Anyone who has taken a painkiller certainly knows that there is a big difference between temporary relief and real healing. Even though a person who takes a painkiller may not consciously feel pain, it is widely understood that this relief does not necessarily mean that a "cure" or a “healing” has occurred.
And yet, it is surprising how many people think that various conventional drugs have performed some type of miracle just because they provided short-term relief of pain or discomfort. Little do many people know that when a drug “works,” this may be the “bad news.” It may be that the drug works by suppressing the disease, thereby creating a much more serious physical and/or mental disease.
Although antibiotics and select other drugs may be an exception to this general observation, getting rid of an infection will not influence the immune factors that led the person to be susceptible to infection in the first place, and in fact, antibiotics are known to disrupt one’s inner ecology, disturb assimilation of nutrients, and even tend to make the person more susceptible to new infection (a future blog will deal more directly with this issue).
Painkillers, on the other hand, may provide great reduction in pain, but this may result in the person continuing to walk on that injured ankle and cause increased injury. The person with arthritis, as another example, may continually take one or more painkilling drugs that provide some relief but these drugs also create their own tolerance, addiction, or pathology, usually leading to much more serious health problems.
A smart person might consider taking a conventional drug that provides temporary blessed relief while concurrently seeking some more deep treatment that nourishes, nurtures, or augments the body’s own defenses. A problem, however, is created when a sick person frequently relies upon a drug to provide temporary relief and does not seek a real, more profound healing.
Differentiating Real Healing from Suppression of Disease
When a person experiences relief from any treatment, conventional or alternative, one should not necessarily assume that a real healing has occurred. While it is possible that the person may really have been healed, it may also mean:
Homeopaths and naturopaths both assert that there is a big difference between real healing, palliation of symptoms, and suppression of disease, even though each of these results may initially seem to be the same.
What people don’t usually understand is that there may be a danger in the frequent or recurrent application of treatments that suppress symptoms. The concept of suppressing symptoms is well accepted and understood in psychology. It is commonly observed when a person suppresses his or her emotions, such actions tend to push the emotional turmoil deeper, leading the person to explode at some future time, often at people who are not directly related to the origin of the person's problem.
While people may be familiar with the problems associated with the suppression of emotions, people are generally not familiar with the possibility that many conventional medical treatments can suppress their physical symptoms, driving the disease deeper into the person. And yet, suppression of disease is so commonplace in today’s medical treatment that it is virtually ignored.
Doctors and drug companies tend to minimize the real problems of suppressing the disease process by referring to the “side effects” of a drug. And yet, pharmacologists commonly note that the determining a drug’s “effects” and its “side effects” are completely arbitrary. They are both the direct effect of the drug upon the human body.
Ironically, many conventional drugs are touted specifically for their ability to “suppress” symptoms…or even suppress the body’s own immune system. Ultimately, pushing the disease deeper into the person is the result of using pharmacological agents that are explicitly prescribed for their ability to control or inhibit symptoms that are the natural defensive functions of the body. Suppression of disease may provide the semblance of benefit (or at least short-term benefit), but ultimately may make the person much sicker. Such suppression of the disease process may lead to increased chronic disease, immune dysfunction, and mental illness, all of which we are seeing together in epidemic proportions.
Understanding the Healing Process from a Whole Systems Perspective
The father of American homeopathy was a German physician named Constantine Hering, MD (1800-1880). Hering was a respected conventional physician who was hired by a publisher to write a book critical of homeopathy, and in his research on the topic, he became convinced of its efficacy. After many years of practicing homeopathy, he observed that people go through a specific healing process after being given the correct homeopathic medicine. He developed guidelines in which to determine when a real healing is taking place. These guidelines have been called "Hering's laws of cure," but some homeopaths prefer to call them “Hering's guidelines of cure.”
To understand these guidelines, it is first useful to know that homeopaths carefully evaluate the evolution of a person's physical, emotional, and mental/spiritual symptoms. Homeopaths consider mental/spiritual symptoms to be deepest to the core of a person's being for they represent the will, the ego, the sense of security that the person feels, and the person's overall state of consciousness. Homeopaths today wonder if the immune system’s important ability to identify “self” from “non-self” is dynamically connected to a person’s mental/spiritual state of health, thereby linking mind and body health. The emotional symptoms are external to the mental/spiritual level of the person because imbalances in the deeper level will create increased propensities to various fears, angers, depressive states, and other emotions. The physical symptoms are the most outer manifestation of the person, though every level can and will influence the other.
