The American Sound Bite
Out of nowhere, my husband turned to me and said, "I wish you'd tell me what you do so I can tell other people. They ask me what you do and I can't explain it."
"I'm a psychotherapist and a consultant in classical homeopathy," I stared at him. "You know what I do."
"But I can never explain it quickly enough. I tell them 'rebalancing,' 'rewiring,' 'peeling the skin off onions,' but then I lose myself. I can't come up with a simple way to describe it."
This is the worst problem for a homeopath. How do we explain an exquisitely subtle and complex process in a simple way? Take something so important and put it in a sound bite?
I remember a long time ago having to try to explain "verbal first aid" in five seconds or less for a three-minute TV news interview. I totally blew it. I'm not very good at sound bites.
But that is what we want in this country -- drive-through information, fast food for the mind. If we can't eat it in the time it takes to reach for the remote, the opportunity to communicate is lost.
But there is hope, because we do like stories. So, I thought that perhaps the best way to communicate what I do is to share with you a few cases. The first one is my own. The others (in Part II of this article) are a dog and a patient with his/her identity protected. I have never shared my own story before, but I do so because I believe its dramatic nature will help you to understand what classical homeopathy can do and why some people are so passionate about it.
The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Mass
Many years ago, I suddenly developed abdominal pain. I had not been sick in any other way and had no idea what was happening. I went for a gynecological exam and was told I was fine. The pain continued. I went back and after numerous exams was sent from the table to the couch. The psychiatrist sent me right back to the doctor. After about a year of bouncing back and forth with increasingly intense (searing, stabbing) pain, they finally "discovered" a mass several centimeters in width in the area of my left ovary.
At this point, the surgeons were called in. I was scheduled for an emergency laparotomy. As they wheeled me in, the surgeon said to my mother, "It could be cancer." I was 26.
After surgery, as soon as I stopped vomiting, the doctor told me that it was not cancer. My mother wept. He said it was a streptococcal infection (Strep B) that had created adhesions and that I could forget about having children. He proudly went on to inform us that they had "scraped me clean" and that I'd be on antibiotics for about a month.
I did as I was told. I was raised by a doctor, surrounded by doctors and had complete faith in the system.
Within a short time a whole new sort of pain emerged, this time, however, deeper. It was more localized, again on the left side. I thought the infection had returned. The pain continued for quite a while. I went to the doctor, but there was no infection. After dismissing it (and me) for at least a year again, I finally wound up in hospital. A cyst had burst. This cycle recurred every few months. They recommended birth control pills, pain pills and pills I didn't understand. Nothing helped. By the fourth rupture and hospital visit, they recommended a full hysterectomy.
I sat silently until I could take a deep breath again. I asked if there were no other options. The doctor said, "You'll just keep getting them and since you can't get pregnant anyway, this is the best idea."
I told him I would think about it. He told me not to think too long but looked at me is if I couldn't think at all.
I called a friend who had been talking about homeopathy. She used a homeopath for herself and had located a homeopathic vet. I asked for more information. She sat with me. She loaned me books. And she gave me the name of a doctor. I decided to at least try something before I let my reproductive center be removed forever.
I told my gynecologist about it. He said, and I quote, "You can use all the weed whackers you want, it won't help."
I said, "We shall see." And I meant "we." I had no more experience in it than he did. But I wanted some option other than organ removal. He did not escort me out. He was more than mildly annoyed. But I was on a mission.
Where the Magic Begins
This is what saved me: a young doctor with a tattered copy of a repertory (the book that is used to look up symptoms and match them to different remedies) and another equally frayed Materia Medica (the book that contains full descriptions of the remedies themselves) in a basement office in New Rochelle, NY.
It was the strangest medical experience I'd ever had. He didn't examine me the way I had expected. He talked to me. Well, actually, he talked very little. He asked me endless questions: Where is the pain? When does it come on? What happened then? What does it feel like? What makes it better? Do you have any food cravings? Do you kick your feet out of the covers? Do you like other people around you? Are you warm? Cold? What makes you afraid? Anxious? Sad?
He was relentless. Two hours of questions that could not seem more unrelated to me or to my ovaries. But honestly, it was such a relief to have someone listen to me without judgment that I suspended my own.
At the end of the interview, he went into a little closet, pulled out an amber bottle, opened the cap, poured a few pellets into the cap, tipped my head back and said, "Open your mouth."
