Is homeopathy a healing idea whose time has come-again?

[Guest guest]

Recently there was a great deal of discussion about neutralizing drops and

using homeopathy as a treatment choice. I thought perhaps some of you would

better understand about homeopathy from this article? It is an empowerment

article that can lead you into further understanding and guide you to do

research.

I personally have been using homeopathy since 1977 with a great deal of

success. Since I go to a Homeopathic MD, most of my remedies are prescribed

specifically for my body and not just off the shelf. There are some great

remedies

(off the shelf) that every home medicine cabinet should have. They are very

reasonable. At the moment I am doing specific made homeopathic remedies for

Mycoplasmas (5 strains) and MOLD, as an adjunct. I can also share with those

professionals that sell products the name and contact information for a company

out of Oregon that makes the " best " medicine cabinet remedies around. But,

there are other brands that are also good. NO, I do not sell these

products....lol

*****For those docs and/or professionals on this list, if you write to me

privately I will also give you my Homeopathic MD's name and telephone number if

you would like to speak to him on the telephone?

http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4222

The controversial cure

Kim Ridley

This article appeared in Ode issue: 30

Ohanian was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota in

the late 1970s when severe fatigue descended out of nowhere. Suddenly, she

couldn't stay up for more than 15 minutes at a time without feeling

exhausted. Ohanian consulted several doctors, one of whom suggested she

might just be depressed and referred her to a psychologist. The

psychologist told her she definitely had health problems.

Nothing Ohanian's doctors prescribed alleviated her fatigue and painfully

swollen glands. She suffered through the mysterious illness for two years,

unable to work. " I didn't know if I'd ever get over it, " she says. " I was

really willing to try something different at that point. "

A chiropractor who gave her acupuncture provided some relief, but Ohanian

always relapsed in a few days. " The chiropractor told me, 'I think the only

thing that will help you is homeopathy.' I remembered reading about it and

I contacted the only person in Minnesota at that time who was practising, "

Ohanian says. " After taking mercurius vivus, the remedy this fellow gave

me, I didn't feel anything for a few days. Then one day I realized I had

been up doing things for three hours and I was able to stay up all day.

Within a month, I had my energy back. "

She was so moved by her experience that she became a homeopath herself at a

time when few were practising in the United States. Twenty-five years

later, Ohanian runs a thriving practice in Minneapolis, treating many

people like herself for whom conventional medicine has failed to relieve

chronic illness, as well as those seeking a deeper sense of well-being.

Ohanian's story is set against the backdrop of a renaissance in homeopathy,

a 200-year-old therapeutic system that aims to stimulate the body to heal

itself. Homeopathy is based on the premise of " like cures like " or the law

of similars, which posits that a substance that causes symptoms in large

doses can cure the same symptoms in small doses.

Homeopaths use infinitesimally diluted doses of substances derived from

plants, animals and minerals to trigger the body's natural defense

mechanisms. To treat a cold accompanied by a runny nose and watery eyes,

for example, a homeopath might prescribe a preparation of allium cepa: in

other words, onion.

Advocates emphasize homeopathy's gentleness-side effects are extremely

rare-and holistic methods. Unlike conventional medicine, homeopathy focuses

on treating the individual rather than the disease. A homeopath takes a

meticulous history of each patient's physical symptoms, emotional and

mental states and overall constitution, seeking the unique aspects that

will lead to the precise remedy to promote healing.

This individualized approach is drawing a growing number of people fed up

with an expensive, impersonal health-care system that relies on chemical

drugs which sometimes end up doing more harm than good. While conventional

medicine clearly saves countless lives, particularly in acute illness and

emergencies, homeopathy is increasingly a choice among people with chronic

health problems, the second most common reason for trips to the doctor's

office in the U.S.

Homeopathy is routinely prescribed for everything from asthma, ear

infections and upper respiratory infections, to high blood pressure,

sprains and strains and depression. Today it is the most widely used form

of alternative medicine in the world, according to the World Health

Organization. Approximately 500 million people worldwide receive

homeopathic treatment. Homeopathy is most common in India, where there are

an estimated 300,000 homeopaths and more than 300 homeopathic hospitals. It

also is popular in Europe, South Africa and Brazil. In France,

approximately 40 percent of the public has used homeopathic remedies. In

the Netherlands, almost half of Dutch physicians consider homeopathic

remedies effective, and in Britain, visits to homeopaths are growing by

nearly 40 percent a year. In the United States, the number of people using

homeopathy increased by an estimated 500 percent during the 1990s.

