Visuals of Homeopathy

Vivian Nigri, Student of MA Integrated Design, Holon Institute of Technology, Holon, Israel Homeopathy is an alternative natural medicine exercised for over 200 years that besides its certification and recommendation from the WHO (World Health Organization), it still suffers from a bad reputation and acceptance from the huge part of the population that compares its doctors with healers and its remedies with placebos. For its scientific community, the diagnosis of this prejudice is the heavy influence of the big pharmaceutical laboratories, that in order to keep their hegemony in the market, they try to bring down all their competitors. This work raises the hypothesis that maybe a factor that is denigrating its public acceptation is its own marketing approach, that the visuals are being used for its repercussion may be meaningless for the concept of health of the modern urban man. In order to check the veracity of this hypothesis, a survey was carried among over 140 people, researching which kind of images have more impact in their concepts of health, those with natural elements applied by the homeopathy or those with science and human elements applied by the conventional allopathic medicine. The results conclude that people do believe that natural medication is much healthier than the chemical ones, but they were almost not persuaded at all by the nature's images, they showed a preference for those that exhibited human's figures in their limits. Keywords: Homeopathy, Health, Graphic Design, Marketing, Brain Control

Abstract:

1. Introduction:

The brain controls the organ systems of the body, either by activating muscles or by causing secretion of chemicals such as hormones and neurotransmitters that are powerful chemicals that help keep our bodies working normally by stimulating, regulating, and controlling the function of various tissues and organs, being involved in almost every biological process including sexual reproduction, growth, metabolism, and immune function. This control is regulated according to our body needs, circadian rhythm or by the extraction of biologically relevant information from sensory inputs that allows a rapid and coordinated response to the changes in the environment. Of all our senses, sight is the one we use the most. Ninety percent of what absorb from the world is through our vision. All our visual signals spread out to different parts of the brain to activate some processes like: production of saliva in response to food seeing, the production of adrenaline and contraction of the muscles in response to the sighting of fearful situations or a increase in the heart beat and in the body temperature when we see exciting images. This mechanism also has the capacity to control our immune system, and is the basis of different kind of therapies such as: the chromo-therapy and the imagetherapy, but it should be a complement to all medicines, since all we see affect in our physiological system, even the color and size of the pill we take.

2. Background:

This process can only exist because of another capacity of our brain: the information storage. All the data we assimilate in our lives is kept as a reference for future events. Our experiences build the foundation of our concepts of what is good, bad, right, wrong, beautiful, ugly, scary, relaxing, and so on. And we only need an image to activate all the chemical physiological responses that we have before those concepts, such as pleasure, stress, calm or fear. The marketing acts exactly with this process. It manages to incite our most positive concepts in response to its publicities. In the cigarette's field our concept of liberty is activated, in the alcohol's field is the happiness and in the remedy's field is the healthy. All the pharmaceutical laboratories invest a lot in their marketing by promoting themselves through images that resemble the 1946's definition of the World Health Organization to health as: "a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.", exhibiting in their visuals a good a quality of life, people practicing sports, enjoying their lives and old happy couples. On the other hand, the homeopathy does not invest in its marketing. Their visuals only show plants and flowers (even if their remedies are also made from minerals and animals), or a pestle (even if they also have modern laboratories). This way it omits all its human and scientific side: the homeopathy treats the patient and not the disease, and it is a live science that still develops even after 200 years of practice. The bad marketing can be one of the big reasons why people are so distrustful about homeopathy. The fact that maybe its visuals are not activating people's concept of health, may denigrate its public image and also disturb its patient treatment since homeopathy is a holistic medicine, that preaches that the patient has to believe in his own healing in order to be able to receive it through the activation of the vital energy with the use of highly diluted substances in its remedies.

3. Materials and methods:

In order to check if the visuals of homeopathy are really not corresponding to the concept of health of the modern urban man a research was applied following three principles: 1) it must be visual 2) the profile of the respondents must be heterogenic in terms of age and 3) it must omit in the beginning that it is a research about homeopathy because people's impressions about it may influence in their response. The first question confronted the respondents with 10 different images, 5 corresponding to visuals of allopathy and 5 to visuals of homeopathy (Figure1), and asked them signalize the one they felt was more close to their concept of health. The second question also asked the respondents which image was more close to their concept of health, but this time one image was of a pestle symbolizing the nature treatment and the other one was of a laboratory, symbolizing the modern science of the pharmaceutical laboratories (Figure2).

Figure1: Images 1,3,6,7 and 8 corresponding to the visuals of homeopathy, and images 2,4,5,8 and 9 corresponding to the visuals of allopathy.

Figure2: Image 1 representing the nature treatment and image 2 representing the modern science of the pharmaceutical laboratories. The third question was about respondent's opinion of the homeopathy to check if this influences in their opinion about the connection between health and nature. They were asked to signalize 1 if they didn't believe in it, 2 if they did believe and 3 if they didn't have any opinion about it. The fourth and fifth questions were about people's gender and age, to check if those data were important parameters in their impressions of the nature.

