Wed, 03 Feb 2010
Follow the Money
The critics of homeopathy have been much in the news lately. I thought I should raise my lonely voice to make simple point. And that is that no one stands outside on a cold winter's day to pull a stunt out of an abstract respect for the truth. The whole campaign against homeopathy started when the British government allowed the homeopathic pharmacies to advertise their products for the treatment of disease. This threatened the medical industry and they responded with a campaign to discredit homeopathy. Anyone who researches the issue will see that this is so. So the campaign started with a dubious review article published in Lancet, continued with press releases and interviews by several public spokesmen, continued with the attempt to defund homeopathic medical clinics, and now has descended to recruiting the skeptic organizations as foot soldiers in their marketing campaign.
If the public realized how well homeopathy works our modern medical institutions would be greatly changed. The ten minute doctor's appointment would be gone, it is incompatible with homeopathy. The overpriced prescription medicines wouldn't be sold, homeopathic medicines are unpatentable and thus won't generate monopoly. Hospitals would be smaller, homeopathy generates less revenue per patient and couldn't support their current opulent scale. So is it any wonder why this campaign is underway? Follow the money.
Sun, 31 Jan 2010
Homeopathy Skeptics Fail
Youtube has a video up of the demonstration against homeopathy held by a skeptical organization calling itself 10:23. The video was put up by the organization itself, so it showed the demonstration in its best light. By any standards, the demonstration was a failure. Only a handful of people showed up, all obviously members of the organization itself and on a first name basis with each other. All the while the general public walked by oblivious to the demonstration. Someone should explain to these bright minds that the end of January is not a good date to hold an outdoors demonstration in England. A more rational person would have waited until Samuel Hahnemann's birthday in April. If you are trying to persuade a profit oriented company like Boots from selling a product, having only half a dozen people show up on their door is only going to cause them to ignore you as loudmouths in the future. There are better ways the leverage your numbers if you are a small, but dedicated group. But why should I be giving them tips?
There's an extra laugh in the video. Boots sells its homeopathic remedies in a tube that dispenses a single pill with a click. The video starts with the demonstrators all laboriously click click clicking into a styrofoam cup to get all the pills out of the tube. Here's a comment from Reddit: "It's too bad these people are such flaming idiots, they might have proved a point."
Tue, 26 Jan 2010
Skeptics Folly
There's going to be a demonstration in Great Britain this Saturday protesting the sale of homeopathic medicines by the largest drug store chain in that country. I think it's odd that they are protesting the sale of homeopathic medicines and not tobacco products. Homeopathic remedies have never harmed anyone when used correctly, they've only done good. But tobacco product have harmed many people. The reason why they are protesting is that homeopathy doesn't fit in with their idea of how the world works. So not only they won't use it, they get angry if anyone else uses it as well. It's intolerance, sheer intolerance. If you think using homeopathy is stupid, then don't use it. If you think eating meat is wrong, don't eat it. If you think looking at Playboy is wrong, don't read it. But there are people who don't share your opinions, who use homeopathy, eat meat, and look at Playboy. So who are you or I to tell the stores not to sell these things? People care entirely too much about what other people are doing, while not doing the hard work it takes to change their own behavior.
Fri, 08 Jan 2010
Educated Stupidity
There's a campaign to discredit homeopathy underway in Great Britain. Like all public relations campaigns it follows a pattern: repetition of a few talking points by authority figures and attempts to cast your opponents as bad people acting in bad faith. Anyone who follows American politics should be very familiar with it. I've mostly ignored it, except when reporting on it in my homeopathic news summary, but the sheer stupidity of the attacks bothers me. So I've decided to start commenting on them. The post that bothered me tonight is Professor David Colquhoun's comment on part of the curriculum at a homeopathic college. Much of the post is given over to the supposed "contradiction" between the Society of Homeopaths' code of ethics and the curriculum of the college. The supposed contradiction is that it is considered unethical to advertise that you cure disease and yet the curriculum teaches how to cure disease. This is just so stupid that it has me shaking my head in disbelief. Surely the professor understands the difference between doing something and advertising that you do something? And that while curing cancer and teaching people how to cure cancer are praiseworthy things, advertising that you cure cancer is not? And surely the professor understands the reason for praising the first and condemning the second? This has nothing to do with homeopathy, this a simple exercise in logic. Simple, but too complex for our professor.
Yes, homeopaths treat chronic disease, including serious chronic disease. Part of this treatment is coordinating care with other forms of medical treatment, including allopathy. The details of this process are too complex to discuss here, but it's done all the time, properly and ethically. Though I doubt that any homeopathic treatment would please Professor Colquhoun.