But last August, the British medical journal The Lancet proclaimed " The End

of Homeopathy " in its lead editorial (issue 366), based on a new analysis

of earlier studies comparing homeopathy and conventional medicine to the

use of placebos. The analysis, conducted by Aijing Shang, Matthias Egger

and their colleagues at the University of Berne in Switzerland, on eight

placebo-controlled trials with homeopathy and six with conventional

medicine, reported that homeopathy appears to work no better than a

placebo. In other words, any positive effects from homeopathy are all in

people's heads. Lancet editors concluded, " Now doctors need to be bold and

honest with their patients about homeopathy's lack of benefit, and with

themselves for the failings of modern medicine to address patients' needs

for personalized care. "

A number of researchers, however, contend that the editorial is slanted,

inaccurate and ignores the real issues. Among them is Dr. Wayne Jonas, who

published a meta-analysis incorporating a number of studies, an approach

similar to Shang's in The Lancet in 1997. After analyzing 89 studies, Jonas

and his colleagues reported that homeopathy was almost 2 1/2 times more

effective than a placebo. Jonas calls the recent editorial " irresponsible "

and " a misuse of statistics. " He says statistics are dangerously easy to

misconstrue, and in the case of homeopathy, techniques like meta-analysis

can fail to accurately capture what's happening in people's bodies and

lives, which is the real issue that needs investigating.

" I do not agree with the editorial that we should abandon homeopathy, "

says Jonas, director of the i Institute of Information Biology in

andria, Virginia, and a former director of both the National Institutes

of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine and the World Health

Organization (WHO)'s Collaborating Center for Traditional Medicine. " We

will never know whether its primary effect is due to a better application

of the art of medicine, or if there's a special effect from the remedies,

unless we do research in these areas. Since the public is using homeopathy

at a growing rate, then it's really our obligation as scientists to try to

find that out. "

Is homeopathy a 200-year-old hoax, or a powerful paradigm for healing? The

pursuit of the truth offers an intriguing glimpse into the tangled-some

would say dysfunctional-relationship between the politics of medicine and

the advancement of healing. Fasten your seatbelts.

A German physician named Hahnemann created homeopathy in the late

1700s. Back then, one of the worst places a sick person could wind up was a

hospital, where bloodletting and purging were among the cures du jour.

Disillusioned after seeing too many patients die from such barbaric

practises, the young Dr. Hahnemann decided to switch careers for awhile and

translate medical and scientific texts. He was translating Cullen's

Materia Medica from English to German in 1790 when he encountered Cullen's

idea that Peruvian bark, which we now know contains quinine, cured malaria

because it was bitter. The notion made no sense to Hahnemann, but he was

intrigued enough that he started experimenting on himself.

After taking several doses of the bark, Hahnemann developed most of the

symptoms of malaria. He concluded that the bark was effective because it

triggered symptoms similar to those of the disease it treated, and called

this effect " the law of similars. " When he gave Peruvian bark to malaria

patients to confirm his ideas, they improved.

Hahnemann eventually tested more than 200 medicines of the day-diluting

them to reduce toxicity-on himself, his family and a growing group of

followers. He meticulously recorded his subjects' physical, mental and

emotional reactions to each substance, establishing the now-standard

homeopathic process of " provings " to develop remedies.

As Hahnemann continued this research he also developed his most

controversial idea: The more a substance is diluted, the more powerful its

healing properties. Homeopathic remedies then, as now, are so diluted they

may not contain a single molecule of the original substance. Hahnemann

called this process of dilution and shaking " potentization, " which he

believed extracted the " spirit-like " nature of each substance that could

activate a patient's " vital force " against disease.

In 1810, Hahnemann laid out his theories and philosophy in his treatise

Organon of the Rational Art of Healing. His methods had gained many

followers, including European royalty, by the time he coined the term

" homeopathy " (for homoios or " similar " and pathos or " suffering " ) in 1826.

Homeopathy spread throughout Europe and the U.S. over the next few decades,

gaining credibility during epidemics of infectious disease. Patients

treated by homeopaths were reported to have had much lower mortality rates

than those treated by conventional physicians during cholera epidemics in

Europe and the U.S. in the 1830s and '40s. For example, during a cholera

epidemic in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1849, only three percent of patients who

received homeopathic care died, compared with up to 60 percent of patients

who received the conventional medical treatment of the time.

But a backlash was brewing on both sides of the Atlantic. Homeopaths were

creating serious competition for conventional physicians. Two years after

homeopaths organized the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1844, the

American Medical Association (AMA) was formed-in part to discredit

homeopathy. In 1855, the AMA incorporated a code of ethics that included

expulsion of physicians who even consulted with homeopaths or other

" non-regular " practitioners. Similar events were unfolding in Europe;

orthodox physicians in France also banned consultations with homeopaths.

Homeopathy was outlawed in Austria.

