Organon 2010: is a medical textbook after 200 years still up to date?

ABSTRACT

The question, proposed by the German Central Union of homeopathic Doctors, is the pivotal subject addressed in a series of lectures and discussions being held all over Germany in 2010, to celebrate the bicentenary of homeopathy´s first medical textbook. Hahnemann´s Organon of the Healing Art is the basis for classical homeopathy. Reading its 6th and posthumous edition is part of the education of 90% of the homeopaths, as indicated by a survey carried out at the 60th Homeopathic World Medical Congress (Berlin 2005). This might be odd to conventional doctors, used to read the latest editions of textbooks and journals, but Hahnemann´s therapeutics seems to be ahead of his time, in that classical homeopathy can be at least as effective as current standard pharmacotherapy. For instance, classical homeopathy for children suffering from atopic eczema showed comparable results to conventional treatment in usual care. Moreover, randomized controlled double blind trials using the dynamization scale introduced by the 6th edition (fifty-millesimal or Quinquagintamillesimal dynamization and its products, the Q-potencies) showed that homeopathically individualized Q-potencies were superior to placebo for fibromyalgia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, and not inferior to the antidepressant fluoxetine in a sample of patients with moderate to severe depression. More studies using the clinical-pharmaceutical protocol of the Organon are of course needed, but so far its use by trained physicians have yield to challenging results, keeping up with what is recommended in most recent clinical textbooks for the treatment of some chronic diseases.(AU)