He poured the little pellets under my tongue.
That was my first remedy. It was Pulsatilla, a common flower in highly diluted (potentized) form.
After that, my mood improved slightly but briefly and the physical symptoms did not go away. Instead they shifted and got worse. I've learned since then that this can happen when a remedy is close but not a bull's eye. The symptoms became far more localized and presented with greater clarity. It seemed to me then that it was like a boil coming to a head, collecting the "illness" from a large area and concentrating it so it could be seen properly and discharged. We waited a very uncomfortable month.
After the second interview he gave me Thuja. After that I had a frankly rude aggravation (cystitis) which lasted about a month and the cystic pain completely disappeared. An aggravation is what homeopaths hope for as the sign that a cure is beginning. It is also precisely what allopathic doctors find wholly inconsistent with their training. They are supposed to make symptoms go away, not generate others. But because homeopaths see the human organism as a moving, dynamic system, they believe that this discharge is absolutely necessary. Aggravations are like siphons; they allow previously suppressed diseases or eruptions a way out of the system. In homeopathic philosophy, it is part of the cure.
But I didn't know that at the time. So I called him and complained, and after he ruled out any dangerous infections, he said "Now, we wait." I'd call him back, still annoyed, uncomfortable, and worried. And he said, again, "WAIT!"
So, I did. After a while, the "rudeness" was gone and so was all the pain. And after a year I realized so were the cysts. None of it -- not the cysts or the strep or any of that pain -- has ever come back. More important, perhaps, than the physical relief, was that over the next couple of years I became calmer, more centered. Much of the insecurity that had ruled my life up until that point also seemed to just not be there. I didn't see it leaving. It was just gone when I remembered to look for it.
That was a very long time ago. All my exams are still splendidly normal and I still have my own organs in my own body.
I went on to need other remedies over time to deal with other issues and wound up with a different remedy as my "constitutional," the one that seems to fit my overall being. But this is how it started. And it convinced me on a cognitive and cellular level that what I had experienced was more than placebo or fanciful wish-fulfillment.
As far as I could see, it could not be a placebo (although that would have been just fine with me at that point), because one remedy missed the mark, but the other did not. And as far as wish-fulfillment -- if it had been up to me, I'm sure I would have wished for instant relief -- sans aggravation!
In any case, getting better was the beginning of a search for understanding and eventually I enrolled in school for classical homeopathy. In the follow-up article, we'll look at a couple of other cases to demonstrate the most important principle of homeopathy: like cures like. And hopefully discover the sound bite people need to understand what Hahnemann's legacy has been.
Follow Judith Acosta on Twitter: www.twitter.com/VerbalFirstAid
Larry Malerba, D.O. : Homeopathic Arnica to the Rescue
Larry Malerba, D.O. : Homeopathy: A Brief History
Judith Acosta: A Personal Case for Classical Homeopathy: Part II
Homeopathy: An Introduction [NCCAM Backgrounder]
http://www.safetyandquality.health.wa.gov.au/docs/mortality_review/inquest_finding/Dingle_Finding.pdf
If ever there was a case in support of denying the right of these charlatans to make any kind of health claim this must be it. I dare any advocate of homeopathy to read the coroners report describing the agony this woman was in before she ultimately consented to life saving surgery and tell me that homeopathy is anything but a lie and a sham.
You will be horrified to read that even when Penelope called her homeopath in a life-threatening condition - distended bowel requiring immediate surgery, she was threatened with the withdrawal of the 'therapeutic' relationship if she went ahead with the surgery. Classy.
Homeopathy is exactly what every government needs. It is exactly what the public wants.
study 1) Kleijnen et al. (1991) concluded the evidence was "not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias."
studies 2) and 3) Boissel, who wrote both Boissel et al. (1996) and the expanded version Cucherat et al. (2000), says: "My review did not reach the conclusion ‘that homeopathy differs from placebo’,”. Plus Boissel said he and his colleagues found evidence of considerable bias in results, with higher quality trials producing results less favourable to homeopathy.
study 4) Shang et al. (2005) only looked at high quality trials, which showed homeopathy to be worthless beyond placebo.
That's 4 out of 22 right there that can't be included as positive for homeopathy in an unbiased report.