In spite of these setbacks, homeopathy continued to flourish, drawing such

admirers as Mark Twain, who wrote in Harper's magazine in 1890, " The

introduction of homeopathy forced the old-school doctor to stir around and

learn something of a rational nature about his business. " By the turn of

the century, more than 100 homeopathic hospitals operated in the U.S.,

along with 22 homeopathic medical schools and more than 1,000 homeopathic

pharmacies. Interestingly, many students and practitioners were women, and

the homeopathic Boston Female Medical College, founded as a school for

midwives in 1848, was the first women's medical college in the world.

The early 20th century, however, brought several blows to homeopathy. The

Carnegie Foundation issued the Flexner Report in 1910, which, in

collaboration with the AMA, sought to standardize medical education. The

report rated all medical schools in the U.S and gave nearly all homeopathic

colleges-as well as most medical colleges for blacks and women-low scores.

Soon, some of these schools started closing, and far fewer graduates of

homeopathic colleges were allowed to take medical licensing exams. Soon

after, the Rockefeller Foundation boosted conventional medical schools with

gifts in the tens of millions.

Conventional medicine became the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm. By 1922,

only two homeopathic colleges remained in the U.S. With the exception of

India and a few scattered corners of the world, homeopathy went deep

underground.

By the time Ohanian decided to study homeopathy, she couldn't find

a training program in the U.S. She read what she could and eventually found

people to teach her. " I had to put things together bit by bit, " she says.

In Europe, however, homeopathy was making a comeback. The person most

responsible for that revival is Vithoulkas, a Greek homeopath who

started practising and teaching in the 1960s. Vithoulkas refined

Hahnemann's ideas and brought them into the new frontier of energy

medicine. He says homeopathy helps a patient heal by affecting his or her

electromagnetic field.

In his seminal book The Science of Homeopathy, Vithoulkas offers a brief

but eloquent description of the goal of any healing system. " A human

being's main and final objective is continuous and unconditional

happiness, " he wrote. " Any therapeutic system should lead a person toward

this goal. " Vithoulkas defined the difference between conventional medicine

and homeopathy this way: " Homeopathy does not merely remove disease from

the organism; it strengthens and harmonizes the very source of life and

creativity in the individual. "

Vithoulkas' teachings and writings inspired a new generation of

homeopaths, including Ohanian, who studied with him in the 1980s. For his

groundbreaking work, he received the Right Livelihood Award, or

" alternative Nobel Prize " in 1996. In addition to being a powerful teacher,

Vithoulkas is also a fearless critic of conventional medicine's reliance on

increasingly harsh and powerful drugs.

Homeopaths believe conventional drugs often suppress symptoms rather than

cure illness. Vithoulkas says this suppression actually drives illness

deeper into the patient, eventually expressing itself as mental illness and

diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system. He also contends

that the medical establishment's overemphasis on increasingly stronger

drugs may be making us sicker.

" The immune systems of the Western population, through strong chemical

drugs and repeated vaccinations, have broken down, " Vithoulkas told the

Swedish Parliament in his acceptance speech for the Right Livelihood Award.

He linked the rising rates of diseases such as asthma and cancer with

" wrong intervention. " Vithoulkas told the gathering, " If conventional

medicine were really curing chronic diseases, today we would have a

population in the West that was healthy, mentally, emotionally and

physically. "

Although such sweeping statements need to be taken with a grain of salt,

they raise provocative questions. Chronic disease is the world's leading

killer, causing approximately 17 million premature deaths worldwide every

year, according to WHO. While lifestyle factors like poor diet, smoking and

lack of exercise can lead to chronic disease, along with environmental and

genetic factors, conventional medicine typically fails to cure people once

they've gotten sick. Prescription drugs, in fact, sometimes do more harm

than good: A 1998 study by researchers at the University of Toronto found

that prescription drugs were the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.

Among the many researchers unconvinced of homeopathy's " end " is Dr.

Lewith, director of the Complementary Medicine Research Unit at the

University of Southampton in England. " People are coming to homeopaths and

some are getting better, " Lewith says. " Our patients are telling us that

something is going on with complementary medicine and we have to listen and

understand that. This is a patient-led revolution, which gets up doctors'

noses a lot. "

Lewith, who has been studying complementary and alternative medicine for

years, first prescribed homeopathy to a patient with rheumatoid arthritis

25 years ago. Within two weeks, the woman's inflammation and arthritis

disappeared. " From then on, I thought, 'This is something very useful,' "

Lewith says. " I know you shouldn't be impressed by such things, but that's

what I found. "

Lewith suspects the consultation process between the patient and the

homeopath is a strong influence. He is now investigating this question in a

study of rheumatoid arthritis patients in which one group receives a

homeopathic remedy and a consultation and the other receives only a remedy.

