Homeopathy

A. Homeopathy is an alternative system of medicine, founded in the early 19th century by a German physician, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann. Since 1980, homeopathy has experienced a strong resurgence of interest in North and South America as well as in Europe. Surveys indicate that more than a third of French physicians have prescribed homeopathic remedies and almost 50 percent of British physicians have referred patients for homeopathic treatment.

B. Hahnemann's discovery of the principle of homeopathy was accidental. After taking some quinine, he noticed that he developed malaria-like symptoms. Since malaria patients were treated with quinine, he speculated that possibly malaria is cured by quinine because it causes malaria-like symptoms in healthy people. He decided to explore his theory by testing other substances used as medicine at the time, such as arsenic and belladonna. His tests were conducted by either taking the substances internally himself or by administering them to healthy volunteers and then recording all of the symptoms the volunteers experienced. He continued his experiments on a wide range of natural substances, often toxic. These recorded results created 'drug pictures' which formed the basis for the new system of medicine. The next step was to give the tested substances to patients suffering from the same group of symptoms represented by the drug picture recorded. The results were incredible. People were being cured from diseases that had never been cured before. He condensed his theory into a single Latin phrase: similia similibus curentur (let likes be cured by likes). This means that a disease can be cured by a medicine which produces in a healthy person, symptoms similar to those experienced by the patient.

C. The process of making remedies is very precise. A homeopathic remedy is normally a single substance. The substances may be made from plants, minerals and even animals, for example snake venom and cuttlefish ink. To make remedies, the raw material is dissolved in a mixture that contains approximately 90% alcohol and 10% water. The mixture is left to stand for 2 to 4 weeks, shaken occasionally then strained. The resulting liquid or tincture is then diluted according to very specific measures to a factor of 1:100. For example, to produce a remedy called 1c potency or strength, one drop of the tincture is added to 99 drops of alcohol/water mixture. To produce a 2c potency, one drop of the 1c mixture is added to 99 drops of alcohol/water mixture. Between each mixture the remedy is shaken vigorously. Hahnemann believed that through this process, the energy of the substance was released. Once the remedy has been diluted beyond a 12c potency, it is unlikely that even a molecule of the original substance remains. Yet, ironically, the more dilute the remedy, the stronger it is. This makes no sense in light of present-day science but regardless of what science tells us is impossible, in practice, the higher the dilution the stronger and more lasting the effect.

D. It is this use of high dilutions that has given rise to controversy. Many conventional doctors claim that homeopathy functions only as a placebo because the dosage is so small. However, the clinical experience of homeopathy shows that this tiny dose can be effective: it works on unconscious people and infants, and it even works on animals. Controlled clinical studies performed by medical researchers are demonstrating that homeopathy can be an effective method of treatment for many diseases.

E. The most important part of homeopathic treatment lies in the lengthy interview which the homeopath conducts with the patient. The idea behind this one to two hour consultation is to build up a psychological, emotional and physical history of the patient, to discover the underlying patterns of disease. The homeopath then decides which medicine to prescribe based on the closest match between the patient's symptoms and the known symptoms elicited by the medicine in a healthy body. A single dose is given for the shortest period of time necessary to stimulate the body's healing power.

F. How does the concept of homeopathy differ from that of conventional medicine? Very simply, homeopathy attempts to stimulate the body to recover itself. Instead of looking upon the symptoms as something wrong which must be set right, the homeopath sees them as signs of the way the body is attempting to help itself. Another basic difference between conventional medical therapy and homeopathy is in the role of medication. In much of conventional therapy the illness is controlled through regular use of medical substances. If the medication is withdrawn, the person returns to illness. For example, a person who takes a pill for high blood pressure every day is not undergoing a cure but is only controlling the symptoms. Homeopathy's aim is the cure: 'The complete restoration of perfect health,' as Dr. Hahnemann said.

