For the half billion people worldwide who use homeopathic remedies, the potions can be as healing as a hug, as benignly nutty as knocking wood for luck or as dangerous as believing a dashboard Jesus will protect you from an onrushing train. What homeopathy is not, however, is medicine that is scientifically proven to work better than a placebo. Independent researchers… return to article
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Reader Comments (16)Page 1 of 1 pagesUnfortunately, as logical as Ms. Allen sounds, she’s just plain wrong. I went to see a homeopath after a friend told me that homeopathy completely cured his migraines. I have suffered from migraines my whole life. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on neurologists, whose miracle drugs resulted in rebound headaches that were worse than anything I had experienced before.
I am finally getting relief—with the homeopathic remedy. It has been several months and the incidence and severity is better than cut in half and improving.
The key, of course, lies in seeing a reputable, experienced homeopath. My practitioner would never recomend a homeopathic remedy to protect against malaria. Common sense is important here!
The results that she has related about other patients she’s helped (no names, of course), are impressive. As with me, many people turn to homeopathy after years of little or no relief from our medical system. (And no, she’s not a liar!)
Ms. Allen, in her attempt to protect us all from bogeymen, is doing a disservice. The important thing is not to do away with treatments like homeopathy that work, but to use common sense. If I suffered a heart attack, I would not run to my homeopath, I would run to the E.R. Afterward, I would see the homeopath to help rebuild my strength.
She means well, but she’s wrong.
Posted by ChrisKM on Jan 25, 2007 at 8:59 PM You sound sensible, Chris. At any rate I don’t want the state dictating to us even more about medical treatment, etc.
Posted by blondemike on Jan 25, 2007 at 9:40 PM I also agree with Chris that Ms. Allen is just plain wrong. At one time there was Hannemann Hospital in San Francisco, which was a homeopathic facility. This was before the mega corporate Sutter chain bought out that and other local hospitals. One of my grandmothers who died in 1967, had an excellent homeopathic doctor. I believe that we need a health system in this country that encourages rather than discourages alternative medical care, such as homeopathic, chiropractic, herbal treatments, and acupuncture. No responsible homeopathy specialist would recommend their remedies for such illnesses as malaria. I happen to see a chiropractor. His treatments are extremely effective for my back. If a patient has some kind of ailment that he is not able to treat, he is able to diagnose that and will advise such a patient to see his or her primary doctor. It must be said that many drugs prescribed by our traditional doctors, often cause serious illnesses and deaths. Shame on In These Times, which is supposed to be a progressive alternative publication, for publishing this nonsense!
Posted by Walter on Jan 26, 2007 at 8:28 AM This is not a minor matter. Terry Allen has done a major service by writing these profound words. We are more than a few years after the Enlightenment, but hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted on unsupported quackery. If there is no proof, there is only blind luck and the benefits of massage. Why, then, is there a homeopath in my family, and why do otherwise smart women in America and the west chase so many pills, so many rubbings of newt, so much GNC profiteering? Because Americans are so good at not performing self-criticicism. And, as Ms. Allen so correctly points out, we are dunderheads at regulation. What an embarrassing state of affairs.
Posted by notabilia on Jan 26, 2007 at 1:10 PM I would have nothing against the FDA testing homoeopathic and other alternative remedies, if the traditional medical establishment wouldn’t be dominating matters. notabilia just ignored what Chris stated, which is that homeopathic remedies have prevented Chris from getting migraines for several months. As Chris said, “The key, of course, lies in seeing a reputable, experienced homeopath.” Homeopathy and the other altermative treatments must be enoucraged as I said. The practitioners of such professions must be licensed, just like our traditional providers. notabillia is correct about one thing. There IS profeterring, but the profiterring is also by the big Pharma corporations, and too many of the traditional doctors peddle their drugs onto their patients without those doctors doing their own research, which often results in a lot of harm. It’s obscene that there are all of these advertisements in the media. Both traditional and alternative medical treatments have their place.
