Challenges to Homeopathy in View of the Framing of Modern Medicine: Towards a Proper Understanding of ‘Homeo-patho-logy’

Abstract The scientific and public discourse on medicine has in the last century been framed in a way that the progress of high-tech medicine, with its methodological restriction on materialistic aspects of the physical body, may appear as a plain success story, from ancient ignorance to modern science—leaving no constructive idea or reason for being of homeopathy. On the other hand, there has always been a tradition of scholarly criticism of medicine, be it historiographic, natural scientific, social or economical. The shortcomings of most conventional forms of critique, however, rest on their embeddedness in the usual one-dimensional thinking: i.e. their unintentional complying with, rather than questioning, the frame of predominant narratives. A categorial reframing of medicine may be possible on the basis of three recently rediscovered traditions of thinking, termed lógos-, hómoion- and iásthai-thinking. Within such an enlarged reframing of the scientific and public discourse, not only medical, social, economic, political and cultural problems could be handled and possibly solved on a higher level of consciousness, but also homeopathy, properly understood as ‘homeo-patho-logy’, would benefit and attain a better, much more reasonable standing.