Sun, 17 May 2009
The Doctor's Story
Amchi Thubten Tsering visited our group and told the story about how he first got interested in Tibetan medicine. He came down with malaria and was put in an allopathic hospital. Allopathic treatment didn't help, he only got worse. A Buddhist nun offered him a Tibetan "precious pill." He took an infusion of it every morning and slowly regained his health and weight. So when he graduated from high school, he went to the Tibetan Medical Institute in Dharamsala and asked for a job. He got a job compounding Tibetan medicine and later selling them. He was asked to attend the Institute as a student and agreed. The coursework was based on memorizing the four medical tantras. Many of his fellow students were monks and had no problems with this, as memorization is also part of monastic education, but he struggled with it. So he went out in the woods each evening reciting the texts in order to memorizing. So he finished and got his degree and now he's in Washington>
Mon, 27 Apr 2009
Flu Then and Now
The cable news is full of talk about the swine flu outbreak. The news made me curious about the Spanish Flu Pandemic. Sandra Perko has the rundown in her book "The Homeopathic Treatment of Influenza." (I bet that book sells a few copies in the coming weeks.) She made two points that interested me. First, the Spanish Flu did not follow the usual seasonal patern, but continued to grow during the summer. Second, the Sapnish Flu became more deadly as the pandemic went on. Neither point is encouraging in the current situation, but I don't want to spead alarm. My guess is that the swine flu will not be a major threat to the world's health and will wind up no worse than any other new strain of flu.
Back during the Spanish Flu homeopathy was still a significant part of our medical system, so I went looking for information about its effectiveness. Julian Winston writes about the Spanish Flu in his history, "The Faces of Homeopathy." and cites the following statistic:
I looked for reports in the homeopathic journals using Google Book Search and found this letter to the editor:Dean W. A. Pearson of Philadelphia collected 26,795 cases of influenza treated by homeopathic physicians with a mortality rate of 1.05%, while the average old school mortality was 30%
To the Editor:
I have been so busy fighting " Spanish Flu " that I have found time for nothing else for several weeks. I want to tell you my experience with the disease, for I am proud of my record; proud of what homoeopathy was able to do out here in this small city in South Dakota.
In all, I treated 188 cases of Spanish Influenza. Of the above number I treated 169 cases from the initial fever and 19 cases who had been unable to get a physician during the early stage, or who thought they could carry it through alone and called me only when the disease got the best of them. Of the 169 initial cases I lost not one, neither did I have a relapse; but I am sorry to say that one lost his mind, which I hope is only temporary. All of the others recovered without relapse. Of the 19 late cases all but three recovered. All of the three were pneumonic. One lived but eight hours after pneumonia set in; one, two days; the third had endocarditis which ended the scene five days after a relapse.
To recapitulate: I treated 188 cases and had three deaths. Among these 188 cases I had every variety of " Flu " and required a variety of remedies. I commenced every case with Gelsemium and Bryonia, which seemed to rob the case of its tendency toward pneumonia. Other remedies I used in my cases were Phosphorus, Tartar Emetic, Hepar sulphur and Pulsatilla. In not one case did I find it necessary to use any of the old-school remedies. In one or two cases I found it necessary to resort to Passiflora and Cratoegus.
Yours truly,
Arthur B. Hawes, M.D.,
Bridgewater, South Dakota.
Fri, 24 Apr 2009
The Merck Mafia
Big Pharma is like a rock and if you turn it over some ugly things slither out:
An international drug company made a hit list of doctors who had to be "neutralised" or discredited because they criticised the anti-arthritis drug the pharmaceutical giant produced. Staff at US company Merck & Co emailed each other about the list of doctors - mainly researchers and academics - who had been negative about the drug Vioxx or Merck and a recommended course of action. The email, which came out in the Federal Court in Melbourne yesterday as part of a class action against the drug company, included the words "neutralise", "neutralised" or "discredit" against some of the doctors' names. It is also alleged the company used intimidation tactics against critical researchers, including dropping hints it would stop funding to institutions and claims it interfered with academic appointments.
Killing people and intimidating doctors and researchers in pursuit of profit. This is the reality of Big Pharma.
Mon, 13 Apr 2009
The Principles of Homeopathy
Andre Saine gave a talk at the NCH summer school on the principles of homeopathy. It's an interesting presentation of the subject, though obviously not the last word on it. Here are my notes from his talk:
Homeopathy was defined by Hahnemann and must be practiced according to the principles he described. These are:
- The law of similars, or similia similibus curantur. The sick are most easily, mildly, and permanently cured by the most similar medicine. For example, podophylum causes and cures diarrhea. This principle is established by treatment and not hypothesis. Homeopathy is the only system of medicine where all treatment is lawful.
- The fundamental, intrinsic cause of real disease is the untunement of the vital force.
- The change and morbid condition of function of tissue and organs in real disease are the result of dynamic disturbance and are not the cause of disease.
