Shashi is very entitled to seek a treatment that you might consider is 'occultism'!
No, personally I don't consider occultism. It is certainly true that most doctors believe that it has no scientific basis, but then again many extremely good and totally rational doctors have become homeopaths.
One should not make the mistake that absence of evidence (by the rather narrow definition of RCTs) equals evidence of absence. As useful as RCTs are, there is also increasing critics of them being the only valid evidence.
Bias and prejudice are inevitably present in all parts of society, including medicine. The reality is that clinical medicine uses pattern-based observational empiricism to weigh up the optimal diagnosis and treatment route for a particular patient. Deductive, step based logic such as in RCTs certainly has its place in scientific research, there are many very poor RCT based research articles that add absolutely nothing to the real world medicine. Somehow the tail ends up by wagging the dog!
Read Hahnemanns biography. He was an occultist. Of course Homeopathy work. Just as Tarot cards and Ouija boards work. They all deal with "energy", "spirits", "miasms" etc. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21998970/
I am not going to get involved in Hahnemann's peronal philosophy. Many doctors are atheists and many are religious, but most manage to separate their personal philosophies from their abilities to apply observational pattern-based empiricism to do a damn good job
I can understand that a treatment which has none of the original chemical present can seem nonsensical to you and many others. Maybe homeopathy will be truly shown to be all woo-hoo with no empirical base, but RCTs look through the prism of singular and equal patients so that a valid comparison can be made between the groups. Statistics is a series of convention that attempts to show a binary true/untrue statemens. This is difficult to do in a world where patients are a heterogeneous group with many subgroups
Read homeopathic and medicine in the same sentence makes me cringe!
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