The world has accelerated since the simple horse-and-buggy days of Hahnemann’s time, and so our approach to homeopathic treatment must become just as advanced and dynamic. With technological, scientific, and medical progress, the diseases and disorders we suffer from have become more complicated and more aggressive.
The evidence shows that patients, not physicians, are the primary impetus for the increasing call for homeopathic cancer treatment worldwide. In the countries where homeopathic treatment is available, treatment is often provided in the absence of good professional references on homeopathic cancer drugs.
In a previous paper we have shown that tautopathic therapy has been a product and outcome of homeopathic practice ever since the classical era of homeopathy.2 Although minor controversies about the place tautopathy ought to maintain within homeopathic practice continue to the present time…
Lori was middle-aged, around 50. She appeared thin, haggard, nervous and so restless, she could not sit still for even a moment. She would fidget constantly. Her arms and legs were twitching and jerking. She would jump up suddenly, pace back and forth and then sit back down again.
“My heart races, my blood pressure is high. I have tried to stay away from blood pressure medication. Instead, I take bugleweed tincture for it. It brings it down some, but not enough. The problem is my thyroid; I have been diagnosed with Graves’ disease (an autoimmune form of hyperthyroidism). At first they had me taking beta blockers for the high blood pressure, but I did not like the drugs. Actually, they did not like me! I got worse headaches from them, and was even more tired. So, I weaned myself off the medication, and now I am taking the bugleweed. I am feeling better but still have a lot of problems. I am depressed and tired. My eyes are irritated. I get headaches every day. I have heart palpitations. I am always too hot. I’m nervous, anxious, even panicky, and I have lost weight as you can see (showing me the waist band of her pants), even though I have a very good appetite. I hope you can help me.” I assured her we’d give it a good try before I gave up on the case. Read more
This article was originally submitted to the CAM Educational Project of the Program on Integrative Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, September 2001. It was updated in 2003 to reflect recent developments in anti-CAM activities in North Carolina.
As the term “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (CAM) becomes a household word in government and academic texts, it is worthwhile to reexamine its significance. “Complementary” and “alternative” imply a juxtaposition to “mainstream” medicine that is questionable for a variety of reasons. The term distorts the real role a diverse group of traditional ethnic and innovative therapies, lumped together under the term CAM, play in the lives of a majority of the world’s population. The term obscures the long-standing exclusion of these treatments by the medical and pharmaceutical power structure from the practice of medicine, which, until a few years ago, labeled (libeled?) these therapies “quackery” and “health fraud”. Today it continues to marginalize them by relegating them to a fictitious category of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, invoking scientific arguments to rationalize this exclusion while avoiding any reference to economic motives. This robs legitimate, but unorthodox, medical paradigms of their rightful place within medical science, and may even be harmful to people’s health.
Millions in Africa, Russia, China, India, Central and South America, Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States claim to benefit from homeopathy, acupuncture, ayurveda, herbalism, nature cures, and many other approaches as their main or only method of health care. Most people in those countries neither perceive these therapies as an alternative nor as complementary to “mainstream” medicine. Considering that far more people are treated with “CAM” therapies worldwide than by “Western” medicine, it is a mystery, to say the least, that the definition of the term CAM has not been more widely questioned. Read more