Also, each level has certain symptoms that have more or less influence on a person's overall health. For instance, a person's asthma will be deeper than his or her skin rash, a person's fear of death will be deeper than his or her irritability, and a person's loss of self esteem will be deeper than a subtle reduction in memory. Likewise, when comparing symptoms on different levels, a person's heart disease will more profoundly affect his or her health than a difficulty in concentration experienced on the mental/spiritual level.
In light of these levels of the human being and the degrees of intensity to which a symptom impairs a person's ability to live, Hering found that healing progresses:
· From within to without (from the deepest part of our being to the most external);
· From the most recent disease back in time to previous ones (a reversion of the disease process);
· From the top of the body to the bottom of the body.
Ultimately, basic concepts of survival and evolution are at the heart of this understanding of the defenses of the body. The human body can and will defend its most vital functions first before defending its more superficial functions.
Homeopaths observe that a truly effective therapy sometimes elicits a temporary exacerbation of certain symptoms, usually in the superficial ones or sometimes ones that the person had many years previously. Homeopaths assert that a true healing is taking place when a person's present symptoms are more superficial than previous ones. One of the reasons that homeopaths and their patients have come to believe that homeopathic medicines are not simply placeboes is their observations that some symptoms tend to increase in the process of a curative response (healing from within to without…and the above other guidelines).
This “externalization” of symptoms is commonly observed by homeopaths who witness that approximately 20-30 percent of their patients with a chronic illness tend to experience skin symptoms, nasal or bronchial discharges, diarrhea, early menstruation with clots, profuse perspiration, or some other externalization of the disease process after an effective homeopathic treatment is provided.
On the other hand, if and when a person takes a conventional drug and his or her symptoms disappear but new ones that are more serious develop, this result suggests that the treatment has suppressed the person's condition and has made them worse. Unknown to most physicians and patients, people undergoing conventional medical treatment are commonly having their disease suppressed. Homeopaths assert that one of the reasons that there is increased mental disease and increased chronic disease at earlier and earlier ages is because of effective suppression of the disease process by conventional medical treatment.
Distinct from methods that suppress disease are those that help disease express and externalize itself. Homeopathy's use of the principle of similars (using medicines bases on their ability to CAUSE the similar symptoms that the sick person is experiencing) is one important safeguard against disease suppression because it mimics the wisdom of the body rather than suppresses its symptoms.
I like to call homeopathy a type of “medical biomimicry” because a homeopathic medicine is chosen for its ability to mimic the symptoms that the sick person is experiencing. Because there is a certain wisdom to the bodymind, mimicking this wisdom is a good way to elicit a real healing.
Dana Ullman, MPH, is America's leading spokesperson for homeopathy and is the founder of www.homeopathic.com . He is the author of 10 books, including his bestseller, Everybody's Guide to Homeopathic Medicines. His most recent book is, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy. Dana lives, practices, and writes from Berkeley, California.
Follow Dana Ullman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HomeopathicDana
Homeopathy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Homeopathy: An Introduction [NCCAM Backgrounder]
Home | National Center for Homeopathy
Experts work out ways to improve homeopathy
There's no evidence that homeopathic products can prevent flu
When Militarism 'Invades' Medicine...Doctatorship Happens
Alternative Medicine: Safety Tips
The Amazing Story Of Charles Darwin And His Homeopathic Doctor
Using effective drugs to relieve symptoms can be a life saver. The body can only do so much.
It is by far, the most natural way to protect the body from infection. The goal is simple, present the immune system with foreign antigens. The body creates a unique antibody. When the real infection arrives, memory cells created earlier can quickly get the immune system to fight off the virus before it can successfully infect the body.
All the other ingredients in the vaccine are just there to get the antigen to the body and sometimes make it more effective.
That is so much more natural than using drugs of any type.
H1N1 Flu Vaccination: The natural way to prevent infection since the 1940s.
