| What is Homeopathy and More |
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| FAQs - General Questions and Answers about Homeopathy | |
Q. What is homeopathy?
A. Homeopathy is a form of medical treatment and a pharmaceutical science that predates conventional drug treatment by at least a hundred years. The German physician and medical genius Dr. Samuel Hahnemann developed it in the late eighteenth century. It has been practiced and developed further since and today it enjoys great popularity worldwide. Q.How is it different from conventional medicine? A. Homeopathy works with nature rather than against it. It uses the disease symptoms to its benefit rather than working against them or trying to palliate them. Disease is an expression of the body’s natural repair capacity. Homeopathic medicines are given to aid the body’s natural self-healing impulse to overcome the illness and restore itself back to health. Homeopathy is about curing diseases, not merely about getting rid of symptoms. When you take an aspirin, you may alleviate the symptoms, but you do not address the cause of the trouble. Most modern drugs work by suppressing or opposing the symptoms. That is why, for example, they have names with the prefix “anti-”, which means “against”- like antihistamines, antidepressants, antispasmodics, etc.
A. The body produces symptoms to overcome a threat or imbalance and to restore health. For example, a runny nose is the natural way to get rid of foreign material, like viral particles. Or the body creates high blood pressure to counter a circulation problem. Or it makes you cough or sneeze to rid the body of dust, etc. When you treat by suppressing or opposing these symptoms, you work against the body’s self-restorative effort. It is counterproductive and slows the recovery. There is a better way: help the body in its effort to get well.
Q. But aren’t some symptoms uncomfortable or even dangerous? A. Yes, sometimes, severe pain can cause problems, and hypertension can kill. Suppression may be necessary for a time. But it is better wherever possible to relieve the discomfort by treating the underlying trouble without countering the self-healing impulse. Also, suppressing symptoms can be, and is often, more dangerous. Q. Why?
A. Suppressing symptoms can hide the real problem. Suppose you have partially blocked arteries, and your body produces high blood pressure to compensate for it. Then you suppress the blood pressure with medication. This can increase the blockage in the brain arteries and cause a stroke, or increase the blockage in the heart and cause a heart attack. In suppressing symptoms you always make the problem worse over the long run. Q: Don’t you get better when the symptoms go away?
A. The symptoms you suppress come back after you withdraw the medication. This shows you have not cured the illness. That is the case in most conventional treatment of chronic illnesses. That is why so many people have to take medication for the rest of their lives. Look at all the people on blood pressure medicine or diabetes medicine. But their diseases are never cured.
Q. Are you saying these diseases could be cured?
A. Yes. Homeopathic treatment usually cures these disorders and most other chronic diseases, like depression, heart disease, mental illness, and even cancer. Q. How is that done? A. Homeopathy works by the method of similarity. All drugs have effects. The homeopathic physician selects a medicine whose effects resemble the patient’s disorder. Each medicine has been tested on healthy people. Each drug causes a peculiar drug disorder in a healthy person. A drug is in used homeopathy in a minute dose to cure a similar disorder in a patient. This is because such a drug triggers the appropriate healing response in patients with similar symptoms. Q. Hmm. Would not the symptoms only get worse?
A. Not if the substance is given in a small enough dose. Q. Tell me more.
A. Suppose you have heart failure with a very slow, irregular heart beat that seems to stop whenever you move, with swelling of the legs, and other characteristic symptoms. You could benefit from the diluted tincture of the foxglove, or Digitalis. It causes a similar group of symptoms when it is tested on healthy people. If given over a period of time in diluted form, the body quickly and gently overcomes the illness. In this case, heart disease may be reversed. Homeopaths work with a huge database called a materia medica that tells them the exact symptoms that have been evoked during controlled experiments with thousands of medicinal substances that can be used to treat a wide variety of disorders. Q. What substance would you give for diabetes, for example? A. As with all disease entities, not all patients with diabetes have the same symptoms. Some patients are obese, some lose weight. Some crave sweets, some crave starchy foods. Some are chronically too warm, others too chilly. When the similarity between a given case of diabetes and the drug is great, that medicine is likely to restore health. The homeopathic physician selects a substance that best fits the individual patient’s characteristics and the symptoms of the case of disease. Q. How is that done?
A. During the examination, homeopaths question and observe the patient thoroughly to assess their specific characteristics. They tailor the remedy to each individual case of illness, not according to a disease entity. Q. If homeopathy can cure diseases like heart disease and cancer, why have I never heard of it? A. There is an organized effort to destroy homeopathy. For the past hundred years the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance industries have gained increasing influence over what medicine is available and over the news media*. They have managed to keep factual information about homeopathy from the general public. Even today, after homeopathy has become more known, there are virtually no fair articles or TV programs that educate people about homeopathy. What articles appear are mostly cheap attempts to ridicule homeopathy and homeopathic practitioners, even by the most respectable sources, without citing facts. *Please see the last question to learn more
Q. Why would they do that?
A. Most of the TV and newspaper revenue comes from advertisements of the pharmaceutical industry. The industry tolerates no competition from homeopathy. Even mainstream talk shows routinely screen out callers who want to report about their successful homeopathic treatment. My clients have reported this to me time and again – they would call into a program to report their story, and the host would not take their call or would cut them off before they finished if they managed to get “on the air”.