- The totality of the symptoms, objective and subjective, as well as etiologic factors and characteristics of the person are the sole indication for choice of the remedy. Medicine cannot be based on opinion or hypothesis. Medicine has usually been deductive, not inductive.
- By constant individualization we treat the patient and not the disease.
- In order to secure the best practical results, medicines must be administered singly. Without systematic application of the inductive method, you will not get far.
- The only remedy that merits preference is always the one that is most similar to the characteristic symptoms of the disease. There are only degrees of similarity, not an absolute. If the the degree of similarity is high enough, the result will be good. This is explained in aphorisms 154 and 258 of the Organon.
- This single remedy will be prescribed for its dynamic property in an optimal posology. For example, salt (natrum muriaticum) in its crude form is not a remedy. It must be potentized to be effective.
- To ascertain the sick making properties of medicine, they must first be proven in the healthy and second be confirmed in curing the sick. Only remedies that have been proven and confirmed should be used. The doctrine of signatures is deductive and is not part of homeopathy. We cannot base a practice that determines life or death on a hypothesis.
- Like prevents like. A remedy that is given in advance of illness will prevent the disease it will cure. This is homeopathic prophylaxis.
Posted during World Homeopathy Awareness Week.
Sun, 12 Apr 2009
Placebo Power
Too many people dismiss homeopathy as a placebo, not stopping to think what a remarkable thing a placebo is. How is it that one can cause a change in one's health simply by believing something is a cure? It's as remarkable as fixing a television set by turning it to a different channel. Our familiarity with the concept of placebo has made it invisible to us. The placebo has become the shadow of medicine, the anti-medicine, when it should point us to a new concept of medicine, one that breaks the materialistic mindset that has imprisoned medicine for too long. I think a medicine that does not understand the placebo will never understand homeopathy, not because homeopathy is a placebo, but because homeopathy also passes beyond the material. The placebo is the doorway to homeopathy.
Posted in honor of Homeopathy Awareness Week.
Sat, 11 Apr 2009
The Placebo Paradox
The argument made against homeopathy usually goes like this:
- There's nothing in homeopathic medicines
- If there's nothing in them, they can't work
- Therefore, homeopathic medicines are placebos
It's a strange argument, because placebos work, by definition, and yet there's nothing in a placebo either. So there's at least one example of a kind of medicine with nothing in it that works. So why not two or more? I'm not saying that homeopathy is not a placebo. I'm saying that this argument does not establish it, because the second premise of the argument is false. Whether homeopathy is placebo can only be established through experimental trial. If trials show that homeopathy gives results statistically different than placebo, then homeopathy is not a placebo. But whether homeopathy is not a placebo can't be established through a priori argument. This is simply because we don't understand what placebos are or how they work. We don't know them when we see them, so we can only determine what is a placebo through experiment. And that is why the a priori argument against homeopathy is just so much hot air.
This is posted on my blog in commemoration of World Homeopathy Awareness Week.
Tue, 07 Apr 2009
Under Attack
Homeopathy is under attack. Especially so in Great Britain, but also in this country. A week ago eight FDA agents raided Homeopathy Works, a pharmacy in West Vriginia. I don't know what the alleged crime was, maybe selling nosodes without a prescription (horrors!) For that they had to divert attention away from the lies, bribes, and dirty business practices of Big Pharma. Or maybe the agents just wanted to take a day trip to West Virginia. Next week is World Homeopathy Awareness Week. There are plans afoot to raise the profile of homeopathy on the web. Now the critics have center stage. We'll see if we can counter their negativity with a positive and helpful message about homeopathy.
Sat, 04 Apr 2009
The Three Humors
Last Sunday Amchi Thubten Tsering gave another talk on Tibetan Tibetan medicine, this time focussing on the description of a healthy person. Here are my notes from his talk.
Today I will navigate through the main principles of Tibetan Medicine. Tibetan medicine was taught by Medicine Buddha and shares the same philosophy as Buddhism. The main cause of suffering is ignorance, or not knowing. Many negative emotions develop based on ignorance and these result in bad health. Loving kindness and other positive emotions are healing. But I covered this last time.
Without understanding its principles one cannot understand Tibetan medicine. The are energies functioning in our mind and body. There are three of these and they are called wind (lung), bile (tipa), and phlegm (baken). The wind is like a horse that the mind rides. The inner wind is related to breath, but it is different. It is the vital force that connects the mind and body. Bile controls our bodily heat and gives color to the body. Phlegm is responsible for stability of the body, induces sleep, and lubricates the body.
It takes five years to learn Tibetan medcine. It is based on four tantras: the root tantra, the explanations tantra, the oral transmission tantra, and the dignostic tantra. It is explained through the analogy of three trees which have 400 something leaves. The first tree is the explaination of the healthy body. The three trunks of this tree are the humors, physical constituents, and excretions. The three humors have been mentioned.
