Dr Debasish Sarma Roy. MD (Hom)
Email: drdsroy@rediffmail.com
The thought came while attending a seminar lately – whether it was time to look at the Schrodinger cat in Homeopathy. The question was how you can bring it out alive? Was it possible? Yes, I think. By altering the nature of the poison inside, or altering the very nature of the homeopathic principles and practices, drawing out the dogmas, thinking rationally, and by not being led into a block hole as some vested bodies are trying for centuries!
It was yet another milestone for Homeopathy in Tripura – in the form of state level workshop on mainstreaming of AYUSH in India, on 26th June, 2010. Yet another show of the poverty of our thinking! The dignitaries from Delhi, representing none other than the CCRH and the head of its technical staff delivering lectures on the FAQs about homeopathy for lay people, its scope and limitations and methodology of treatment! This happened when another fresh spurt of attack was pointed towards homeopathy internationally, when groups of people around the globe, specially in the EU countries took homeopathic pills in busy hours in busy intersections of roads in some of the busiest cities of the world to prove that homeopathy was nothing but placebo in its effects! Of course, the CCRH representatives speaking on that day clarified that they have released leaflets pointing out the fallacies of study protocols etc of now much hyped Lancet article denouncing homeopathy, as well as against the later day letdowns. These leaflets were distributed in different health fairs etc among common people.
Does that make any sense?
Are these in any way comparable to the publicity any anti-homeopathy proclivity the media (both electronic and print) indulges upon? Just think about the BMA (British Medical Association) members taking a resolution in their conference in Brighton urging the government to stop funding homeopathy in the NHS (please see BBC Health website, dated 30.6.2010)! What a publicity they attracted just for their “I know everything” attitude!
Are they authorized to say Ayurved does not work, or homeopathy does not work, all because someone wrote something in the internet! Are the commoners in any way concerned about the scientific solidity of homeopathic principles as long as they got benefit from the treatment? May be the CCRH or respective bodies in different countries could point it out to the governments concerned so that the flow of funds were not choked up.
What was most astonishing in the speeches delivered was the principle of homeopathy followed by the CCRH and was urged to be followed by the others. They advocated single remedy prescribing, at the same time they also pointed out clearly which diseases were to be treated by homeopathy and which not. In case of emergency the advice was to refer the patients to allopathic practitioners immediately! But still one remedy norm was to be followed and after application of one single dose the doctor was advised to wait till the actions of this dose were finished! When was this going to happen – what duration to wait for in what diseases – the question could not be answered specifically since Hahnemannian era!
There were of course numerous versions – wait till such and such things occur. Are you sure that this is surely going to occur? Theoretically yes, practically very remote chance! How many percent you are sure that this or that is going to happen? Why we homeopaths can’t accept what we see with our naked eyes everyday in daily practice as the real truth and are always searching for some miraculous and rare occasions to happen, as they were described in a time when the lifestyle of human being were serene enough to wait for, speculate and self impose a lot of different thoughts / sensations on oneself?
Then comes the question of homeopathic aggravations! If a hypertensive or diabetic patient, or a patient suffering from say urinary tract infection, is to wait after a single dose of medicine till something happen, if at all, and then the remedy is found to be incorrect in nature or potency, then another dose and another period of long wait! Who will take the responsibility for the lowering of longevity or increased chances of complications for this long waits? Sure enough the CCRH won’t.
As they have already asked to refer the patient to other system of medicine then. What happens when the patient is referred to other system of medicine? Is he then treated with the most harmless medicines in the creation? One single dose of any allopathic medicine is much more voluminous and much more destructive to the system than any single homeopathic medicine taken life long even if selected wrongly (barring some mother tinctures / mother substances / very low potencies). This is plausible and can be proved easily with DBRCT study, quite unlike the notions of stalwarts (!) that ‘wrongly prescribed homeopathic medicines are much more harmful than the allopathic treatment’!
