Homeopathy
Introduction
Last year sales of homeopathic medicines in Europe topped £3 billion. Clinical studies are showing that these medicines out perform their pharmaceutical cousins. Patients are voting with their feet and money in their droves. In fact the first path of treatment for most Europeans is to a homeopath and 20% of Scottish GPs have received training in this medicine. Homeopathic sales 70% of the sales were in Europe and 30% in North America. France is the leading market for homeopathy in Europe with sales of over 210 million euros per annum and 40% of the population having been treated homoeopathically.
Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician (1755-1843), founded homeopathy as a safer alternative to bloodletting, purging with mercury compounds, and other perilous medical practices of his day. He based his new approach on what he called the "law of similars." According to the theory, a pharmacologically active substance administered to a person in good health triggers a series of symptoms. When these same symptoms appear in a sick person they can be cured by administering the same substance in a homeopathic (chemical free) form.
Two centuries ago a German doctor named Samuel Hahnemann discovered homeopathy. When working as a medical writer he landed on some research by a Scotsman called Dr Cullen who was also a chemist and an expert on medicinal substances. Cullen had discovered that quinine, a chemical found in Peruvian Bark, helped malaria due to its astringency. This set Hahnemann thinking, as a chemist he knew there were more powerful astringents available so why was quinine so effective?
To investigate further, he dosed himself for several days with quinine and to his surprise he developed the symptoms of malaria, one after another, despite the fact that he did not have the disease. He saw that 'like would cure like' and this is the first and foremost rule of homeopathy - similia similibus curenter. Essentially speaking when a chemical that would otherwise cause symptoms of a disease in a healthy person is given to a person with the disease, the symptoms are cancelled and the person returns to normal heath. For example, to remove nausea symptoms one would take homeopathic Nux Vomica a remedy from the nut that would cause nausea in its chemical form.
Hahnemann then set about recording the symptom pictures caused by taking another 100 chemicals individually. He recruited volunteers for this amongst his friends and recorded the symptoms they developed by the chemical administered. This process he called proving and noted the physical, emotional and mental reactions. Some of the remedies were poisonous and he had to dilute them so no trace of the chemical remained. Amazingly he had his second discovery, which was the more diluted they were the more powerful and faster was their effect. The result is homeopathic medicine in its current form where remedies are a result of dilution and what is called potentisation, or strengthening of a remedy.
Homeopathic remedies are derived from a variety of sources as the following sources illustrate; allium from the onion, cantharis from the Spanish fly, urtica from the stinging nettle and Nat Mur from Dead Sea rock salt. Frances number one OTC remedy for colds is a homeopathic medicine derived from fresh duck's liver and heart. The homeopathic medicine is so dilute that not even a molecule of the duck remains.
The homeopathic version by working in the persons vital force, cancels out the symptoms. Most homeopathic medicines are imparted on a lactose, milk sugar pill. A report to the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1921 documented the dramatic success of homeopathy in the worst flu pandemic in history. The death rate of 24,000 flu cases under conventional medical care in that study was 28.2 percent, while the death rate of 26,000 cases treated with homeopathy was a nearly miraculous 1.05 percent.
Individual Prescription
Long popular in parts of Asia, in recent years homeopathy has become Europe's fastest-growing form of alternative medicine. Debates about how it scientifically works are heated but patients are voting with their feet and money in their droves. In orthodox medicine, if seven people went for treatment for a throat infection they would all get the same medicine. In homeopathic treatment they probably would all be prescribed a different remedy, due to but not limited to how their personalities differ. The object of homeopathy is to match the person with the remedy that fits them. The homeopath also takes, during an hour-long consultation, notes on all of the patient's symptoms encompassing: emotions, mental outlook and physical. The attentive homeopath with the patient being completely involved is a winning formula.
Homeopathy is a very flexible system of medicine that can be used by just about anyone. Minor ailments can be treated at home using a standard homeopathic first aid kit and more serious complaints need to be seen by a professional, as there are over 3000 remedies to choose from. If you are getting a cold regularly, you would need to see a homeopath to figure out the underlying causes and to be prescribed a remedy that will improve your immune system. Fundamentally homeopathic medicine seeks to raise your vital force which is weak and this is resulting in recurring illness.