Posted by Walter on Jan 26, 2007 at 5:55 PM Licensing is nothing but a tax for the state and a way to limit the number of doctors to raise the income of the remaining ones. People need to be free to make their own mistakes and learn from same. See Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom for a great argument against occupational licensing.
Posted by blondemike on Jan 26, 2007 at 7:25 PM With all due respect to Ms. Allen, if she had checked her facts she could not have written this article. Her unsubstantiated attacks border on the irresponsible. Homeopathy in fact is a complete system of medicine that is extremely effective in treating a very wide range of issues. And in fact, numerous studies have proved its effectiveness. I suggest these books for starters, if you’d like to get the straight story on homeopathy: Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy, by Amy L. Lansky, Ph.D. Her son was cured of autism by homeopathy, and in consequence, Dr. Lansky changed careers to become a homeopath herself. Another very good book is Homeopathy: Medicine of the New Man, by George Vithoulkas. Homeopathic medicine is in fact well worth looking into. A quick and easy way to get more information is to go to the website of the National Center for Homeopathy: www.homeopathic.org.
Posted by Kayla on Jan 27, 2007 at 2:58 AM I lived in a small community where many octogenarians had practiced homeopathy throughout their lives and woulsdstake their reputations proclaiming its effectiveness. The other 2/3 used pharmaceuticals and MDs.
I am allergic to bees and wasps. I would never use the bee sting remedy if I got stung, instead I have a kit with a shot of epinephrine standing by.
However, at one point I had two babies teething at the same time. A neighbor brought me, “Rescue Remedy” and suggested I rub it on their gums. I read the info which claimed it had 1 millionth part of something, This was many yeaars ago and I can’t remember what the something was. The solution tasted like water so I rubbed some on their gums and it worked! They stopped crying and went to sleep. I, also, got a good nights sleep.
I still am not a firm believer in homeopathy but the “Rescue Remedy” worked throughout the rest of their teething. It only helped them sleep when they were supposed to sleep, unlike the paregoric, which contained opium, that my mother used on us which knocked us out eveery time!
I do not know how or why it worked. I never found another homeopathic remedy that worked for us, but I swear by, Rescue Remedy” for teething!
Posted by gglodoe@msn.com on Jan 28, 2007 at 1:32 PM Christians have faith healing, i guess others have their own “techniques” such as homeopathy. Both are equally effective (spilling goats blood under the full moon is also just as effective).
But to be fair, we asre a superstitious species. And hope is very oftern better than nothing. Just don’t give up real medicine for hope. . .
Posted by wolf on Jan 28, 2007 at 11:13 PM Just to respond to some comments, because that’s what anyone who ventures an opnion should do:
1. Wolf is right about our superstitions, but that is precisely what science and the Enlightenment was made to counteract, which we owe so much our relative health and prosperity to. Otherwsie we’d still be reading chicken entrails for our medicine. Hope is actually way over-rated, as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in a great essay about her battle against breast cance rand the “hope industry.” Let people have their harmless little idiocies - why? Why let all those billions go to nonsense without comment? Why not tell people to grow up, find some evidence for their beliefs, and start to challenge their precious slef-divined “truths”?
2. There may some some little newt potions that worked in the past, that got the babies to sleep, but I be worried as hell about anything I was rubbing on my little infants’ gums. Western science offers you the possibility that the stuff has been studied, has been critically examined. Th problem is that we still are so afraid of being held accountable for a responsible system of regulation, that we leave the FDA toothless against the GNC juggernaut.
3. I agree with Waltr that Big Pharma is odious, but the answer is not going way backward to homeopathy. American women tend to be suspicious of Big Medicine, and so have wasted so much of our ill-earned shekels on supplements and rubbings of newt. We need to get serious, because these are billions we are talking about, because people get away with hope and hopeful nonsense because they do not see the government as able to be trusted with regulation. In the end, countless peopl suffer, countless advantages go wasted, and their defenders get to cite bogus “studies.”
4. Thanks to the good folks who responded. I certainly am no doctor, and am humble about my lack of scientific knowledge, but perhaps I am more aware of our human capacity for self-delusion?