Sheldon Sheps
Letting the body's defenses do all the work sounds very inviting. Evolution has given us many tools to aid in the fight against disease. Our defenses often are not enough to do the job or work very slowly. Suppression of symptoms in many cases gives the body help to win the battle. Just allowing the body to cure itself prolongs the illness or worse.
I was surprised to see several statements that were made. They are usually seen when describing homeopathy:
" the symptoms went away on their own, and the treatment had nothing to do with it."
"the treatment palliated the symptoms, providing short-term relief but resulted in the recurrence of symptoms in the near future"
The placebo effect is a part of the action of any drug. To find the true effectiveness all drugs need to be compared to a placebo. This is where homeopathy has yet to get convincing evidence for any one condition.
Mr. Ullman is a homeopath. Homeopath, as homeopaths, have a single skill. They listen and examine their patient and then prescribe homeopathic remedies. That's all they do. What they need to do is to make sure that everyone who is interested in homeopathy, in person, or in a drugstore (sad, isn't it) or on the internet, knows how a homeopathic remedy is made and how dilute the remedy they are getting is.
Dilutions should be expressed in terms that are easily understood. A drop of the original solution diluted by a small lake, a great lake, the Great Lakes, the Atlantic Ociean, the earth, the sun, the universe --- you get the idea. And specify whether there is a molecule of the original in it.
And specify the original source in English as simplified as possible. For Oscillococcinum, the ingredients should be listed as Muscovy liver and heart, glucose and pancreatic juice diluted by 1 followed by 400 zeros parts of double distilled water.
H1N1 Flu Vaccination: Believe it or not, Boiron, who make Oscillococcinum, seem to recommend the flu shot. http://boiron.ca/en/learning-center/file-101/flu-10
Sheldon Sheps
I've used homeopathy for many years with excellent results for both chronic and acute illnesses. I've found it to be great in treating injuries, pain and swelling in dental problems and work and in preventing flu. My friends, neighbors and family have tried homeopathy and been equally pleased. We use it to treat our animals for their illnesses and injuries too.
Anyone who finds homeopathy has a friend for life. I hope many, many more people will investigate and try it.
As you get up into the higher homeopathic dilutions that you intend to be effective, there will also be all those contaminants such as mercury that are also in the homeopathic effectiveness range. So how the does the remedy decide which homeopathic remedy it is? Or do you always get so many remedies at once that the they should just dilute double distilled water?
Flu Vaccination: Safe and effective. Good for you, good for your community and good for your cat.
Investigate other ways of protecting yourself from the flu.
www.mercola.com
I suspect you are a lazy thinker however, and more of a 'true believer' in the Church of Science, having put little thought into examining your perspectives on truth. Otherwise I suspect that your posts would have a different and much less arrogant tone.
Also, if you're really concerned about contaminants, a review of the vaccine manufacturing process might be a good mental exercise for you. This process is a real concern to many free thinkers.
Thank you for getting out there to let folks know that Homeopathy is a wonderful alternative and support to traditional medicine. We need all forms of healing; it's not one or the other. Homeopathy has been around for over 250 years and has something to share with traditional medical people. I would hope that as homeopathy is proven more and more, that everyone can realize we are focused on helping a person who is in pain or discomfort, to heal. Our goal as homeopaths is to alleviate suffering. It is no different for the traditional or other alternative/complementary medical models. I believe being able to communicate and talk WITH one another is where we need to be. It is happening. I don't feel 'trashing' any modality is beneficial to anyone. We're all in the field of healing. We all want people to be healthy. I believe we have a wonderful foundation to share what we know with one another. And I appreciate you being here and helping to show how homeopathy can help. In the spirit of team work, Eileen Nauman, DHM(UK)
www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/nov/24/homeopathy-science-technology-committee
As this report shows, the scientific community has studied homeopathy and considers it to be quackery.
What evidence is their that healing starts at the top of the body?
So if I have a problem with my chest and with my bladder, my chest will be cured first. Right?
Flu Vaccination: Almost as safe as homeopathic vaccine and more effective.
Alice laughed, "There's no use trying," she said, "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
With just a little practice, you too can believe impossible things. Belief is much easier when you don't have to actually prove anything.
