Friends,

I previously alerted people to the NEW book, COPELAND'S CURE: HOMEOPATHY AND THE WAR BETWEEN CONVENTIONAL AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE. Below is a new review in the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR.

You can purchase this book from H.E.S. at a special discount...

http://tinyurl.com/52xjt

Click here to read this story online:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0329/p15s02-bogn.html

Headline: Tracking the idea smaller doses have bigger effects

Byline: Gregory M. Lamb

Date: 03/29/2005

Today conventional medicine conceives of itself as a strict science based solely on facts and clinical evidence. Homeopathy - which some 15 million Americans continue to seek out as an alternative means of healing - is one of many therapeutic loose ends that medicine has trouble neatly tying up. These often popular unconventional therapies leave medical practitioners and researchers by turns frustrated, angered, bemused, or, in a few cases, intrigued.

In "Copeland's Cure," author Natalie Robins traces the life of Royal Copeland, the most prominent American proponent of homeopathy, to follow the history and effects on society of this unconventional healing method. The term homeopathy was coined in 1796 by a German doctor, Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, codifying ideas that had far earlier roots.

One was the principle of similibus curentur, or like cures like: A small dose of what ails a patient will cure him. It was also seen as a gentle and humane alternative to the conventional medicine of the day, which routinely included practices such as bloodletting. Followers of Hahnemann use common minerals or extracts from plants or animals, highly diluted, usually in plain water. (Many are herbs and some, such as belladonna, would be considered poisonous if taken in larger doses.) The other chief homeopathic principle concludes that the smaller the dose of the original substance the stronger the healing effect. In some cases, the drug is diluted so greatly it is unlikely that a single molecule of it remains in the solution. This solution then may be absorbed into sugar pills or tablets that can be easily stored and dispensed.

Shortly after its founding in 1847, the American Medical Association, the practitioners of conventional medicine, promptly termed homeopathy "a delusion" with no scientific basis. Nonetheless, in the late 19th century, doctors continued to receive homeopathic training at some of the nation's best medical schools, including Harvard, Columbia, and Dartmouth. Homeopathic hospitals dotted the country. Among its advocates were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, John D. Rockefeller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mark Twain wrote favorably of it. In 1901, a leading conventional doctor declared, "No one will deny that as many patients recover under homeopathic treatment as recover under any form of treatment."

As the 20th century dawned, Royal Copeland, raised in Michigan and trained as an eye surgeon and in homeopathy, became homeopathy's most prominent spokesman in America, Robins says. The busy doctor recorded a number of his own homeopathic cures, including a patient who was experiencing acute eye inflammation and great pain. "In all my experience I never saw a remedy act more quickly," he wrote of the homeopathic drug he administered. "Had it been a narcotic, the effect could not have been more magical." Copeland also pursued a political career and became a United States senator from New York, with a young Franklin Roosevelt as one early campaign manager.

If homeopathy does work, is it because of a physical or mental effect? Even its practitioners are divided on the subject, Robins says. Some expect a biomedical effect will eventually be found - that the drug, though no longer physically present in the homeopathic solution, has somehow affected it in an as yet undetectable way. Others theorize it must be a placebo effect, based on the expectation of the patient (and, more controversially, the physician as well) that the patient will be helped by the drug. Perhaps taking a homeopathic pill somehow "releases chemical impulses in the brain that diminish symptoms," as the Mayo Clinic has suggested.

According to Robins, Copeland himself apparently recognized a mental aspect. He told one patient after cataract surgery: "I wish you would not worry over your condition. It does you no good and so depresses you that your eye, as well as the rest of your body, is unfavorably affected.... Now just take for granted that you are going to be all right, as I firmly believe you are going to be, and you will find yourself in better spirits, and as a result your eye itself will be better...."

Robins makes several mentions of Christian Science, which would take a step beyond homeopathy's highly diluted drugs to no drugs at all in treating disease. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of this newspaper, experimented extensively with homeopathy before discovering Christian Science in 1866. She felt it gave her an insight into the mental nature of disease, which she ultimately concluded was most effectively healed through prayer to God. Copeland said he "respected" Christian Science, Robins writes, and conceded it had "beaten to a frazzle" homeopathy with its "popular success.")

As with other alternative healing methods, homeopathy is difficult to assess through conventional clinical trials, Robins points out. Treatments are designed uniquely for each patient; what works for one doesn't for another. So a similar reaction to a certain homeopathic drug from a broad sample of test subjects wouldn't necessarily be expected.