For a discussion of the four out of the five meta-a's that come to broadly positive conclusions about homeopathy and an analysis of the discredited Shang analysis see:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18834714
www.extraordinarymedicine.org/2011/01/14/extraordinary-evidence-homeopathys-best-research
www.neuraltherapie-blog.de/?p=1620
There are both negatives and positives in most studies of all systems of medicine including homeopathy. You are simply using the negatives in these studies to claim that homeopathy doesn't work. On balance between the negatives and positives, the results of these studies are broadly positive for homeopathy.
Reasonable people reading the material at the links I provided will come to that same conclusion.
In the meantime homeopathy continues to grow in use and is now the second most system of med in the world with ConMed being the third.
I'll tell you one.
Long ago, there was a poor child afflicted by an unsightly facial wart. In desperation, his parents tried all manner of "cures", but nothing seemed to work. One day, he met an old woman. Unlike the other allopathic, so-called healers he had previously encountered who examined him to rule out contributory causes or underlying factors, and who said it would settle spontaneously, this healer merely asked questions. Like what side of the bed he got out of in the morning.
Eventually she drew a leathery old toad out of her pocket. Poking it with her finger to wake it up, she then rubbed it on the boy's face, and told him to come back next week, after taking his pocket money. The boy's allopathic healers were skeptical, saying "You can use all the toad ticklers you want"
Unfortunately the boys wart got worse, but the woman kept saying "Patience, child" and kept rubbing on some more toad juice. The wart still did'nt improve, even when the old woman switched the old toad for a green specimen. "WAIT!", was all the old woman said, and she kept on saying it for the next 12 months, all the while taking the boy's deserved pocket money.
Eventually, the wart disappeared. The boy was amazed, and went from internet forum to forum extolling the virtues of toad slime for warts.
Too bad the boy was taken in by material doses. Never would have happened if he'd used hi dilutions of causticum, nit ac or thuja. He would simply have watched his warts disappear never to return again. He also would not have been out but a few pennies of his pocket money.
Bless!
You need it.
The first thing that new patients appreciate about Homeopathy is that it's an entirely different approach to medicine. It also explains why material doses of substances will do nothing to cure an acute or chronic illness.
It's extremely unsophisticated and intellectually dishonest to refer to clinical experience as "anecdotal".
Of what? If you have a cold and I wave my hands over you, and you get better, what should I attribute your healing to? If I do it many times to many people and they all get better, should I now claim that I have a special power? Don't get me wrong, there is value in clinical experience--that is, masses of anecdotes--but anecdotes do not allow you to draw the cause and effect relations which are being claimed here.
"The "evidence base" that conventional medicine relies upon when it comes to drug treatments is often proved sketchy or dangerous in clinical practise."
Often, really? Even if it was true, that wouldn't do a thing to prove anything about homeopathy.
Those people who actually have knowledge within an area of expertise understand that no person can be an expert on all subjects and are more likely to accept that outside their area of expertise they must rely upon experts just as others rely upon them in their area of expertise.
Ample evidence for this exists within these discussions: almost without exception those who have expertise in and promote homeopathy demonstrate, by their selection of studies, that they are deeply ignorant of basic science and research methodologies.
In the same category is the belief that homeopathy degrees are as rigorous as medical degrees. They simply are not. Institutions offering degrees in homeopathy are often unaccredited institutions that will grant a degree to anybody provided they remit enough money. Homeopaths consider these institutions equivalent to real universities because they lack sufficient knowledge to recognize the difference between a real university and a diploma mill.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/peerReviewUnderTheSpotlight.php
The point of that article is that peer-review is insufficient and not a substitute for public scrutiny in the context of approving regulated substances.
The main issue raised by the author is that oftentimes companies use "commercial confidentiality" to prevent the data they submit to regulators from being scrutinized by the public.
Marketers of homeopathic products do not have to submit any reliable evidence that their products work before those products are marketed to the public.
In fact, the article's argument supports requiring marketers of homeopathic products provide reliable evidence to support their products' claims before allowing them to market same.
That you summarized it as "peer-review Vs public scrutiny" indicates that you did not understand the point the author was making. Given that the article was fairly short and uncomplicated I seriously question your ability to process information and, concomitantly, whether you are competent to give people advice on anything.
... led to about a thousand years of bloodletting being considered a valid medical treatment for all sorts of conditions. Clinical experience and anecdotes can mislead. The scientific method reduces the chance of being misled by things like that.