They remind me of Fox News by the way they spin information and create misinformation. I sincerely hope that readers here see through the straw men that they create. What they say about homeopathy is simply wrong and confused.
They clearly do not understand homeopathy; they keep saying that there is no research, despite the many references that I have given to such research in highly respected medical journals. They make embarrassing statements about the smallness of the homeopathic dose and then wonder how small doses of substances in the water or air do not "heal" people (again, they have no understanding of homeopathy and homeopathic pharmacology).
The good news here is that they expose their ignorance to the world, even though they use fake names. They do not even seem to have the intellectual rigor to read and understand the articles I have written nor the research to which I commonly refer. Sad but true...
More importantly, Mr. Ullman wrote a historical essay on Darwin and Gulley. Take away Darwin and all that's left is Dr. Gulley, a British homeopath (who used other treatments as well) of the 19th century.. At best, it's of interest to homeopath historians.
Without Darwin, in my opinion, it would never have been published. by eCam.
Since Darwin is the reason for the paper, Darwins views must be front and center. And they must be accurately stated in the text. The reader should not have to read a very long quote to discover that Darwin wasn't a skeptic on homeopathy. Rather his mind was made up , he thought homeopathy was useless.
Flu Vaccination: Safe, effective and the morally right thing to do.
1. The “Law of Similarsâ€, the notion that like cures like, has no basis in biology or the natural world. This is the product of a well known form of magical thinking known as sympathetic magic – the idea that causes resemble effects. Samuel Hahneman, the inventor of homeopathy, thought that the body would not allow two similar ailments to coexist in the body at the same time – but two centuries of medicine and biology has not discovered any such principle. Modern homeopaths explain this alleged effect as the body’s reaction to the homeopathic remedy, like immunization, but there is no immune response to homeopathic potions and there is no other mechanism for any such reaction, so this is just explaining the unknown with another unknown.
2. Hahneman’s theory of disease, the miasma theory (the notion that all chronic illness is caused by external poisons or miasmas) – was pre-scientific and does not correlate with any known biology.
3. Homeopaths claim they treat the whole person, cashing in on the “holistic†marketing brand, but this contradicts the law of similars. They feel their remedies need to be individualized, taking into account many superficial characteristic of the patient, including personality. Yet they simultaneously claim that a specific remedy will treat a specific symptom based upon the law of similars. So this whole person approach is both implausible and internally inconsistent.
FOR THE PRICE OF ONE.
This is a speculative comment and is not covered by my normal research policy. If I get it wrong, don't expect an apology.
The output of a talk based therapy, such as cognitive-behavior theory, is a change in the thinking and behaviour of the client. The output of conventional medicine is often a prescription drug. The output of a homeopath is almost always a homeopathic remedy.
I've never understood why homeopathic remedies don't have side effects. After all, it is the remedy alone that does the healing. And as successive successions and dilutions potentiate the remedy in the double distilled water, they must also be potentiating the contaminants in the water.Why isn't the fecal matter in the water not being potentiating in the water?
Why can't we give the homeopathic physical ingredient a 8C head start before we are concerned with contaminations in the double distilled water. I think an 8C dilution is equivalent to a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000 dilution So for a 30C preparation, we've got a whole bunch of 22C potentiated contaminants, some of which must be homeopathic remedies in their own right.
How does the physical body (remembering the first paragraph) know which homeopathic remedy to follow as it works from the head to the toes?
Flu Vaccination: Safe, effective and very logical.
When I get the flu, I've found a homeopathic product called "Alpha CF" consistently reduce the symptoms, so I feel only mildly bad instead of really really bad. (And until Tamiflu came out, modern medicine didn't really have anything to offer besides aspirin for fever, decongestants, and chicken soup.) On the other hand, one of the ingredients is ipecac. There's not enough to induce vomiting, but there's enough I can tell that it's there.
http://www.boericketafel.com/commerce/product.jsp?prodId=4506&catId=&companyId=48
Flu Vaccination: Almost as safe as homeopathic flu vaccine, except that it works.
So you have to be dis-eased in order to get diseased.
But just because science can't measure "dis-ease" does not mean that it isn't a reality. Unfortunately, there probably is no patentable way to measure it, thus, no one is interested.
