By: Wellcome Collection - The Best of Medicine
Interview with Sara Eames, GP and President of the Faculty of Homeopathy
"I?m Dr. Sara Eames and I?m the President of the Faculty of Homeopathy and I?m also a fully trained GP and I?ve worked in psychiatry as well. And I?m here this evening to tell you why I use homeopathy in my work and I think that it?s the best idea ever in medicine. I?m going to divide my argument into three cases really. First of all that it?s the best idea in the past, when Dr Samuel Hahnemann first developed the idea of homeopathy, then I?m going to say why it?s the best idea in present-day medicine and also looking into the future, why it?s such a brilliant idea for the future of medicine as well.Well I think when Samuel Hahnemann first developed homeopathy, there wasn?t really much competition about was the best idea in medicine. Conventional doctors at the time were doing things like bloodletting, leeching and treating people with mercury and other poisonous substances. So I think any medicine that used other less injurious things was going to win the day. But in fact he developed a lot of very modern standing concepts way back at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, things like ideas of public health and epidemics and infectious agents and the idea of genetics and inherited predispositions to diseases. All sorts of really interesting things that we think are much more modern.In the present day I like to use homeopathy because it really helps my patients in some ways that conventional medicine doesn?t. I don?t use it exclusively, but I do use it in a large percentage of patients and it certainly works in ways that I haven?t found anything else to be nearly assuccessful for. Some of the things are that it can actually cure more than one problem at the same time, it can deal with physical and emotional problems at the same time and it helps people, not only make sense of their illness, but also take responsibility for their own health and cure.
In the future I think it?s just great because actually we?re developing a healthcare service that no one can afford, we can?t even afford it in the Western world, let alone thinking about what?s happening in Africa and Asia and other countries. So I think you have to incorporate something like homeopathy, which is cost-effective and safe and people can often use quite a lot on their own, that has really to be incorporated into a healthcare system if there?s every going to be any sort of social equity and an affordable healthcare service for the whole world in the future. And homeopathy?s also very well primed to be ready to treat any epidemics in the future, it?s got a very strong record of evidence for having been quite successful in the treatment of epidemics such as cholera, epidemics in the past."