Posted by notabilia on Jan 30, 2007 at 1:46 AM Well, I’ve been reading In These Times online for a while and haven’t commented on anything yet, but as the son of a practicing and teaching homeopath, I thought I would give some opinions on this piece.
1. First of all, if you have an acute trauma or life threatening situation, DO NOT GO TO A HOMEOPATH. They are not surgeons nor do they think homeopathic treatement can replace surgery or other sorts of necessary major interventions into the body. The idea that homeopaths would reject Western treatement for a broken bone is absolutely absurd. That said, I personally think, from experience, that homeopathy can have an enormous positive effect on recovery from acute injuries, as well as with chronic illness. The main difference between homeopathy and Western medicine is that homeopathy seeks to be curative where as western medicine mostly restricts itself to symptom management.
2. To ignore the contentiousness of immunization for a simplistic denouncement of homeopathy is again disigenous, but I won’t get into all of that.
3. Finally, I’ll quickly attest to my own good experience with homeopathy. I’ve never taken anti-biotics and recieved only one immunization in my life (for tetanus). Around a year ago I developed an acute infection that, if it didn’t get better quickly, would require hospitalization and surgery. I got a prescription filled for anti-biotics and, with my father, decided that I would begin taking them if the infection didn’t improve with homeopathic treatment within four days. My dad began treating me, giving me what are generally known as constitutional remedies and other various ones often connected to infections but none were working and by the third day I was in extreme pain and decided that the next day I would start Western treatement. At around three in the morning my dad woke me up and told me he had had an epiphany while he was sleeping and gave me a new remedy. When I woke up the next morning, the infection had started draining and by the next day I was back at school. If it was only a placebo effect, wouldn’t the first remedy have had the same effect as the last? Of course, this is only one person’s anecdote (I have plenty more) and doesn’t prove anything, but at the same time try not to be totally beholden to the dominant paradigm of health and healing.
Posted by Steven on Jan 30, 2007 at 7:49 AM Thank you Steven! I also say don’t go to a homeopath, a chiropractor, or an acupuncturist for acute trauma or a life threatening situation. And furthermore, no honest practitioner in any of these fields would treat a patient who is in that situation, but would refer him/her to their primary doctor. If there are dishonest practitioners in the above fields, there are also dishonest traditional medical practitioners.
I have never been treated by a homeopath, but as I previously mentioned, I am a patient of a chiropractor and an acupuncturist who treats a minor ailment that I have with herbs which are very effective. I also have my traditional primary doctor. I go to whichever practitioner takes care of whatever particular medical problems I may have.
I would like to see a system where we would have medical networks where all of these medical professionals work together. I believe that in order for one to become a traditional doctor, that he or she must have some knowledge of the various alternative forms of medical care. Before I ever visited a chiropractor, I once asked a former traditional doctor his opinion about seeing a chiropractor for my back problem. The doctor replied in a very stern manner “When you have a problem with your back, you don’t go to a chiropractor, you come to me! And if I can’t help you, I’ll send you to an orthopedic.” Well, I went to a chiropractor and my back has since been so much better. Under a system that I just mentioned, in many cases one’s regular traditional doctor would have to refer their patients to one or any of the alternative practitioners that I mentioned at first, before giving drugs or performing invasive and expensive surgery. Note, that I didn’t say in ALL cases. When I tell my current regular primary doctor that I’m being treated by a chiropractor and an acupuncturist, he says that as long as the treatments that I get work that it’s fine with him.
Posted by Walter on Jan 30, 2007 at 8:58 AM In my personal experience, and that of a close friend, homeopathy works. My friend, who had been experiencing debilitating migraines, went to a homepath and was completely cured—has never (in over twenty years) experienced another migraine. If this be called quackery, so be it.
My own experience is that my migraines are improving steadily, in both length and severity. Placebo? Very unlikely, since I’ve tried everything under the sun in the past and nothing worked—I wasn’t exactly convinced this was going to be the ticket, but after my friend told me of his experience, thought I’d try it. If anything was going to work through the placebo effect, it would’ve been the drugs I tried with the MDs, since they are so sure of themselves and their methods. They only made things worse, though.
