Sustainability as a challenge to therapeutics - The Hahnemannian and Gandhian approach

Schmidt, Josef M. (Juli 2020): Sustainability as a challenge to therapeutics - The Hahnemannian and Gandhian approach. In: Explore, Bd. 16, Nr. 4: S. 237-241

Abstract

Sustainability, i.e. the goal of maintaining a human-ecosystem equilibrium, is a comprehensive topic and suggestive ideal prompted by many current threats from and to humanity, such as climate change, environmental pollution, fatal drug reactions in modern medicine, and the like. Today, sustainable concepts are desperately needed, also in terms of medical treatment. Homeopathy offers an approach of rational and yet innocuous therapeutics, methodically not being reliant on prior animal testing and mass production of drugs, avoiding contamination of soil, air, or water, and toxic side-effects. It is based on a concept of specifically empowering the life-force of the patient to rid itself from pathogenic influences. Homeopathy, as outlined by its founder Samuel Hahnemann, may indeed be understood in a broader sense than just medicinal, and applied in a pedagogical, psychological, and political context as well. A similar methodically related approach may be found in Mahatma Gandhi's strategy of Satyagraha (holding onto truth) which also aims to specifically prompt and compel people to renounce their vices in a sustainable way. Both ways of healing in a moral sense, however, rest on premises whose plausibility has increasingly been questioned in the recent past. Thus, the waning appreciation of Hahnemann's and Gandhi's mindset is mirroring unsettling changes in the world's socioeconomic constitution rather than indicating its putative ineptitude to achieve sustainability on a global scale.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Keywords: Sustainability; Homeopathy; Satyagraha; History of medicine; Theory of medicine; Ethics
• Fakultät: Medizin > Institut für Ethik, Geschichte und Theorie der Medizin
• Themengebiete: 600 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften > 610 Medizin und Gesundheit
• ISSN: 1550-8307
• Sprache: Englisch