He was, in fact, the first medical doctor/researcher to employ a scientific method in
proving Homeopathic remedies. The medical history is quite clear on this point to those
who actually read it. It's obvious you haven't.
And, for the sake of the argument conceding that Hahnemann *did* investigate homeopathy in a scientific manner, it's easily possible to do science *badly*. Just look up the history of N-rays for an example.
The 'provings' he conducted started somewhat scientifically, but he started drifting off into la-la land rather easily. The first studies were of cinchona bark and malaria. But instead of thinking that there might have been something in the bark which killed the malaria parasites (which weren't known to exist yet), he decided that it must have something to do with the symptoms cinchona bark produced in people.
I need to take of my socks to count up the number of times someone in my family has had a condition that turned out to be self limiting. This includes ovarian cysts, episodes of cystitis, migraines, joint pains/arthritis, childhood asthma, menstrual problems and skin problems like eczema.
These all settled using the wonderful power of natural healing (though analgesics helped for times of pain symptoms).
However, for none of these conditions did anyone ascribe their "healing" to the mystical power of something like moonshine in October, or geese flying south in the winter. What is unclear is why you should attribute your healing to the magical construct known as homeopathy, particularly when it only appeared to make you more ill for a year.
Time is the greatest healer - that is something that doctors and homeopaths both know. The difference is that most doctors rightly do not say something other than time has helped their patients, as the homeopaths do.
Ovarian cysts are under hormanal influence, and besides varying within a woman's menstrual cycle can vary and easily regress over time.
Cystitis is a problem that besets many young women. It is bacterial in origin (to correct your ignorance). Individual episodes can be self limiting, but repeated attacks are occasionally common but improve over time and very rarely persist. Many women have attacks during their 20s, only to see them "spontaneously" resolve.
Migraines tend to reduce in frequency and severity over time. They are self-limiting. Even individual attacks will cease on their own (of course).
Arthritis can be a fluctuating and variable illness. Often there is spontaneous improvement because people cease doing things that exacerbate the problem (eg in my case I stopped playing soccer)
Eczema is frequent in childhood, and improves significantly as children grow older, usually completely resolving.
It is clear that many medical conditions run relapsing/remitting courses or spontaneously improve. Understandably, these are the very illnesses that homeopathy makes a huge song and dance about "curing".
Warts can be treated by rubbing with the secretions expressed from a toad. Works every time - within a year or 2 they disappear.
Draw your own conclusions.
Did duct tape cure it? I don't know. All I know is that it went away. It could very well have been self-limiting or affecting by something else that I wasn't paying attention to. I wouldn't start extoling duct tape as the cure-all for warts because of it, as some here are doing for homeopathy with their own aliments.
If homeopaths and their supporters limited their advice and practice to low-cost supplementary administration and admit that it could very likely just be a placebo, we wouldn't be having these big arguments. Instead, we have you and others who are extoling homeopathy as a direct and preferable alternative for any and all medical conditions. This is delusional, irresponsible, and exploitative.
One must know that not all cases aggravate. Only the chronic ones and that too a few ones. Aggravation is not a characteristic of a remedy - it is the characteristic of the disease. Sulphur (in potentised form as a homeopathic medicine) when given for insomnia would never aggravate it. But when given for skin would almost always aggravate the itching or the gravity of disease.
Wait, so are you actually saying that homeopathy can have negative effects?
http://homeopathyresource.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/extensive-study-concludes-homeopathic-remedies-and-treatment-are-safe/ (supporting previous results of a study done in 2005 by Reilly)
People who use homeopathics can experience what is called a healing crisis or aggravation. In chronic illnesses and some acute illnesses a healing crisis takes place in which more external symptoms like itching are temporarily worse. In the initial stages of treatment the remedy is doing all the work. When the immune system takes over the work of the remedy there is a healing crisis followed by cure.
Law of simplex (Organon 1st edition, 1810): One single medicine for the patient at any given time
[ref] In 1797 in his essay, "Are the obstacles to the attainment of simplicity and certainty in Practical Medicine insurmountable?" he wrote, "Is it good to mix various kinds of medicines in a prescription? He further asked, "How can medicine attain a higher degree of certainty, when the doctor seems intent only on allowing a number of miscellaneous forces to be exerted at the same time on a pathological state?. He further said, "May I be allowed to confess that for several years I have never prescribed more than one medicine at a time....May I be allowed to confess that, as a result, I have successfully cured patients to their satisfaction..."
ref: Samuel Hahnemann: his life and work, Richard Haehl, pp.68-70 http://bit.ly/l5kSdz
Thanks for your comment.
