Doctors Love Homeopathy in France

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has a long thread on Twitter that starts off with the fact that homeopathy is subsidized by the national health service in France:

This reminds me of a story. About five years ago I developed an unexplained breathing problem, and in addition to a pulmonologist I also saw a GP. My regular GP couldn’t fit me in, so I ended up seeing one randomly selected for me by Kaiser. On my first visit, she gave me a tubelike thing and some instructions about breathing exercises to do with it. On my second visit, when I reported that I had been doing the exercises religiously but they hadn’t helped, she suggested (a) that I might have some kind of lung inflammation at the “submolecular” level that MRIs couldn’t pick up, and (b) that if I was so inclined, I might head over to the health food store and buy a homeopathic remedy. At that point I closed off the conversation as quickly as I could and left.

Later on, when I saw my pulmonologist and told him about the breathing exercises, he told me to stop immediately because they would only make things worse.

There’s no point to this story except to wonder if perhaps my GP had been trained in France. On my charitable days, I assume she didn’t really believe in homeopathy but was only suggesting it as a placebo. That’s a little hard to credit, though, since the medical record of my visits—not to mention five minutes of watching me—pretty clearly suggested a physical problem, not some weird mental reaction.

Anyway, in case you’re curious, my problem was eventually solved by prednisone and time. But it was never cured completely. It’s still a mystery.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate