On Saturday 2nd February, at Neal’s Yard Remedies in Covent Garden, I dropped a whole tray of homoeopathic remedies in their vials on the floor, two of which smashed leaving small round balls rolling around on the floor. It was 1 vial of Arnica 30c and 1 vial of Arsenicum 6c that has smashed and I was asked if I’d be able to salvage them. Ethically, they couldn’t be sold but they couldn’t be put into the staff box either because, as was pointed out to me, the tablets look the same and some would argue, are the same! I disputed this, but was asked a challenging question - "Well, how would you find out which ones which then?" I replied - "Unfortunately, we’d have to take the tablets and see what happens to find out which one’s which."
I was told that was cheating. Later that day, in a twist of karmic fate, my challenger dropped a shoe box full of CDs, most of which are unlabelled duplicates of our originals (as they get scratched quite quickly and we can return to the original for new copies!) So, I wryly asked, "How are you gonna tell which CD’s which? If you gave them to a chemist to analyse they’d say they were all the same - Same amount of acrylic, same amount of silver, same mass. How you gonna find out which one’s which?" She replied "I’ll just put them in the CD player, der!"
"But that’s cheating!" I grinned. To a chemist, one CD is the same as the next. We need to hear a CD to unleash its music and evoke a response. The digital information as 1s and 0s burnt onto the silver through the acrylic are read and processed into movement of airwaves that replicate the original sounds. It vibrates the air that then vibrates our eardrum. We then convert that vibration, once again, into an electrical signal for our brain to interpret. How you interpret that CD may be wildly different to me. You may enjoy ABBA, I may not. But remember, to the chemist, all CDs are the same. When I prescribe a homoeopathic medicine, I’m interested in how you interpret it. I know that you’ll be susceptible to responding to the medicine as you’ve produced symptoms that mimic what the remedy does to a healthy person. Yet, to a chemist all homoeopathic medicines are the same.
I was told that was cheating. Later that day, in a twist of karmic fate, my challenger dropped a shoe box full of CDs, most of which are unlabelled duplicates of our originals (as they get scratched quite quickly and we can return to the original for new copies!) So, I wryly asked, "How are you gonna tell which CD’s which? If you gave them to a chemist to analyse they’d say they were all the same - Same amount of acrylic, same amount of silver, same mass. How you gonna find out which one’s which?" She replied "I’ll just put them in the CD player, der!"
"But that’s cheating!" I grinned. To a chemist, one CD is the same as the next. We need to hear a CD to unleash its music and evoke a response. The digital information as 1s and 0s burnt onto the silver through the acrylic are read and processed into movement of airwaves that replicate the original sounds. It vibrates the air that then vibrates our eardrum. We then convert that vibration, once again, into an electrical signal for our brain to interpret. How you interpret that CD may be wildly different to me. You may enjoy ABBA, I may not. But remember, to the chemist, all CDs are the same. When I prescribe a homoeopathic medicine, I’m interested in how you interpret it. I know that you’ll be susceptible to responding to the medicine as you’ve produced symptoms that mimic what the remedy does to a healthy person. Yet, to a chemist all homoeopathic medicines are the same.
- So, if you can’t see something, does that mean it’s not there?
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