The three humors have five subdivisions each. The five winds are the life sustaining wind, ascending wind, descending wind, secret wind, and fire combining wind. The life sustaining wind is located in the crown of the head. Its main functional areas are nose, throat, and chest. It controls speech, saliva, burping, and so on. The ascending wind is located in the chest. It controls respiration and the lungs. The secret wind controls the circulation and hydrological systems, and muscles. The fire combining wind controls digestion. The downward voiding wind controls expulsion of feces and urine.
The first sort of bile is digestive bile. In Tibetan medicine digestion is divided into three parts. The upper part is controlled by the decomposing phlegm, the middle by the digestive bile, and the lower by the fire combining wind. The second sort of bile is the coloring bile. It controls skin color and tone. The third bile is determining bile and is located in the heart and allows us to distinguish between sense impressions. The fourth is seeing bile. It controls clear vision. The last is the complexion clearing bile.
There are five types of phlegm. The first type is supporting phlegm. It is located in the brain and supports the other four types of phlegm. The next is decomposing phlegm and assists digestion. The third type is experience phlegm and controls taste. The fourth is satisfaction phlegm and controls satiation. The fifth is connective phlegm and lubricates the joints.
The second trunk is the physical constituants. There are seven leaves on this trunk. They describe the stages of separation of the pure and impure elements in digestion. The first stage is the nutritional essence, Then it passes into blood, then flesh, then fat, then bone, then marrow, and finaly the regenerative fluids. The waste products are separated from these by the fire combining wind and expelled by the donward expelling wind.
The third trunk has three leaves for the three waste products: feces, urine, and perspiration. There are two flowers and three fruits on this tree. The first flower is freedom from disease and the the second is a long life. The thrre fruits are religious practice, health, and happiness.
Negative emotions that are held onto manifest first as anxiety, then depression,and then serious psychological problem. Desire causes wind imbalance. Anger causes bile imbaance. Laziness causes phlegm imbalance. To combat negative emotions we should cultivate positive emotions like loving kindness.
Tue, 24 Mar 2009
Proving Cannabis
The news reports a new syndrome associtated with long term cannabis use:
The severe vomiting sickness, called "cannabinoid hyperemesis," was first recognized in Australia in 2004. Symptoms include nausea, stomach pain and severe vomiting. Sufferers report the only way to get some relief is from taking a hot bath or shower.
How unusual! Cannabis, which is prescribed to cancer patients for nausea and vomiting, causes the same symptoms it cures when used chronically. Unusual to anyone except a homeopath, to which it's an example of a homeopathic proving. Note the interesting modality, better from a hot bath.
Thu, 19 Mar 2009
Count on the Count
It's been a long time since I've posted on homeopathy, but lately I've I've gotten interested in the Boenninghausen method of repertorization again, so I thought I'd write something about it. Kent's method focuses on keynote symptoms and generals. It works well a lot of the time, but there's an element of guess work in it. Boenninghasen's method is more clear cut, but unfortunately it's often difficult to get the sick person to tell you the symptoms you need to make it work. So your case taking skills need to be good to get the sick person to think in a way they're not inclined to think, that is, homeopathically. In all homeopathic case taking the modalities (what makes a symptom better or worse) are important, but especially so in the Boenninghausen method, where you want a complete symptom to repertorize. A complete symptom is qualified by a clear sensation and modality. Unfortunately, usually the interview goes like this:
I've got a cough. — What's it like?
It's a bad cough. — Is it wet or dry?
A little of both. — What makes it better?
When I take cough medicine.
Thirty minutes of a case like this and you want to throw all your homeopathic books in the trash and devote yourself to a simpler hobby. Sometimes you get a decent case, though, and can use your repertorization skills. Karl Robinson has written a good article on the Boenninghausen method and I have notes from Doctor Luc's seminar at the NCH Summer School. Here's an extract from my notes that gives the gist of the method:
When repertorizing the chief complaint comes first. In other methods of case analysis, you don't use the chief complaint. If there is more than one complaint, ask which is worst. The modalities of the chief complaint are the most important. It is such a decisive factor that if you have a remedy with the concomitants, sensations, and dreams of the patient but not the modality, you must reject it. A remedy the ranks very high in the modalities is the one you choose. If there is a recognizable never well since or etiology it comes first among the modalities. Concomitant symptoms are symptoms that go together with the chief complaint. The less often it typically goes with the complaint, the more important it is. For example, diarrhea with headache is a concomitant. The concomitant also has modalities. For example, asthma with increased urination. If there is an aggravation of the concomitant that is the same as of the chief complaint, it has increased value. For example, eczema on the head and white stools where both are aggravated by milk.
I offer this in the hope that patients may speak their symptoms clearly, doctors may find the similimum easily, and cure the patient speedily. In other words, in hope of a perfect world.
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