1) I think that Dr. de Koning is wrong when he says that medical doctors,
properly trained and licenced in Ontario, are forbidden to practice
homeopathy. I think that most physicians, not only in Ontario, but
elsewhere, do not practice homeopathy because it has not stood up to
scientific inquiry, not because they are forbidden to. My parents used
homeopathic medicine for us, but when we were sick, took us to the "real
doctors".
Just because someone survived the influenza pandemic of 1919-1920 who used
homeopathy does not mean that the homeopathic medicines were successful.
I cannot see how the use of less than a microgram of sodium chloride, or
potassium cloride, or iron phosphate, administered every six hours or so,
can combat a virus, or anything else for that matter. Perhaps I'm missing
something though.
2) I have been preparing a response to the original request of Tom Pearson,
but have not completed it yet. For the majority of my 29 years practising
medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, I was involved in the care of
people who were in imminent danger of dying. I was involved often (hundreds
of times) in discussions of whether to "pull the plug". I realized that
although I had no background in ethics, yet I was a practicing ethicist
every day. I felt completely alone there, with no support from the
evangelical or indeed any church. I will write further on this as I
complete my response, but in brief, we cannot isolate our ethics from our
lives. We are all practicing ethicists every day, just as we are all
practicing gravitarians or practicing anything else, whether we think about
it or not.
Eric