Q. Do you have any examples?
A. Several years ago, a patient who had recovered from a chronic disease through homeopathic treatment listened to “People’s Pharmacy” with hosts Joe and Terry Graedon on public radio. Even though this was an open show, and the topic was appropriate, when she called to tell her story she was told the subject was no longer of interest. I have had hundreds of reports like that over the past three decades. Q. But how could they keep homeopaths from advertising?
A. It is a question of profit. By nature, homeopathy is not a very profitable profession. This is because homeopaths work themselves out of the job. They cure their patients. This means they do not rely in permanent patients who keep coming back and stay on medication for the rest of their lives. Homeopathy restores their health and they may never need treatment again. Homeopaths charge for their time, and when the patient is cured the income stops. As a result, homeopaths simply don’t have the kind of funds needed to advertise on TV. Homeopathic pharmacies aren’t getting rich either. They sell fewer medicines if patients don’t stay on drugs for the rest of their lives. Q. Wouldn’t insurance companies welcome a medical method that cures? A. No. The insurance business has no incentive to reduce health care costs. The entire health insurance business is based on predictable risk of catastrophic treatment costs. If there is no risk of expense no insurance is needed. The higher the expense, the higher the risk, the more coverage is needed, the more business, the better the profits for the insurer. Would you pay out hundreds of dollars a month for insurance if you could afford the treatment? Most people pay less to a homeopath during the time they need treatment than it costs to have health insurance for that time. It is the fear of catastrophic expense that keeps the health insurance companies in business. Conventional treatment, like surgeries and organ transplants, are expensive. Q. You are saying that homeopathy could prevent heroic treatments like surgery and transplants? A. In most cases surgery could be prevented with homeopathic treatment. For example, most coronary artery disease could by prevented and treated with homeopathic treatment and diet. As the famous homeopathic surgeon Dr. Alonzo Shadman showed in this book Who is Your Doctor and Why, many desperate surgical cases of heart disease and cancer can still be resolved through homeopathic treatment. They become desperate because the suppressive method was used for too long. Patients get sicker under suppressive treatment. Research has shown that it is not unusual that heart disease is induced by years of high blood pressure medicine. All of this could be prevented by more benign treatment. Even so, many advanced cases of arthritis, heart disease, cancer and many other chronic disorders can be reversed without resorting to dangerous surgeries, radiation or drug therapy. Q. Do most drugs cause other chronic diseases?
A. Yes. While this is very disconcerting news to patients, it is a very lucrative business for the pharmaceutical industry and the doctors. You can refer to any Physicians Desk Reference for the side effects of drugs or visit sites like www.rxlist.com or www.drugs.com for more information. Q. Is homeopathic treatment safe?
A. Yes, it is overall very safe when used by trained practitioners. Millions of patients enjoy homeopathic care around the world, but you never hear of any documented cases of death or injury from homeopathic treatment. Homeopathic drugs are safe. You will find no cases of sickness or death from poisoning by these drugs from the Poison Control Centers. Conventional drug treatment, on the other hand, causes more than 250,000 deaths annually in the United States alone. And an estimated 2.1 million are seriously injured by conventional drugs every year in this country. Q. Is homeopathy more popular in other countries?
A. Homeopathy is more widely accepted in Europe. The British Royal Family has enjoyed homeopathic treatment since the early nineteenth century. In Germany you will find a homeopathic pharmacy in every small town. But even there, after World War II, the international pharmaceutical industry did their best to eradicate homeopathy. Homeopathy is one of the three accepted forms of medicine by the government of India. Homeopathy actually was also once very popular in the United States. At the beginning of the twentieth century we had more than twenty homeopathic colleges and more than a hundred homeopathic hospitals in this country. Q. What happened?
A. The Rothschild/Rockefeller oil and banking interests that controlled a vast number of private trusts and public corporations decided to get into the pharmaceutical business. With the invention of synthetic drugs -- mostly derived from petroleum -- they knew they had a way to change medicine into a profitable enterprise. They were building a monopoly – total control over the drug business, as they had already taken over the oil business and the banking business. Ironically, old man John D. Rockefeller himself used homeopathy until well into his nineties. That did not prevent him, his sons and grandsons from turning the rest of Americans and most of the industrialized world’s population into medical drug addicts. With the help of the Carnegie Foundation they generated the “Flexner Report”. This report on medical education was very critical of (meaning, “biased against”) homeopathic colleges and any college teaching a form of medicine that would not require synthetic drugs. As a result, funding was withdrawn from these colleges causes most of them to close from a financial basis. The Rockefeller drug trust was formed in 1939. It controlled vast international chemical and pharmaceutical enterprises, including the Wellcome Trust in Britain, I.G. Farben in Germany and many others. The drug trust is still in control of most of the world’s pharmaceutical industry and most of the medical research, education and publishing, and it controls the popular mainstream media. Q. How can I read more about homeopathy and its history?
A. There are many good books about homeopathy. Good general introductions on homeopathy are:
Excellent bocks on the Drug Trust and on the assault on medical freedom are:
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