The reasons behind this notion are numerous. But after all, you are allowed to consume those poisons, still you are not supposed to repeat your medicine more frequently or add one or more medicine to get the same effect as would have been done with the allopathic poisons? How funny! You are supposed to refer the patient to receive ACE-inhibitors prescribed for his hypertension, though it is supposed to increase the chances of his developing cancer – as per a study report (meta analysis) published in The Lancet (oh no! not again this name!), on approximately the same time the workshop was organized at Agartala with CCRH dignitaries vouching for single medicine norms and referring patients to allopathy! (Ref. The Lancet Oncology, Early Online Publication, 14 June 2010, doi:10.1016/S1470-2045(10)70106-6, “Angiotensin-receptor blockade and risk of cancer: meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials”, by Dr. Ilke Sipahi et all). Or, the diabetic patient is referred to take oral hypoglycemic agents, many of which have documented side effects to increase cardiovascular mortalities besides other effects! Or just think about the UTI patient you have so mercilessly advised to refer to the other system of medicine!
What they’ll do here? Of course give him a course of the appropriate antibiotic, if he is sensitive he’ll hopefully respond. Otherwise another group of antibiotic will follow. Think about the innumerable cases of viral fevers and viral diarrheas being treated with antibiotic each and every day across the globe, specially in the developing worlds! The UTI patient at least deserved that course. What about these viral infections? How many cases of viral fevers treated with antibiotic can prevent even a single case of secondary pneumonia?
A conservative estimate 1 in 4000! How still you cannot prescribe Glonoine or Rawolfia to lower his BP though these, even when taken for eons, are way too harmless than a single dose of any allopathic antihypertensive? What has the patient done to you to deserve such maltreatment? Are you being pressurized from some source or other to truncate your area of applications? Or is it that the allopathic pharmaceuticals and dogmatic physicians are dragging foxily the world homeopathic bodies in a position that they are made to acknowledge that there is nothing in homeopathy excepting the extremely potentized medicines and all other potencies are gradually to be taken off the shelf and thus it would be easier for them to corner the system more and more?
Already they have succeeded in the very first phase when Hahnemann was strongly and constantly criticized and ultimately barred to prescribe medicines in the name of homeopathic aggravations, thereby forcing him to experiment with gradually higher dilutions of medicines, the single most attacking point now against homeopathy by the so-called world scientific bodies. There is more in homeopathy than single simple potentized medicines, which if perfected well by all of our sincere efforts, can take the system to its height and will be a welcome relief for the hapless people and for the more at loss governments of different countries across the globe who are solely at the mercy of the multinational pharma giants now. Even the WHO is used by them, as surfaced from a report (dated 4th June, 2010, as run by the BBC Health website) that stockpiling of antiviral drugs for swineflu, ‘Tamiflu’ made by Roche and ‘Relenza’ manufactured by GlaxoSmthlkine by different countries (governmental purchase) were done on advise of WHO experts who received financial kickbacks from those pharma companies.
Think about the UTI patient again, or take any other bacterial infection case. What the allopaths would do – prescribe the appropriate antibiotic course. How adversely that would affect the patient besides controlling the infection? Of course it will destroy a huge bulk of our commensal flora as well. Now these commensals are considered as our second genome, constantly swapping genetic information with our immune system cells, thereby helping our systems to preserve the milieu. There are scores of articles supporting this notion.
A few are – A human gut microbial gene catalogue established by metagenomic sequencing (by S. Dusko Ehrlich et al, Nature, 464, 59-65, 4th March, 2010), Activation of TLR2 by a Small Molecule Produced by Staphylococcus epidermidis Increases Antimicrobial Defense Against Bacterial Skin Infections (by Yuping Lai et al, Journal of Investigative Dermatology, advance online publication, 13 May, 2010). By killing the commensals we are giving scope to the newer strains of bacteria and fungi to colonize our body, which drastically alters the functioning our immune system cells, in the long run producing a wide array of allergic and auto-immune disorders – ranging from bronchial asthma, vitiligo, different kinds of arthritis, and so on – an unending list of diseases. Is this the spectrum of disorders what master Hahnemann pointed out to be Psora? Because no suppression of itch mite disease can produce what he called psora.
That is for certain. It is beyond all scientific knowledge that Sarcoptes Scabei infestations when ‘suppressed’ or otherwise, could give rise to such a diverse alterations in the human genome making it susceptible to such a wide spectrum of disease conditions. Why we can’t accept this fact yet, and trying for generations to formulate some theory or other to prove that Hahnemann could see everything like Nastradamus what science will unravel even after thousands of years! Is this possible for any human being? No scientist ever was fully correct in his theory or predictions – not even the likes of Einstein or Newton. Are not we digging our own graves keeping the science at exactly the same level where Hahnemann left it nearly two hundred years ago?
