Recently I sold my business because I saw the writing on the wall and avoided the pain of leaving it too long.

Otherwise it’s just a question of accepting it and taking any sadness in my stride. And yes, what is wrong with feeling sad now and then.

It is a perfectly respectable emotion and experiencing it makes you appreciate the nice times all the more.

I’m glad too that your approach seems to work for you. What you describe as ’see-saw’ felt a bit like the whirlpool to me. You acknowledge the finality of the loss and move towards the edge of the pool, but then emotionally get sucked back in again. That feels real and normal to me. Intellectually we can acknowledge the finality of the loss but emotionally be in a different place.

Thanks for your comments.

For me, in dealing with loss, I tend to have a bit of a see-saw approach which, when I accept it, seems to work pretty well. I alternate spells of feeling sad, letting stuff swamp me out, hiding, analysing with spells of those moving-forward type of thinking, of getting out and doing things to feel better and distract myself. I find that works for me and as time goes by the spells of feeling sad become shorter and more widely dispersed and are replaced by plateaux of feeling mellow.

But I do wish people would allow others to feel sad sometimes without feeling the need to try to fix them or rush them on to feeling better.

I suspect that, had I read this a couple of years ago, it might have helped me no end, just in terms of recognising that the way I felt was not actually a sign of me going crazy!

I understand you regarding government funding. In Ontario it’s not funded in any way. I think in Nova Scotia it is and perhaps another province in Canada as well. Not entirely sure.

I hope that I would be open to new evidence, and am slightly puzzled why the homeopathy camp don’t produce the convincing evidence if they have it, or set up the studies to produce it in order to look for it. The Commons Science and Technology Committee studied the evidence base, and found none. Until the homeopathy camp can produce a scientific explanation for, and evidence of effectiveness that goes beyond the anecdotal, or beyond that which could be explained by chance, or by placebo, I think the government are wrong to fund it. In my view, apart from being an unjustified use of public money, it gives it a badge of credibility that, to date, it doesn’t deserve. If it changes, I hope I will be willing to change my mind, eat my words, and take the arnica

I usually say nothing about this. What can I say? I have used homeopathic remedies for oh I don’t know, about 15 years or so, on and off. I don’t preach it. I don’t teach it. I just use it. Is it placebo? Could be. A lot of conventional meds could be said to be placebo as well. Heck, just having someone listen to you is probably the best medicine and likely the best placebo.

I’m only speaking up because I respect you A Thinking Man and think know less of you for your position. I just know a lot of us out here keep our mouths shut on the issue because we hate being called Quacks. I’m also a Registered Nurse, but that doesn’t account for much I know. The sad thing is, there are many main-stream medical professionals who do use homeopathy and alternative medical options, but as I said, most of us keep our mouths shut.

I’m not saying I can defend my position. Just letting you know I’m a quack.

In your further comments I hear (perhaps incorrectly) two arguments that I still disagree with:
1) If it helps them, let them have it, even if there is no truth in it.
2) The fact that there is a body of people who believe it means that it can’t be wrong.

In reply to the first, fine if they want to pay for it, but I also feel that human beings deserve truth, and I don’t apologise for arguing against something which (until I see evidence to the contrary) seems so patently wrong. I don’t think the end justifies the deception.

In reply to the second, a large body of people believing something to be true and efficacious doesn’t make it so. Millions of people are arguably ‘helped’ and believe that the world is changed by regular chats with invisible friends, but that doesn’t make the process efficacious or true, and any resources spent in doing so could arguably be more productively used elsewhere.

The whole issue of relying wholly on evidence-based control trials is also not as straightforward as it always seems. Did you read the spoof article a few years back in the BMJ - where they tried to prove the effectiveness of parachutes for preventing death using scientific trials? It was very amusing and worth a read. Although you may have to be a subscriber to do so. Let me know if you want to read it as I have a copy somewhere.

My own feelings about homeopathy and other seemingly “quack” remedies are that they should be available to those who wish to use them. Personally I think they lose their efficacy if people do not believe in them. They may well be placebos but there is no way people can get placebo treatment (and often it is enough or helps when nothing else is available) really is there? If people go gung-ho and destroy people’s faith in quack remedies then they are left with nothing in many cases. It would be interesting to know how many people would suffer more for having the placebo taken away as opposed to those who are harmed because they had faith in the placebo and didn’t therefore seek the help of conventional medicine.

It would also interest me to know (and this data must be available) what kind of people mostly turn to homeopathy. I would have thought most of them were educated, middle class people who know full well that the treatment is “alternative”. But perhaps I am wrong?

But on your point about public funding I do, I think, agree.