I have suffered greatly from the treatments that MDs have given me; I have not suffered one iota from the homeopathic treatment.
In the past, I tried the homeopathic remedies you can buy off the shelf in the health food stores. These did not work for me. It takes the skill of a trained, experienced homeopath to determine which remedy to use—the hit and miss approach of packaged remedies does not seem very helpful. This is probably why gglodoe says, “I never found another homeopathic remedy that worked for us.” It is unlikely an untrained individual will be able to find the correct remedy.
And here’s another tidbit: the homeopathic remedy that I’m taking is meant to work on my whole system, not just migraines. A few weeks after I began taking the remedy, my chronic eczema started to clear up and is now completely gone. This cannot be due to the placebo effect, because I was only thinking about my migraines, since they were the most difficult symptom to live with. I was astonished when the eczema started to clear. (The steroids the doctors prescribed only made it worse due to the rebound effect.)
I am a very logic-minded, critically thinking individual. I worked as a scientist for many years. Unfortunately, it took years of suffering before I went to a homeopathic doctor. I am not superstitious or foolish or easily led down blind alleys.
It may be hard to understand why it works, but it does, and it is a heck of a lot less harmful than what many MDs are doing. It’s only a waste of money if it doesn’t work. I hate to think of the thousands and thousands of dollars I spent on doctors/neurologists only to find my headaches worsening from their “cures.” Now add to that everybody else who has been harmed by our medical system and THAT’S billions and billions of dollars down the drain.
The fact is, we need both—the “traditional” system and the alternatives—but our society is so weighted toward our MD-centric system, and people who attack legitimate forms of healing like homeopathy only serve to make it more so. Our system is great for emergencies but not so good when it comes to preventive or non-emergency care. The sooner we accept that, and help people toward healing (not drugs for every symptom), the better off we’ll all be.
Posted by ChrisKM on Jan 30, 2007 at 7:11 PM What has been completely overlooked in the comments in my quick reading of them is that homeopathy is based on treating each person as a unique individual (who changes over time). Therefore, one person with a migraine may be aided by one homeopathic remedy, another person by another type of remedy, and the same person by two different remedies at different stages of their lives. The fact that Western medicine does not take this approach may explain why so many pharmaceuticals are actually effective in far fewer than 100% of cases - often fewer than 50% of cases.
The homeopathic approach takes not only the symptoms into account, but also the patient’s general state of mental and physical well-being. This approach is more difficult to test scientifically - i.e., each patient must see a homeopath, and then be prescribed the appropriate remedy. The appropriate remedy will be different from patient to patient for the same medical ‘problem’ (as defined by Western medicine). Randomized, double-blind scientific studies start from the assumption of the body as purely a chemical-mechanical entity that can be ‘fixed’ mechanically or chemically. If you exhibit certain symptoms of ill-health, it is assumed that the fix will be the same for you as for everyone else.
We are imposing our belief that the scientific method (and its associated method of statistical-experimental design, which assumes we are all the same in our response to stimuli, homeopathic or otherwise) is the only way to ascertain the validity of an approach to medicine. It is a very good approach in many cases, and quite possibly the only way that is seen as reliable from our point of view, but is it not possible that it is missing something here? Our Western minds so often forget to critically examine the underlying assumptions through which we think and operate.
Posted by Scott9 on Jan 31, 2007 at 6:09 PM Good points, Scott. We need both, it’s not either/or.
Posted by blondemike on Jan 31, 2007 at 6:25 PM Scott, I also say that it’s not an eirher/or situation. And that applies to the other alternative medical practices such as chiropractic, acupunture, and herbal specialists. We need a system where the traditional western and the alternative medical professions work together, with western medical doctors being required to have some knowledge of the alternative forms of medical care, as I said before. And such a system must not be dominated by the traditional western medical establishment and big pharma.
Posted by Walter on Jan 31, 2007 at 6:55 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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