Are not we by keeping the science still in 1840s disrespecting Hahnemann, a true scientist, who himself changed and modified his views at least 6 times in a span of roughly 40 years? How come hundreds and thousands of qualified homeopaths for so many years could not accept this fact? Why can’t we understand that accepting the 1840 version of science is ultimately making Hahnemann more disgraceful than what he could probably draw from all his opponents over two hundred years! Is there no one who can tell that the king has no clothes instead of praising the texture and patterns of the clothes which are nonexistent? This is way out of what my article aimed at, but nonetheless comes inevitably at the end as we are becoming more “scientific” now – taking up laboratory diagnosis for documentation of efficacy of homeopathy.
If the nosological diagnosis is a must (we don’t nowadays diagnose a case as Psoric, Syphilitic, or Sycotic any more, who in the world would believe in that anyway excepting a few of us, and of course Hahnemann also urged to tell the patient the diagnosis as ‘a kind of ague’ and so on!) to know the prognosis and management of a case, as is advocated by almost each and every homeopath who are worth their salts, how do you consider the fact that all three so called miasmatic states (let alone some other newer miasms incorporated by later day stalwarts) are active simultaneously in many of the chronic cases that comes to us? Either you diagnose a case as a nosological entity, many of which are present in a single person many of the times, with completely known etiology and prognostic factors, or diagnose the case as a miasmatic one – where you know the prognosis for sure – that the vital force is unable to cure this without proper anti-miasmatic treatment, and if not done will ultimately lead the patient to his grave (chronic miasmatic cases to be assumed here please).
Now which story is true? We can keep the diversity of psora in mind here – (section 80, 5th edition) – ”nervous debility, hysteria, hypochondriasis, mania, melancholia, imbecility, madness, epilepsy and convulsions of all sorts, softening of the bones (rachitis) scoliosis and cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungus haematodes, neoplasms, gout, haemorrhoids, jaundice, cyanosis, dropsy, amenorrhea, haemorrhage from the stomach, nose, lungs, bladder, and womb, of asthma and ulceration of the lungs, of impotence and barrenness, of megrim, deafness, cataract, Amaurosis, urinary calculus, paralysis, defects of the senses and pains of thousands of kinds, & c.”
You name it, you have it! All sorts of etiopathogeneses are punched here – infective, genetic, metabolic, toxicological, auto-immune, what not! And all of these are not going to kill us if left untreated or treated by other systems of medicines – as has been told about the prognosis of Psora! So, when you are personally ill with any of these diseases what’ll you believe in – that you’re going to die unless properly treated, though many of the diseases mentioned here are self limiting? Will you be equally anxious if afflicted by any of these disease conditions – as all of these are caused by psora itself? Of course it is scientific to get a nosological diagnosis. But, even after that why this fuss about miasm?
To prove how close I am to the power circle? Like what the chelas of politicians or gurus do? Or if you tell that you don’t believe in miasms in the Hahnemannian sense (let out the futile efforts to incorporate everything like theories by scores of followers – rush to perfect the ‘theory of everything’ ahead of Stephen Hawking!) – then you declare yourself to miss the entire bus of homeopathic philosophy? Have not heard so far in my life anyone to say as much standing in a podium. We homeopaths are destined for perfecting the art of hypocrisy, lest we declare ourselves a fool. How many improbable theories are there in the market now regarding the concepts of miasms? How many funny ideas to prove Hahnemann meant everything right from bacteria / viruses / genes / traits and all! Just like Nastradamus, or closer home our religious scriptures –where we find everything from atom bombs to molecular biology!
As for “Sycosis”, Hahnemann was close enough, it seems. The “condylomatous disease” is indeed being increasingly proved to be a menace to human being – the Human Papilloma Virus infection is the culprit behind this, Gonococcus is not the scapegoat! Why can’t we change these notions and incorporate the present day knowledge of medicine as our sole area of concern and think about the cause of recurrence of diseases after treatment as due to the un-matching depth of diseases and drug actions, now known etiopathologicl factors and removal of them, etc, rather than making the miasms as ultimate culprit?
Even if anyone wants to incorporate the genetico-environmental spectrum as basis of miasm, then why not term it that way? It’ll not harm the world excepting making you feel like losing your much worn pyjamas! Well, the jeans will be waiting for you then! Of course, the pun is fully intended.
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