G. Homeopathy has made significant progress in treating diseases which orthodox medicine finds difficult. Best at dealing with inflammatory conditions such as arthritis, skin conditions, migraines and respiratory problems linked to allergies, it has also proved highly successful at treating asthma. But homeopathy is not an appropriate treatment for degenerative diseases such as emphysema. It cannot treat diseases which destroy tissue, although it can still be beneficial if used in combination with other treatments. Two of the main advantages of homeotherapy are the low cost of the medications and the rarity of adverse reactions. The medicines are inexpensive, safe, and easy to use, so people can learn to handle many of the common illnesses for which they currently seek medical help. The resulting savings in costs and the increase in personal independence represent a significant contribution to health care.

Why Don't Babies Talk Like Adults?

A recent e-trade advertisement shows a baby speaking directly to the camera: 'Look at this,' he says, 'I'm a free man. I go anywhere I want now.' He describes his stock-buying activities, and then his phone rings. This advertisement proves what comedians have known for years: few things are as funny as a baby who talks like an adult. But it also raises an important question: Why don't young children express themselves clearly like adults?

Many people assume children learn to talk by copying what they hear. In other words, they listen to the words adults use and the situations in which they use them and imitate accordingly. Behaviourism, the scientific approach that dominated American cognitive science for the first half of the 20th century, made exactly this argument.

However, this 'copycat' theory can't explain why toddlers aren't as conversational as adults. After all, you never hear literate adults express themselves in one-word sentences like 'bottle' or 'doggie'. In fact, it's easy for scientists to show that a copycat theory of language acquisition can't explain children's first words. What is hard for them to do is to explain these first words, and how they fit into the language acquisition pattern.

Over the past half-century, scientists have settled on two reasonable possibilities. The first of these is called the 'mental-developmental hypothesis'. It states that one-year-olds speak in baby talk because their immature brains can't handle adult speech. Children don't learn to walk until their bodies are ready. Likewise, they don't speak multi-word sentences or use word endings and function words ('Mummy opened the boxes') before their brains are ready.

The second is called the 'stages-of-language hypothesis', which states that the stages of progress in child speech are necessary stages in language development. A basketball player can't perfect his or her jump shot before learning to (1) jump and (2) shoot. Similarly, children learn to multiply after they have learned to add. This is the order in which children are taught – not the reverse. There's evidence, for instance, that children don't usually begin speaking in two-word sentences until they've learned a certain number of single words. In other words, until they've crossed that linguistic threshold, the word-combination process doesn't get going.

The difference between these theories is this: under the mental-development hypothesis, language learning should depend on the child's age and level of mental development when he or she starts learning a language. Under the stages-of-language hypothesis, however, it shouldn't depend on such patterns, but only on the completion of previous stages.

In 2007, researchers at Harvard University, who were studying the two theories, found a clever way to test them. More than 20,000 internationally adopted children enter the US each year. Many of them no longer hear their birth language after they arrive, and they must learn English more or less the same way infants do – that is, by listening and by trial and error. International adoptees don't take classes or use a dictionary when they are learning their new tongue and most of them don't have a well-developed first language. All of these factors make them an ideal population in which to test these competing hypotheses about how language is learned.

Neuroscientists Jesse Snedeker, Joy Geren and Carissa Shafto studied the language development of 27 children adopted from China between the ages of two and five years. These children began learning English at an older age than US natives and had more mature brains with which to tackle the task. Even so, just as with American-born infants, their first English sentences consisted of single words and were largely bereft of function words, word endings and verbs. The adoptees then went through the same stages as typical American-born children, albeit at a faster clip. The adoptees and native children started combining words in sentences when their vocabulary reached the same sizes, further suggesting that what matters is not how old you are or how mature your brain is, but the number of words you know.

This finding – that having more mature brains did not help the adoptees avoid the toddler-talk stage – suggests that babies speak in babytalk not because they have baby brains, but because they have only just started learning and need time to gain enough vocabulary to be able to expand their conversations. Before long, the one-word stage will give way to the two-word stage and so on. Learning how to chat like an adult is a gradual process.

But this potential answer also raises an even older and more difficult question. Adult immigrants who learn a second language rarely achieve the same proficiency in a foreign language as the average child raised as a native speaker. Researchers have long suspected there is a "critical period" for language development, after which it cannot proceed with full success to fluency. Yet we still do not understand this critical period or know why it ends.