Very interesting article.

The arsenicum story is a good one to examine:

1. It involves self-medication, and what looks like a prescription from a doctor who is not a homeopath (look at the posology--like taking headache medication or allopathic anti-diarrhea medication...same schedule of repetition--and clearly along allopathic lines when you consider the length of the dosing schedule--August to October!!!!!);

2. It involves self-medication with what looks like the wrong remedy, from here; as well as no intervention from the practicing prescriber (another reason to believe a conventional medical doctor dealt with this patient--no evidence of personal contact or in-person casetaking).

3.
oversensitivity to cold
insensitivity on finger-tips and legs
swelling of eye-lids
itching dry skin without eruption
ascending paralysis.
Arsenicum levels elevated in urine and blood
(this last one must be either an autopsy finding or a finding made and then ignored)

These are all CLEAR symptoms of poisoning. ANY doctor would have recognized them. In particular, a homeopath would have recognized WHICH poison had been taken.

This isn't a case of homeopathy killing a patient, its a case of medical negligence: it seems very clear from just this amount of information that no one supervised this case. I question why anyone would have prescribed anything at all for the initial complaint, anyway. The patient was described as "a healthy person, no chronic diseases".

Here's what I have problems with, in this article--don't know if this is the author, or just additional commentary, but:

Oh, I agree here--and most homeopaths do this in the office with each patient, and out of the office, teaching classes in an effort to market themselves as practitioners. Believe me--homeopaths can't tap dance fast enough to do this with their patients...and many of those patients don't care. Homeopaths KNOW they have to do this work in order to survive and to help patients--and they are the best form of education out there, for the general public. And they manage to do this despite the concerted efforts of conventional medicine and its interest's to keep homeopathy marginalized as a medical treatment.

A far better recommendation would be to educate journalists and "Quackbusters" to stop publishing misleading articles about homeopathy--in short, stop the smear campaign that is going on in the media and the medical schools.

This wouldn't have prevented this patient from medicating herself; nor does this prevent untrained medical staff from "practicing" their version of homeopathy, without any understanding of how it works. Clearly we need to restrict the practice of homeopathy only to people who have studied homeopathic medicine--regardless of their accreditations in other forms of medicine.This is not being done--and it won't be done as long as allopathic medicine continues to maintain its hegemony.

This is called The Materia Medica. An index to this vast database exists, as well: it is known as a Repertory. This database and index have been over 2 centuries in the making.

The article is written by conventional medical doctors who do not know or understand homeopathy, and their bias is clear (particularly in the sentence which states that the public holds the opinion that homeopathic medicines not only have no curative effect--but they cannot harm anyone either! That's a rather presumptive statement in an article that's supposed to be about facts. It also puts their bias and their motive right there on the table.)

That's all I can think to write right now, as I'm not sure whether this article was written to discredit homeopathy or cast some disparagement on homeopaths...Homeopaths are missing as a presence in the article, except as a target.

To me, this "arsenicum" story parallels the countless prescriptions of drugs made every day in conventional medicine, whose use is--by nature of the practice--unsupervised. Deaths result from the mis-prescribing, unsupervised prescribing, and continued misuse of those drugs all the time...but those deaths are never properly attributed to case mismanagement and inadequate medical training on the doctor's part.

Divina

[ 04 March 2002, 13:41: Message edited by: Divina ]

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