Because we have this thing called genetics and we are not all the same. Immunology is a complicated field. A person could be exposed to a small amount of a pathogen at one point in their life and be asymptomatic. They are then exposed to a larger dose of pathogen and do not develop disease, yet a person who had not been exposed previously would develop the disease based on the same dose of pathogen. Germ theory is not incomplete, simply your understanding of immunology, microbiology, physiology, and virology is.
I guarantee that no matter how healthy you are, you would become sick with an infection of every pathogen at some dose of that pathogen.
The lucky homeopath who does so will also win one million dollars from James Randi, so what are you waiting for?
Note that the BBC said that they were "replicating" the work of Professor M. Ennis, but read Ennis letter that confirms that this is a lie. Randi has been informed about this lie, and yet, he did (and continues to do) nothing to correct it. I would love to be proven wrong on this because I respect good research, not junk science.
And John Stossel has proven himself to be the king of junk science and junk journalism. Did anyone ever see his tv report on organic foods where he reported on "research" ...but he and his team "forgot" to do the research and simply made up the data. "The Nation" wrote a blistering review of this...see for yourself.
You also completely sidestepped the issue of the reward... why is that? Wouldn't you want a million dollars to promote the "benefits" of homeopathy? Or are you more interested in preserving the benefits you receive by not being to prove your case and diverting attention from that fact?
And just because Stossell is a rightwing libertarian with a political and financial agenda, that again does nothing to prove your case or negate the overwhelming facts that homeopathy is a profit machine based on on the bottling of distilled water.
Oh, and just in case I missed out, has Ennis' work been replicated, recognized and published in any peer reviewed journals? Also has anyone been able to prove the alleged discrepancies used on the Horizons show led to an outcome that has been proven to be wrong? With all the time, money and resources available I'm sure someone must have done so by now.
http://www.hpathy.com/research/smith-how-homeopathy-works-4.asp
I have been studying the writings of Cyril Smith of England for some time. While he does not have all of the answers, his studies of quantum mechanics has most of them as to how the potentization method creates homeopathic medicine.
Further, there is an excellent homeopathy site where you can see some of the photographic evidence of successes by modern homeopathic physicians in India and the US. What they do in dermatology is amazing.
http://www.classicalhomoeopathy.com/app/default.asp
I hope these links give you more information about the discipline Dana Ullman and I follow.
Multiple sources destroying the quantum mechanics/homeopathy link:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/02/its_not_just_homeopathy_its_quantum_home.php
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/06/your_friday_dose_of_woo_the_circle_is_co_1.php
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/10/your_friday_dose_of_woo_on_wednesday_a_h.php
http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2008/11/letter_to_an_older_mathematici.php
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=601
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=40
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2377
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/alternative_medicine_and_the_laws_of_physics/
Thanks to this effort. You have far more patience than me.
Scientsts have discovered (and it has been verified) that high dilutions can and do stimulate biological effects by molecules which have been diluted away, as though they are still there (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p181). And I DON'T CARE HOW MANY ZEROS are after the dilution coefficient - we are talking about molecular and atomic quantities. (And NO, the BBC documentary did NOT "refute" Ennis' experiment).
Comments from Dr. Brian Josephson, regarding Homeopathy (from his web page, "Is Homeopathy Nonsense and Why It May Not Be!)
"...criticisms centred around the vanishingly small number of solute molecules present in a solution after it has been repeatedly diluted are beside the point, since advocates of homeopathic remedies attribute their effects not to molecules present in the water, but to modifications of the water's structure."
"Simple-minded analysis may suggest that water, being a fluid, cannot have a structure of the kind that such a picture would demand. But cases such as that of liquid crystals, which while flowing like an ordinary fluid can maintain an ordered structure over macroscopic distances, show the limitations of such ways of thinking. There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any refutations of homeopathy that remain valid after this particular point is taken into account."
(quoted from Letter to the New Scientist by Brian Josepshson)
Thanks again!
James Pannozzi
I am so tired of trying to explain to people the difference between alleviating the pain of an illness, and actually curing it, that usually I'll just nod my head and agree with whatever they are saying.