Homeopathic Education Post 4
A second trend emerging in the development of homeopathic education is that homeopathy is starting to break out from the private colleges into the university sector. A number of US universities teach a little homeopathy now within their medical schools (see Chronicle of Higher Education 1996). Bastyr University has a strong homeopathic stream within its naturopathy courses. In Australia, several homeopathic subjects have been included within the new Bachelor of Naturopathy at Southern Cross University, a regional university in New South Wales.
The University of Westminster in London is offering a BSc (Hons) in Health Sciences (Homoeopathy), in conjunction with the London College of Classical Homoeopathy. And of course homeopathy is quite well entrenched in the university system in India, as we have already seen.
The emergence of homeopathic education within the mainstream university system will bring to a head the necessity to choose between the medical and “lay” models, or, preferably, to develop our own model. Let us look at the advantages and disadvantages of the two existing models.
To some it is obvious that the medical model is all that is needed. The medical degree contains medical knowledge at its highest level, is built on the findings of leading-edge medical research, and gives the most rigorous clinical training to graduates. Therefore we ought to model homeopathic education on medical education, or teach homeopathy only to medical graduates.
There are problems with these arguments. To begin, they are not really based on first principles. There is no first principle that says the degree of MBBS or MD is the optimal training for a homeopath. Such courses are collations of knowledge that have been put together to serve as appropriate training for the use of allopathic treatments, based on an allopathic understanding of health and disease. The homeopathic understanding of health and disease, and homeopathic therapeutics, are radically different. Therefore, we would expect that the underpinning knowledge required to train someone in homeopathic methodology and therapeutics would be different in nature and in content.
We should aim to design an optimal course in homeopathy, not to take an existing model designed for a different purpose. In order to do this we should ask what skills and knowledge are required to train someone to be a first-class homeopath? To do it justice, the idea of the competency-based standard is precisely that. The way it has been implemented in Australia is often bureaucratic and heavy-handed in many respects, but the underlying concept is not a bad one.
If you take the former path, you are drawn towards a number of conclusions. Good homeopathic practice has many components. What is essential is the ability to apply the principles of homeopathy and the techniques of case-taking and observation in such as way as to match the patient’s overall manifest state and condition with the profiles of indications and characteristics in our materia medica. Essential, too, is the ability to conduct a physical examination of the patient, to investigate the objective symptoms which will be part of his or her profile. Furthermore, one must be able to manage the case: to “read” the way the patient’s condition develops under treatment, to decide when a change of medication is warranted and why, to understand the use of intercurrents, treatment of different layers and so forth. These subjects, and the underpinning knowledge required to master them, should be the core of any course in homeopathy.
Tags: education, homeopathy, pharmacy
