Challenges to Homeopathy in View of the Framing of Modern Medicine: Towards a Proper Understanding of ‘Homeo-patho-logy’

 SFX Search Permissions and Reprints(opens in new window) Article preview thumbnailAbstract

The scientific and public discourse on medicine has in the last century been framed in a way that the progress of high-tech medicine, with its methodological restriction on materialistic aspects of the physical body, may appear as a plain success story, from ancient ignorance to modern science—leaving no constructive idea or reason for being of homeopathy. On the other hand, there has always been a tradition of scholarly criticism of medicine, be it historiographic, natural scientific, social or economical. The shortcomings of most conventional forms of critique, however, rest on their embeddedness in the usual one-dimensional thinking: i.e. their unintentional complying with, rather than questioning, the frame of predominant narratives.

A categorial reframing of medicine may be possible on the basis of three recently rediscovered traditions of thinking, termed lógos-, hómoion- and iásthai-thinking. Within such an enlarged reframing of the scientific and public discourse, not only medical, social, economic, political and cultural problems could be handled and possibly solved on a higher level of consciousness, but also homeopathy, properly understood as ‘homeo-patho-logy’, would benefit and attain a better, much more reasonable standing.

Keywords framing - medicine - homeopathy - critical theory - philosophy Note

This article is based on a presentation at the 77th LMHI World Homeopathic Congress (Liga Medicorum Homoeopathica Internationalis) ‘Homeopathy in need of a philosophical and political reframing’ in Sevilla, Spain, on September 3, 2024.

Publication History

Received: 12 October 2025

Accepted: 02 December 2025

Article published online:
25 February 2026

© 2026. The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, permitting unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction so long as the original work is properly cited. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Georg Thieme Verlag KG
Oswald-Hesse-Straße 50, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany

Comments (0)

No login
gif