How valuable is your health?

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Which do you feel is more expensive...

Getting well?

... or staying ill?

Homoeopathy - The Last Resort

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Have you ever heard someone say when they've found something that they'd lost that it was the last place they'd think of looking?

We know there's a simple explanation for this -

You don't carry on looking for something once you've found it, do you?

People often regard homoeopathy as the last resort. In fact there's a medical nemonic - T.E.E.T.H - Tried Everything Else, Try Homoeopathy!

But... The reason homoeopathy is the last resort is the same as when you've found something that you've lost...

Once you've found health and healing, why would you need to look any further?

Placebo

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Patients do get better with homoeopathy. Its sceptics site the placebo effect as the reason for its favourable response.

So…

What is it about the placebo effect that means that patients get better when they have homoeopathic treatment but haven’t via a conventional route?

There's none so blind as those that don't want to see

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On Saturday 2nd February, at Neal’s Yard Remedies in Covent Garden, I dropped a whole tray of homoeopathic remedies in their vials on the floor, two of which smashed leaving small round balls rolling around on the floor. It was 1 vial of Arnica 30c and 1 vial of Arsenicum 6c that has smashed and I was asked if I’d be able to salvage them. Ethically, they couldn’t be sold but they couldn’t be put into the staff box either because, as was pointed out to me, the tablets look the same and some would argue, are the same! I disputed this, but was asked a challenging question - "Well, how would you find out which ones which then?" I replied - "Unfortunately, we’d have to take the tablets and see what happens to find out which one’s which."

I was told that was cheating. Later that day, in a twist of karmic fate, my challenger dropped a shoe box full of CDs, most of which are unlabelled duplicates of our originals (as they get scratched quite quickly and we can return to the original for new copies!) So, I wryly asked, "How are you gonna tell which CD’s which? If you gave them to a chemist to analyse they’d say they were all the same - Same amount of acrylic, same amount of silver, same mass. How you gonna find out which one’s which?" She replied "I’ll just put them in the CD player, der!"

"But that’s cheating!" I grinned. To a chemist, one CD is the same as the next. We need to hear a CD to unleash its music and evoke a response. The digital information as 1s and 0s burnt onto the silver through the acrylic are read and processed into movement of airwaves that replicate the original sounds. It vibrates the air that then vibrates our eardrum. We then convert that vibration, once again, into an electrical signal for our brain to interpret. How you interpret that CD may be wildly different to me. You may enjoy ABBA, I may not. But remember, to the chemist, all CDs are the same. When I prescribe a homoeopathic medicine, I’m interested in how you interpret it. I know that you’ll be susceptible to responding to the medicine as you’ve produced symptoms that mimic what the remedy does to a healthy person. Yet, to a chemist all homoeopathic medicines are the same.

• So, if you can’t see something, does that mean it’s not there?

Sound Investment?

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Homoeopathic hospitals in the UK are faced with closure as they are deemed an unnecessary drain on NHS resources...

Imagine you’re the shareholder of a large pharmaceutical company...

You’ve invested in that company and therefore in the pharmaceutical industry.

Naturally, you’d like some good returns on your investment. In the 2006 top 20 companies highest returns on assets there are 4 pharmaceutical companies

So, if you were developing medicines how would YOU generate the maximum amount of revenue?

• The medicines would have to be exclusive to the company that developed them for the longest possible time


• The medicines would have to be expensive as well as exclusive


• You would want the medicines to be given to as many people as possible


• You would want the medicines to be taken for the longest possible time, for the rest of someone’s life if at all possible


• You would want them to be given as young as possible especially if someone is to take it for the rest of their life


• You would want any side-effects of the medicines to be treatable by medicines that your company also makes


• You would want to make medicines that people take, even if they have no symptoms so as to ‘prevent’ illness

11 million people in the UK take a cholesterol-lowering drug called Lipitor, which is a statin. This brings in £12billion each year for Pfizer that makes it.

So, hopefully, you can see why it's paramount to the pharmaceutical industry that homoeopathy is proven not to work.