4. Results and Discussion:

The research at the beginning was applied on random people in the streets, but in order to obtain a more concise result through a greatest number of responses it was published in one form builder web site (JotForm) and its link spread through email. The total number of responses received was 146. Chart1 shows the number of times each image in the first question (Figure1) was chosen by the respondents. In Chart2 we can see the difference between the percent of people that voted for image1 and image2 (Figure2) in the second question, and in Chart3 we can see the percent of people that in question three said they don't believe in homeopathy, believe or have no opinion about it.

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Chart1: Number of votes for each picture of the question 1.

2 53%

1 47%

Chart2: 1 is the percent of people that voted for the picture with the pestle and 2 the percent of those who chosen the picture of the laboratory.

2 12%

3 17%

1 71%

Chart3: 1 for people who said they believe in the homeopathy, 2 for those who said that they don't believe and 3 for those who said they have no opinion about it.

We can see the comparison of those results in the charts below that also include some data about people's gender and age.

2 28%

1 72%

Chart4: 1) Shows the percent of people that voted for the visuals of homeopathy in question 1 and question 2.

2 28%

1 72%

Chart5: 1) Shows the percent of people that voted for the one of the visuals of homeopathy in question 1 and that said that they believe in it.

2 52%

1 48%

Chart6: 1) Shows the percent of people that voted in the visual of homeopathy in question 2 and that said that they believe in it.

2 53%

1 47%

Chart7: 1) Shows the percent of people that voted for the visual of allopathy in question 2 and that said that they don't believe in homeopathy.

1 40% 2 60%

Chart8: 1) Shows the percent of people that voted for the visual of allopathy in question 2 and that said that they have no opinion about homeopathy.

0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 5 60-70 4 50-60 3 40-50 2 30-40 1 20-30

Chart9: Shows the percent of people of each age that voted for the visual of homeopathy in the question2.

2 50%

1 50%

Chart10:1) Shows the percent of women that voted for the visual of homeopathy in the question2.

1 38% 2 62%

Chart 11: 1) Shows the percent of men that voted for the visual of homeopathy in the question2.

Analyzing chart4 and chart5, we may say that people who voted for one of the visuals of homeopathy in the first question, that were just 12% of the total of respondents, also preferred the natural kind of remedies (72%) and said that they do believe in homeopathy. According to charts 6, 7 and 8, we notice that almost makes no difference people's opinion about homeopathy to the fact if they are open minded or no to natural remedies. This proves that those who believe in the homeopathy are opened to the science, and those who said that don't believe in it or have no opinion about it believe in the nature as a source of health. Chart 9 shows that the connection of the nature/homeopathy with health is something that do not increase or decrease over the years. In Charts 10 and 11 we see that women are equally opened to nature and science (50%), but men are more opened to science (62%).

5. Study Limitations:

One thing that was observed in the research is that was very hard for people to answer question 3 that asked about their opinion about homeopathy. They said it is something that is hard to define because they have a bit of conflict about what they think and about what they hear from others. Many people said that they are pro homeopathy but many of their friends make jokes about it so he starts so question about it, or sometimes the opposite that they said they were always against it but they heard many cases about people who were healed with their medication. In most of those cases people opted to say that they believe in homeopathy, even if it was only partially, so maybe this number is not so consistent with reality, but this doesn't affect the result of the research.

6. Conclusions:

The conclusion of the research is that what is denigrating the image of homeopathy is not its natural approach. People showed to believe that nature remedies are healthy even when they claim to not believe in homeopathy, but only a small part of people felt a connection between plants and health. When people think about health they have the tendency to straightly think about a happy and long life. The image with the old happy couple was the one that received the highest number of votes (37% of the total), and people are aware that one of the things they have to do to have a long life is to practice sports. This is something we learnt in our childhood and the body culture added to the increase of the number of gyms all over the world only reinforces this concept, giving strength to the look well to feel well theory.

7. Recommendations:

A change should be done in the visuals of homeopathy in order to change for positive its image before people and to possibly increase the quality of its treatment. People don't realize anymore the direct connection of nature and health and they miss the human side of the history. In order to verify more precisely this fact, a research should be applied in patients instead of health people to verify if people exposed to those images, that received more votes, during their homeopathic treatment had a better result.

8. References:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Wikipedia, Homeopathy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy Wikipedia, Homeopatia, http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopatia Wikipedia, Allopathy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopathy Wikipedia, Brain, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain Wikipedia, Placebo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo Wikipedia, Hormones, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormones Wikipedia, Health, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health Wikipedia, Senses, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senses Integrated Psychiatry, The effects hormones have on your mood, http://integratedpsychiatry.net 10. Channa Leichtling, How colors affects marketing