But homeopathy had nothing to do with it.
Former FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler, M.D., J.D., acknowledges that homeopathic remedies do not work but that he did not attempt to ban them because he felt that Congress would not support a ban.
Homeopathy remedies have been proven to be no better than a placebo. Systematic reviews of published trials fail to demonstrate efficacy.
When the broad body of homeopathic literature is considered, your statement that "homeopathic remedies have been proven to be no better than a placebo" is completely invalid.
There is a single (tremendously flawed and overtly biased) metanalyses which stated that their evidence supports the notion that homeopathic remedies work clinically by placebo, but all other metanalyses are either inconclusive or positive.
The most comprehensive review to date - the Health Technology Assessment compiled for the Swiss Federal Office for Public Health found that the weight of the current evidence indeed supports the clinical efficacy of homeopathy. This review was far more comprehensive in scope than any of the meta-analyses or systematic reviews and therefore is most valid.
Here are a number of studies demonstrating
1) homeopathy's clinical efficacy (as determined in randomized, controlled human clinical trials):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16883077
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9310601
2) homeopathy's real world effectiveness (non-randomized trials)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19091085
3) biological effects of supposedly "inert" homeopathic remedies:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19945674
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17544864
There are no trials of any quality that show homeopathy is capable of outperforming placebo.
That's all it is - an elaborate placebo.
Your citations fail to prove your claim. Strange how you dismiss the high quality reviews (which say homeopathy has no effect beyond placebo) as "flawed" (well what else would you say, I suppose), yet champion reviews which are demonstrably low quality/flawed as being great, because they conclude what you want them to say.
I also note that you cite one metanalysis by Linde (1997), but very strangely fail to cite the 1999 follow up to this in which the same authors stated:
"The evidence of bias (in trials of homeopathy) weakens the findings of our original meta-analysis. Since we completed our literature search in 1995, a considerable number of new homeopathy trials have been published. The fact that a number of the new high-quality trials have negative results, and a recent update of our review for the most "original" subtype of homeopathy (classical or individualized homeopathy), seem to confirm the finding that more rigorous trials have less-promising results. It seems, therefore, likely that our meta-analysis at least overestimated the effects of homeopathic treatments."
Funny how you guys who say you are objective and "scientific" can be so selective and cherrypick only the stuff that supports your case, isn't it?
That's not how science works, btw.
www.hpathy.com (search "Dr. Bhatia diabetes", "clinical cases" and "Ask the Doctor")
Cures of brain tumors:
www.pbhrfindia.org/index.php/cure-of-brain-tumor-casestudy-1
www.pbhrfindia.org/index.php/cure-of-brain-tumor-casestudy-2
Cures of other cancers:
www.pbhrfindia.org/index.php/case-studies
or just google "homeopathy cured cases" for a wide array of diseases
Thank you for sharing your story.
As others have said, it takes courage to do so - not only b/c it requires sharing personal information but also because there exists such a deep hostility and hatred of homeopathy by some people who usually are only too willing to let you know their opinions. I am actually shocked not to see any negative comments about homeopathy in the comment section so far.
As a naturopathic physician who utilizes homeopathy as the primary modality in my practice, I have the blessing to witness miracles like yours on a daily basis. It is such a bizarre existance to experience this amazing healing technology daily and yet read almost nothing but negativity about it in our broader society (in most media). It is through stories such as yours that this situation will eventually change.
Thank you again for sharing.
Here is a blog I write about homeopathic research: http://worldofhomeopathy.wordpress.com/
The guys just haven't found the post yet-it's coming, though.
And let the negative comments come. That is what this forum is about.
How can you have a relationship of trust with a patient if you do not disclose the fact that there is no large scale, properly blinded, methodologically rigorous clinical trial to support a single claim made by homeopaths?
Your response was that you disclose that homeopathy is not approved by the American Medical Association. Unfortunately, such a disclosure does not accurately convey the information the patient would require to provide informed consent.
Incidentally, I am also curious as to how you reconcile your promotion of homeopathy with the rules that you are require to follow as a licensed social worker.
Wishing you a joy-filled, healthy 2012, Mary