Fw: [COPD-ALERT] Revolutionary Revival of Homeopathy and its Demolis
The Revolutionary Revival of Homeopathy
and its Demolishment by the World Media
by Louise Mclean
27th August 2005.
Anyone who read the papers, watched the news or listened to their radios
yesterday might be forgiven for wondering what yesterday’s media demolishment of
homeopathy was all about. It comes hard on the heels of a report on 24th August
that Prince Charles commissioned a study on the economic benefits of
complementary medicine and a report in The Times UK on 21st August which stated
that ‘demand for alternative therapies such as acupuncture and homeopathy is
soaring and people are increasingly using their medical insurance to pay for
it’.
This news appears to have sent the pharmaceutical companies into a flat spin
and they went into coordinated overdrive to get all their favourite medical and
science correspondents to put out highly negative stories about homeopathic
medicine in newspapers all around the world. These reports were based on a very
unfavourable study on homeopathy published in the Lancet which stated that the
benefits of homeopathy could be all in the patient’s mind. The study was
unveiled with fanfare at the end of a week full of complimentary articles about
alternative medicine.
Commenting on the study Prince Charles commissioned, Professor Edzard Ernst,
the only professor of complementary medicine in Britain, made unfavourable
remarks about homeopathy and yet in an article of 22nd November, 2003 entitled
‘A Scientist in the Alternative Camp’ published in the British Medical Journal
Online, he says: ‘Our family doctor in the little village outside Munich where I
grew up was a homoeopath. My mother swore by it. As a kid I was treated
homoeopathically. So this kind of medicine just came naturally’.
The ferocity of the media attack can only mean one thing - that there is a
huge rise in popularity of homeopathic medicine and that it is now becoming a
threat to the billion dollar drug industry! This worldwide revolution has taken
place almost entirely by word of mouth and by personal recommendation - a truly
remarkable phenomenon because up until now the media has studiously ignored and
excluded any positive news on the subject.
A few years ago the programme Horizon on BBC 2 tried to demolish the work of
Dr. Jacques Benveniste whose studies proved that homeopathic medicines work.
Benveniste claimed his studies had been replicated hundreds of times. Dr. David
Reilly of the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital has also conducted many such
successful studies and the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital has conducted long term
studies of the benefits of homeopathic treatment. All these homeopathic
hospitals, including the London Homeopathic Hospital reportedly have at least 6
month waiting lists.
If anyone needed proof of the efficacy of homeopathic medicine, they need only
study the statistics of various epidemics during the 1900s. In 1854 a cholera
epidemic struck London. A report revealed that under allopathic care the
mortality was 59.2% whereas under homeopathic care the mortality was only 9%.
In the yellow fever outbreak in the US in 1878, the mortality in New Orleans was
50% under allopathic care and 5.6% for homeopathic care. Records of three years
of diphtheria in Broome County, New York from 1862 to 1864, show the mortality
rate for allopaths as 83.6% and 16.4% for homoepaths.
There are 220,000 homeopathic doctors in India and all over Europe, especially
France and Germany, homeopathy is hugely popular. The Queen, who is arguably
the richest woman in the world, reportedly travels everywhere with a homeopathic
first aid kit and often dispenses to staff. The kings and queens of Britain
have always had their own personal homeopathic doctor and for the last two
centuries the aristocracy has traditionally enjoyed the benefits of homeopathic
medicine. Many famous people, including MPs choose homeopathic treatment. Tony
Blair’s sister-in-law, Lyndsey Booth, changed careers from being a lawyer to
becoming a qualified homeopath. Is it possible that all these people have been
deluded into taking dummy pills, the effects of which are ‘all in the mind’, in
their imagination?! Hardly.
What about animals and babies? How does the placebo effect work on them?! As
any homeopathic vet will tell you, homeopathic medicine works almost better on
animals than on humans and likewise, babies respond particularly well to
treatment. Is it even possible to explain to them that the homeopathic remedy
alleviated their symptoms, much less that the psychological effect of taking it
brought about the cure?!
Hippocrates said there were two laws of cure - the law of opposites (orthodox
medicine) and the law of similars (homeopathy). In homeopathy, a small, highly
potentised dose of a substance (that in a large dose would produce the patient’s
symptoms), works as a catalyst to stimulate the patient’s own dormant healing
power, setting it into motion to bring about cure. During the process of
creating a homeopathic medicine, the dilution alone would do nothing. It is the
effect of the succussion (vigorous shaking) in combination with the dilution
that causes the medicine to become highly potent in its action.
This Lancet study is probably just another skewed trial intent on bringing
down homeopathy, akin to the kinds of trials we have to come to expect from a
pharmaceutical industry that gave the green light to such medicines as
thalidomide and Vioxx.
The fact of the matter is that homeopathy has enjoyed a huge rise in
popularity for one simple reason and that is because it works.
____________________________________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]