He's comparing these groups with two others, one receiving a placebo with a

consultation and the other receiving only a placebo. " As I've gone on over

the last 10 years thinking about how we could research homeopathy, it's

increasingly becoming clearer to me that the process of homeopathy and the

process of the consultation are probably inseparable, " he says. " I think

there's something quite therapeutic in that process which is different from

the almost mechanical consultations that you get in conventional medicine. "

While many like Lewith work on human studies, others are investigating

homeopathy's effects on animals, which offer further insight into the

placebo question. Animals don't make things up; they either get better or

they don't. In an intriguing set of new studies completed last summer,

Liesbeth Ellinger, a homeopathic veterinarian in Apeldoorn in the

Netherlands, investigated homeopathy's effect in newborn dairy calves.

Diarrhea is a common problem in dairy calves, a condition some Dutch

farmers regularly treat with homeopathic remedies. Among Ellinger's

findings: On one farm, not a single calf who received a homeopathic remedy

developed diarrhea, while every calf given a placebo did. She says the most

difficult part of the research, done with the Louis Bolk Instituut, was

persuading farmers to give a placebo instead of homeopathy " because they

know homeopathy works. "

In spite of typically limited funding for research, homeopaths around the

world are continuing their own investigations and publishing results in

homeopathic and alternative medicine journals. They are reporting

homeopathy to be particularly promising in treating illnesses and

conditions including ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder),

arthritis, viral illnesses, chronic fatigue syndrome, eczema, inflammatory

bowel disease, premenstrual syndrome, and post-traumatic stress, according

to the American Institute of Homeopathy. In seminar rooms around the world,

homeopaths tell story after story of extraordinary, improbable cures.

Among the believers is Dr. Weil, director of the Program in

Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona and author of Healthy

Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Physical and Spiritual Well-Being. " I've

witnessed homeopathy working in my own life and I've seen a great deal of

clinical success with it, " he says. " I'd love to know how it works. I think

there is some way in which homeopathic remedies convey information to the

body and that some day it will be seen as some form of energy medicine,

which is up and coming. As that develops, we may have studies that uncover

the mechanisms by which homeopathy works. "

Homeopathy defies explanation by conventional science, a valid point that

skeptics make over and over again. How can a remedy that might not contain

a single molecule of the original substance have any effect at all? If an

explanation is ever found, it may be discovered on the frontiers of quantum

physics through studies that might yield great material for a sequel to

What the Bleep Do We Know?!-the recent movie exploring those sorts of

questions.

Wayne Jonas points out that science also has yet to explain the mechanism

of action of many conventional drugs. How aspirin works, of all things, has

undergone four or five different explanations over the last 100 years.

" There are many things we deliver in conventional medicine that we have no

idea why they work, or even if they work, but we still allow them and we

still continue to research them, " he says.

So much of medicine, like many things that influence our lives, hinges on

the " politically dominant standard " of the time, says Dr. Iris Bell,

director of research for the Program in Integrative Medicine at the

University of Arizona. Bell criticized the editorial in The Lancet, saying

tools such as the meta-analysis are " inappropriate to the nature of the

intervention that they're evaluating. " Unlike conventional drugs, which are

expected to produce basically the same effect in every person, homeopathic

remedies are prescribed for each individual. In other words, three people

with the same physical symptoms could easily be given different remedies

based upon their unique physical, emotional and mental make-up. In short,

evaluating homeopathy is likely impossible using standard methods, and

extremely difficult even when using other techniques.

Bell says all medicines-complementary or conventional-should be evaluated

for their broader effects on patients' lives, as well as for safety and

cost. One tool to help with such assessments is the well-designed

observational study, which measures the effects of an intervention on a

patient's overall well-being, energy level and other " real-life " changes.

" If homeopathy and other forms of complementary and alternative medicine

were the politically dominant standard, researchers would have every right

to evaluate every drug on safety, cost, and whether or not one drug can

help improve a broad range of symptoms in the person as a whole-with

minimal side-effects-not just an isolated symptom, " she says.

As the debate over homeopathy continues, people are streaming in to see

Ohanian and into the offices of other homeopaths around the world.

" I've seen our client base go from people at the end who have tried

everything else, to people who want to get a constitutional remedy to

fine-tune their health, " Ohanian says.

Ohanian is now treating the grandchildren of some of her earliest clients,

which she finds particularly gratifying. She talks about a client who had

angrily stopped treatment when he was a teenager. Now an adult, he returned

recently with his young son. " He told me, 'I resisted you because my mom

made me come. But the peace and light and energy in me went away after I

stopped seeing you,' " Ohanian says.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the medicine of the future needs to

focus on strengthening our own healing abilities. After all, that's our

best defense. " We know that the most powerful weapon we have against

illness and suffering is our own inherent healing capacities, " Jonas says.

" We wouldn't be around if we weren't constantly repairing ourselves and

becoming more whole. "

The people seeking better health through alternative forms of medicine like

homeopathy just want to feel better. They're not waiting for a paradigm

shift in medicine-they're leading it.