Here’s an especially delightful paper on the roots of the British Royal Family’s allegiance to homeopathy, the style of healthcare management that involves ingesting tiny pellets of greatly dilluted medicinal substances. Thanks to CM reader Lisa, who reminded me of this!
I don’t know that I agree with every word here, but it makes for fun reading. Here’s a provocative excerpt:
Royals might be attracted to homeopathy because it is rather nebulous, rather exclusive, rather special, ‘divine’ and private in the way they probably think they are. It is also a rare, elite and minority treatment reserved for the rich and for clerics: traditionally that has been the case. It panders to their arrogance and vanity perhaps, as it stresses the delicate, the subtle, the refined and eternal…I would mark out the exclusivity and the rarefied and vitalistic or divine nature of homeopathy as being especially important reasons in this list.
Another theme is that homeopathy is essentially organic and connects with all life, living forms, plants and insects, which to rural-obsessives as Royals often were/are, is another chord of resonance between them.
Homeopathy also very soon became a tradition amongst the aristocrats and Royals and they love nothing more than their traditions. Whatever their father or mother did, they also do. This theme of slavish following of tradition is deeply typical of their approach to life in general. So once something has ‘got into their veins’ as a darned good thing, then they tend to keep it and lavish upon it an amazing amount of devotion and loyalty. I suspect that private schools in UK use Arnica and Calendula in their sick rooms for precisely the same reasons: it is a tradition of the aristocrats.
Homeopathy also pandered to royal and aristocratic squeamishness and horror of leaching and purging, at a time when only they had the money to ‘try something different’. No surprise there really, we would all recoil from that approach I suspect.
Love that British prose style! Read the whole paper here.
posted March 4, 2007 at 1:25 pm
With regard to the Royals using homeopathics, we here in America could take a lesson from them. Our doctors here are much too eager to prescribe a pill for everything…from ED to depression to RLS…homeopathy has been used for thousands of years, and not just by the Royals…….and is gaining popularity here among people who are fed up with traditional medicine. Two years ago I was hospitalized with what I believe was exposure to asbestos. My lung was bleeding profusely after the company I worked for ripped out asbestos from our bldg..to make a long story short, I was left in the emergency room for about 6 hrs before I was admitted, and for 3 days, I received no food, no water, only medication for pain I was NOT having, and a superantibiotic to treat me for who knows what. The antibiotic blew my immune system, and I left the hospital sicker than when I went in. I saw a dr for the first time after I’d been in for 3 days. I complained to him that I’d had no food, no water, no tests, nothing since I was admitted. He told me I must be mistaken! I demanded to be released, upon which time the doctor went over my records, realized they had screwed up royally, and suddenly they weren’t going to let me go home because I was dehydrated and malnourished. Yes I was, because of the lack of care by the hospital. My lung wasn’t even bleeding anymore. At any rate, I still signed myself out of that hospital, and my boyfriend’s (at the time)mother, who left traditional nursing to go into wholistic health, soon had me on the road to recovery with herbal supplements and tinctures. Something the doctors couldn’t do with their meds. By the way, they never were able to diagnose me, by the time they got around to doing any testing, the bleeding had stopped, and they couldn’t find anything wrong. The only thing they said was that it was “environmental”, but they wouldn’t come out and say it was asbestos exposure. Probably didn’t want to get involved in any possible lawsuits. I don’t have a lot of faith in traditional medicine anymore.
posted March 5, 2007 at 7:01 pm
I wonder if it’s somehow possible that the royals are attracted to homeopathy because they find it effective. I know, totally from left field, but hey, it could happen. That’s certainly why I am.