Scientific Studies
Many of homeopathy's critics say that the medicine is no more than the placebo effect. By placebo they mean something that has no medical effect but may affect the psychology of the patient creating an improvement, quite like giving someone pills but with nothing inside them. Medicine uses this to see whether or not the patient improvement is all in the mind and to see whether real medication works in trials against a placebo. Funnily enough, in some trials for new drugs, people get better with the placebo and worse with the drug.
Dr Reily at The Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital has carried out some very serious research on homeopathic medicine. Dr Reily and his team found that placebo was clearly not the cause for health recovery in a clinical study involving a homeopathic medicine and a placebo to treat hay fever. Results from the study show quite clearly that the homeopathic medicine worked with patient's health improving steadily over weeks whilst there was little or no effect from the placebo.
Private European insurers cover these treatments and The World Health Organisation recommends them when pharmaceuticals are expensive and hard to get. Spain took an initiative to a few years ago to incorporate homeopathy into their national health service and with the cost of a medicine based on dilution I am sure their taxpayers and those of other countries are reaping the initiative rewards.
Homeopathic medicine is also making headway into veterinary care with more and more vets training due to the results that their colleagues are receiving in the field. Two years ago I interviewed a entrepreneur who was importing organic wine from France and some of the owners were using homeopathic medicines to treat the grape vines rather than using pesticides.
The medical system is set to become bigger in a culture whereby people are taking more of an interest in their health. In years to come we will see a return to this system that once saw one in six US doctors being also homeopaths. Homeopathy and the principals of homeopathy have been used for centuries it is only in the last twenty or so years western allopathic medicine has been questioning homeopathy.
The Answer To Avian Flu
When a similar strain of bird flu, misleadingly termed Spanish Flu, spread around the world in 1918, there is no doubt that it had catastrophic consequences. 50 million people died. Nevertheless, American hospital statistics from the time show that homeopathic treatment gave a far better chance of survival than conventional treatment did. The statistics are reported in Randall Neustaedter's excellent book "Flu: Alternative Treatments and Prevention".
For at least the past 150 years homeopathic practitioners have used the medicine Influenzinum as a flu preventive. Influenzinum is a homeopathic medicine made from flu viruses. A proprietary preparation is produced by Dolisos pharmacy each year using the flu virus strains recommended by the World Health Organization for the year's vaccine production (Dolivaxil - containing Influenzinum 9C). The typical dosage is once per week for four weeks beginning in October or later, followed by another dose three weeks later.
Oscillococcinum
The best selling alternative flu medicine in the US is a homeopathic preparation of the liver and heart of a Barbary duck (trade name Oscillococcinum). This medicine was first formulated in 1925. The name arose from the belief that the blood of flu victims in the 1918 pandemic contained bacteria composed of balls (cocci) that vibrated, or oscillated. Joseph Roy, a French physician at the time identified this supposed pathogen and found it in many animal species. He chose as the source of his homeopathic preparation a duck, possibly an extremely fortuitous accident because of the association between human flu epidemics and bird viruses. This remedy recently toped Drugstore.com sales list sales in the US alone are in the region of £20 million. A course costs of Oscillococcinum costs £6, which is used regularly by 5 million French for the prevention of colds and flu's.
Oscillococcinum was first studied in France during the 1987 flu epidemic caused by an H1N1 virus similar to the bird flu of today. This multi-centre study examined the effect of Oscillococcinum (200C) on the early symptoms of flu. Results were published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. More patients in the treatment group recovered completely in the first 48 hours than the control group (17 percent of patients with active treatment compared to 10 percent of controls). More patients in the treatment group also judged the treatment as favourable compared to the placebo, 61 percent vs 49 percent (Ferley, 1989).
In 1990 German scientists replicated the French study of Oscillococcinum. They used the same criteria as the previous study and enrolled 372 patients. After 48 hours of treatment with Oscillococcinum the treatment group had significantly milder symptoms than the control group, and the number of patients with no symptoms from day two onward was significantly greater in the treatment group (17.4 percent) compared to the control group (6.6 percent) (Papp, 1998).
Both of these studies show a significant curative effect of a homeopathic medicine in the treatment of flu in carefully conducted, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. Conventional antiviral drugs reduce the duration of flu by about one day if taken within the first 48 hours of illness (Cooper, 2003). These studies shows that homeopathy carries the potential to make a dramatic difference in any flu epidemic without the risk of drug side effects.
Is anyone planning to stockpile homeopathic medicines proven to effectively treat the flu for over one hundred years?