fact 83% of the most commonly prescribed medicines in the UK have ‘weak or no’ evidence of efficacy, and they criticise homeopaths! It has almost become a sick joke the number of times a pharma company has been caught falsifying studies of safety or efficacy, or defrauding health services & insurance companies. They own the process of peer-reviewed research: from owning the journals, to being the major advertisers in the journals, endowing grants to universities, to sponsoring individual scientists or lecturers to influence their behaviour, to suppressing research that isn’t favourable to their latest ‘wonder drug’, to ‘agency capture’ – the well-known technique of staffing the senior levels of the agencies supposed to be regulating them with their own people. Deaths from adverse effects of chemical medicine is the 3rd most common cause of death in the US, what an outrageous statistic!

Medicine no longer needs to be dangerous, if you give the wrong homeopathic remedy…..nothing happens, that’s all. That’s why it’s safe for anyone to take without an ‘expert’ guarding the gate. Welcome to Open-Source Medicine.

Note: I’m not disparaging ALL chemical medicine, Accident & Emergency medicine is amazing & life-saving, and surgery can be incredible (although many cases wouldn’t have been required if it had been treated earlier by Open-Source Medicine).