You're on the cusp of adolescence, a time where you start to move away from the comfort and protection of your family and begin to forge your own way in life. Friendships become increasingly important, and you're in a constant process of trying to make new ones, maintaining old ones, and falling out with others. The world seems confusing, terrifying, and wonderful in varying measures, and you spend a lot of your time watching those around you and drinking in how they act, what works and what doesn't, deciding how to act yourself to fit in and be accepted. This is the time when, though the ground is constantly shifting beneath your feet. you start to put down little social foundations and try to make sense of the world.
There is a wealth of evidence that suggests many benefits of connecting with people of your own age during adolescence. At such a crucial, tumultuous time of life, being socially isolated from your peers can have long lasting and harmful effects.
What's this got to do with homeopathy?
I've written before about how poor advice from homeopaths can potentially cause a lot of damage, and through our Homeopathic Harms series of blog posts, Nancy (of the Evidence Based Skepticism blog) and I have hopefully managed to convey to you an idea of how it can sometimes be the seemingly innocuous and difficult to quantify harms that can be most worrying.
I received an e-mail the other day that I have since been thinking a lot about and which I wanted to share with you. Its a real-life example of just how much harm poor advice from a homeopath can cause. The chap who sent me the email has very kindly allowed me to share his story with you, but of course I am going to respect his anonymity and refer to him as C.
C's story
C. had delayed puberty. Now this is something that is fairly common, happening in about 3% of cases, and which can be caused by a number of factors, but the most common type is Constitutional delay in growth and puberty (CDGP). This is basically a technical way of saying 'Just one of those things, which might be caused a whole load of stuff or possibly just chance.'
Conventional medicine would manage CDGP by... well, usually just by waiting, really. Monitoring, and reassurance are often all that is required. Otherwise, short courses of sex hormones should be enough to do the trick. If the delay in puberty is caused by something, then ideally the underlying cause would be appropriately treated. You can see some good, reliable guidance on management here.
Note, by the way, that the definition of delayed puberty according to patient.co.uk specifies '...in boys beyond 14 years old'. Now, I have no way of saying what the definition of delayed puberty was at the time that we join C's story, but his experiences began when he was 12- well below the point where we would diagnose delayed puberty nowadays.
C's mother consulted a homeopath. He was given some homeopathic pills, which on account of just being made out of sugar, had no beneficial effects, but also no harmful effects. However, the homeopath also appears to have given C's mum some advice, the goal of which seems to have been isolating him from his peers between the ages
C was:
- not allowed to stay at school for lunchtime, but instead had to go home.
- not allowed to stay at school after the school day had finished.
- not allowed to cross the local footbridge over the motorway, which cut him off from the majority of his peers.
- not allowed to go down the street of the one classmate who lived on his side of the motorway.
- allowed and encouraged to socialise with one boy who was two years his junior.
C's case would appear to be one of a homeopath acting outside of their competence and providing bizarre and very harmful advice. In C's case, homeopathic treatment was certainly not safe, although this had nothing to do with the sugar pills themselves.
The result of this set of rules on C were, in his own words:
"a boy who was immature, shy and lacking in self-confidence. When it came to puberty I had significant mental health problems (starting with OCD due to high levels of anxiety) which have had an impact throughout my life....I didn't regain a sense of normality (in terms of socialising properly) until the age of 25-26."Limitations
C's story is, of course, merely one anecdote, and as good skeptics we of course have to realise the limitations of it. There's nothing to say that, if C hadn't have followed these rules, he wouldn't have gone on to develop any mental health problems, and indeed delayed puberty itself is not without an increased risk of psychological problems.
Given our very human need to fit in, it may be the case that children with delayed puberty have a preference for younger friends, as they stand out less. This is entirely understandable, but in C's case it is clear that his situation was enforced upon him.
But given the established link between social isolation in adolescence with mental health issues, I think we can pretty safely say that this is a case where at the very least homeopathy worsened his situation. His quality of life was undoubtedly affected when he had to obey the rules.
Thankyou to C
Many, many thanks to C for sharing his story with me. I think its so important to hear these stories, as they might help to raise awareness of the less obvious, nebulous harms that can arise from treatment by unregulated, alternative practitioners. Unfortunately, its really difficult to quantify these sorts of harms into cold hard evidence, and that's why I, and many others like me, keep banging on as loudly as we can about them. If you have any examples of potential harm caused by homeopathy, it goes without saying that I would love to hear from you.
H xxx
