"Is that pronounced 'home-e-OP-a-thee' or 'HOME-e-o-PATH-e?"
"Gee, I wish I knew...."

     Jester is back home today, doing as good a Morris impersonation as a gray cat can, subsisting on yogurt and sympathy.  Turns out that our poor refugee from the streets does indeed have a bad case of diabetes (blood glucose count over 400) and perhaps multiple heartworms as well. 
     We're planning on making his last days with us as comfortable as possible....

     Those days probably will not include homeopathy. 
     Homeopathy (that's ho-me-OP-a-thee, according to my dictionary) is the pseudo-medical science invented by Samuel Christian Hahnemann in the late 1700s.  It holds that the way to cure a disease is to administer substances which create or mimic symptoms of that disease.  Thus, if you have chronic diarrhea, you might be given, say, arsenic. 
     That's just half the story, however.  The other half is that you administer these substances in doses so low that no lab in the world can detect them.  For example, a drop of arsenic given to treat chronic diarrhea would be diluted with 100 drops of water, then one drop from the resulting solution would be diluted with 100 more drops of water, and so on perhaps 30 times.  You end up with a solution that appears utterly free of arsenic but that allegedly "remembers" the medicinal powers of the arsenic and heals. 
     Right.
     My vet has repeatedly offered this treatment to us as an option for Jess (along with more conventional ones) but no matter how I look at it, I keep feeling as if I've stumbled back into the Middle Ages.  Last night he offered to make us a one-dose chemical concoction the size of a sesame seed for $40 ("I'll charge more once I know what I'm doing") but we demurred. 
     Seems nothing's changed since Mexican doctors plied a dying Steve McQueen with apricot-seed extract almost 20 years ago....

     The Chair recognizes the First Objection:
     "But lots of people believe in homeopathy!"
     Well, lots of people believe in a lot of things that defy logic.  Whether a foolish thing is believed by one person or a billion, it remains foolish.  The only thing that changes is whether others view that foolish thing as the psychotic delusion of a single person or the dogma of a church, the creed of a political party, the hallmark of an era, or the underpinnings of an entire civilization.

     The Chair recognizes the Second Objection:
     "But it just might work!"
     Yes, well...  Leeches, bleedings, the laying on of hands, voodoo, and lots of other things "just might work" too.  Independent studies seem to provide little reason to believe in any of these things, however. 
     Why do some if not quite all of these practices endure?  I suspect it's because we humans have a tendency to make a simple mistake.  We think that if B follows A, B must have been caused by A.  That is to say, if someone gets better after taking a homeopathic medicine, they believe they got better because they took that medicine.  But maybe they would have gotten better anyway.  Maybe it was something else they did but didn't note, so homeopathy gets the credit. 
     If you sell, believe in, or want to believe in homeopathy (or anything else, for that matter), it becomes that much harder to see clear to the objective truth.  It becomes easy to seize upon every positive outcome as indubitable proof while dismissing every negative outcome as an unfair test.  Our vet exhibited precisely this behavior and attitude last night.  "If we try this and it doesn't work, it'll be because I didn't use the right concoction or don't know what I'm doing yet."  That reminded me of an old joke: "I finally taught my horse how to get by without eating.  It was just my luck that it died shortly afterwards."  Psychics are especially notorious for this sort of thing.  Every correct prediction gets trumpeted forever while the many more numerous incorrect predictions get ignored, explained away, forgotten. 
     Maybe what I really ought to do is shuffle a deck of cards and place one card, face down, under Jester's bed every night.  If his next day is a good one, I'll know that I put the right card under his bed.  If his next day is bad, I'll pull that card from the deck.  In just a few weeks, I should have a deck of just good cards and he'll be home free.  Maybe I'll market this technique and make millions.... 

     The Chair recognizes the Third Objection:
     "What have you got to lose?"
     Other than time and money?  My self-respect.  Dire circumstances are never an appropriate reason for acting counter to what you believe.  Hope serves us poorly when it requires the sacrifice of the better part of our minds. 
     If all the money and energy spent on homeopathy, laetrile, magnets, crystals, and similarly silly things went into basic scientific research, we'd be that much closer to the day when we have something that actually does work. 
     If we taught ourselves how to accept the inevitable instead of pouring 90% of our medical resources into the last 10% of life, we'd all be better off as well - and hucksters would be a great deal poorer.

     The Chair recognizes the Fourth Objection:
     "Sounds like you're just imposing your values on your cat!  How good of you to save your time, money, and self-respect at the expense of another creature's life!"
     I think we humans imposed our values on cats the minute we started making pets of them.  I think that cats have generally done pretty well under that imposition.  And I have yet to hear of a cat demanding medical intervention of any sort.  From the way they react to simple pills and blood tests, I'd have to guess that their preference is to be left the hell alone.  
     Well, tough.  Whether Jess likes it or not, I plan on making his last days as unnaturally comfortable for him as I can.

     But enough of such gloomy philosophizing.  Jess prefers that I spend my time scratching him behind the ears, and so I shall....