What's also apparent, is that if homoeopathy doesn't work, why do they need to knock it?

Immunisation anomalies

Some of you may already know that I’m of scientific stock and assess problems from an analytical point of view. It’s taken a while for me to incorporate my intuition and hunches into my practice and indeed my everyday life.

Now, vaccination theory and our immunisation programme are alleged to be based on sound scientific evidence. However, some of the theory and execution of the programme does appear to have gaping holes in it…

• When a child is given a series of vaccination injections it is expected that the child will produce a mild fever as a sign of an appropriate response of their immune system. So, why is Calpol routinely recommended to be administered to reduce the expected response? Does it reduce the ‘favourable’ effect of the vaccination? Or worse still, does it increase the likelihood of an unfavourable outcome?

• Although this isn’t an anomaly, I find it just rude… Vaccination comes from the word vaccinia, which is Latin for cow. This stems from Edward Jenner’s use of cowpox to deal with smallpox. But don’t you think that referring to mass immunisation of people as herd immunity is taking it a little too far?

• Smallpox is quite an interesting one actually… Have you heard anyone say “… well, vaccines have eradicated smallpox”? In England, free smallpox vaccines were introduced in 1840 and made compulsory in 1853. Between 1857 and 1859 there were 14,244 deaths from smallpox. After a population rise of 7%, the death rate rose by 40.8% to 20,059 between 1863 and 1865. In 1867, evaders of the vaccine were prosecuted, so very few were unvaccinated. After a population rise of 9%, the death rate rose by 123% to 44, 840 between 1870 and 1872. So, this evidence indicates that the smallpox vaccine increased the severity and incidence of smallpox when all other illness (that at the time had no vaccine) were on the decline.

• Ever heard of scarlet fever? Ever seen any one with it? At the beginning of the 1900s, scarlet fever accounted for the most deaths amongst the childhood diseases, and yet this disease declined in the same manner as measles, whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria and TB. Ever heard of a scarlet fever vaccine? There isn’t one. If one had been introduced, would we still be using it?

• Tetanus is virtually unheard of in developed countries. It is estimated that 40% of the UK population doesn’t have an up-to-date vaccine of tetanus. In the building industry, where one may expect the incidence of tetanus to be higher due to nature of injuries sustained at work, there is no tetanus. Isn’t it plausible that we may actually have natural immunity that prevents such an illness from taking hold?

• As a physiologist, I learned that about 80% of immune system is on the outside. Very crudely, we are a hollow tube from mouth to… the other end. Our lungs and skin are also ‘outside’ (in the sense that they directly touch the outside world). Our body keeps things out it doesn’t want and utilises the things it does want. So, when we are naturally dealing with immunological challenges, we first deal with it at this level… So why do we by pass all this part of our immune system and inject? Does an unnatural exposure produce an unnatural response? Well, vaccines don’t produce an immunity in the same way as natural exposure to a disease.

• Furthermore, just because you’re exposed to something, doesn’t mean you're going to develop symptoms from it. I’ve been exposed to people with TB and not ‘caught it’ (I’m not vaccinated against TB… My GP said it didn’t work). A particular person for whom I’ve been exposed to who had TB was also vaccinated against it! Whoa!

• So, they had TB antibodies… and got TB. It is assumed that if you have antibodies to a disease you are protected against it. Here in the UK, measles vaccine, part of the MMR vaccine, is quoted as being 90% effective. This translates as 90% of the recipients will produce ‘necessary’ antibody levels. There is no definition of immunity derived from a certain level of antibodies.

• …and finally… Since vaccines don’t produce a lifelong immunity, when will adults need their next MMR booster so they don’t get these illnesses as adults?

When we are unwell

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• Our body throws out symptoms as a reaction
• Our body is trying to heal itself
• When a doctor prescribes a medicine, they wait to see what the medicine does
• When a homoeopath prescribes a medicine, we wait to see what the person does
• We concentrate on the reaction of the patient and not the action of the medicine
• Surely, it's better to promote the healing process of your body rather than to hinder it?