Some homeopaths have asked why they must prove how their remedies work when many conventional drugs are approved and dispensed without understanding exactly why or how they work either. Nonetheless, Robins says, to be accepted as "scientific," homeopathy will have to submit to this kind of testing. While many such tests have shown no therapeutic effect, some do. Just last year a team led by a British researcher, an admitted skeptic of homeopathy, found that a highly diluted homeopathic solution of a histamine influenced the action of human white blood cells. "We are, however, unable to explain our findings," the befuddled researchers concluded, "and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon."

That's just what Copeland - and Robins - would propose: a deeper, and perhaps broader, look into the puzzle of homeopathy and the questions it poses about the nature of disease and healing.

* Gregory M. Lamb writes about healthcare and technology for the Monitor.

Copeland's Cure: Homeopathy and the War Between Conventional and Alternative Medicine

By Natalie Robins

Alfred A. Knopf330 pp., $24.95

(c) Copyright 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

To read what the WASHINGTON POST said about this book, HES has a review of it here:

http://tinyurl.com/52xjt

Dana Ullman, MPH
Homeopathic Educational Services
http://www.homeopathic.com

hi Dana just finished it. there is something about Copelands cure that is very disturbing, for example, you are quoted along with the mention of you having been arrested for practicing medicine without license ,as if you commited some horrible crime ( giving ruta for a knee injury if i recall correctly) ms. Robbins seems not to have dug to far in her research ,just the omission of JW"S books s and Harris Coulters work would seem to leave a huge gap in what appears to be so well researched. it left me shaking my head. still it was a very interesting book, i feel she could have gotten a few more homeopaths point of view.

from my reading Royal Copeland seems to have been one of the world's worst Homeopaths i hesitate to even call him one,. the quack busters are quoted often i would have enjoyed seeing Julians response to there ignorant view of medicine. it will make for interesting discussion after people have a chance to read it. she used the term reputable doctors ( AMA) one day at Homeopathy Works a woman new to town had a bad case of poison ivy she said to Joe i need the name of a reputable doctor around here. he responded i don't know of any . :-)

mike

correction i messed up ms. Robbins does refer to coulter's work and is
listed in bibliography .

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mike Law hi Dana just finished it. there is something about Copelands cure that is very disturbing, .... i feel she could have gotten a few more homeopaths point of view. from my reading Royal Copeland seems to have been one of the world's worst Homeopaths i hesitate to even call him one,. the quack busters are quoted often i would have enjoyed seeing Julians response....

Well, I've just finished it and working on getting my thoughts together-- enough to write a review of it. Although it is an interesting slice of history and brings out the whole story of Copeland, it is just another book written by someone who does not understand homeopathy and about someone who didn't understand it either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dana As the 20th century dawned, Royal Copeland, raised in Michigan and trained as an eye surgeon and in homeopathy, became homeopathy's most prominent spokesman in America,

Yeah. And I was on first names with the Pope. Royal Copeland was a poor homeopath, and a politician who had almost no ethics.

It is interesting that the author did not reference a book written by Copeland called "The Scientific Reasonableness of Homeopathy" in which he says that he will use "expediency" (i.e., allopathy) when he cannot find the remedy. In it he applauds the efforts of those who can use the repertory and suggests that HE might study it, but, alas, he never did.

There is one paragraph in book under review which is mystifying to me: It appears on page 28:
"But some new ideas did appear. In 1877, Repertory of the Homeopathic Materia Medica, by the American homeopath James Tyler Kent, a former eclectic, had been published abroad. This book introduced to homeopathy the concept of constitutional types and prescribing, and brought into being what is called Classical homeopathy. Kent held that people with similar personalities and body types also had similar illnesses, and he saide that the remedies should be prescribed according to the individual's physical appearance and emotions, as well as to his symptoms."

THIS is total ****.
The book was published in *1897*. It was published in Lancaster, PA--NOT abroad. It did NOT introduce anything about "constitution" into homeopathy.

Where does the author get this information?

That the author chose to use Barrett's Quackwatch as a "reliable source" says heaps. Barrett is NOT reliable. He has a large axe to grind. His minions have the same axe to grind. That the Author cannot see this, or chooses to take Barrett's word at face value, devalues the entire book. The Author is writing a book about a subject she knows nothing about and, once clear of the facts about Copeland, had made a real poor job of it.

Even in the interview with Jacobs and Carleston I find nothing that says that homeopathy IS a viable alternative. Either the author did not understand, or Jacobs and Carlston have sold their souls down the river-- something I would have a hard time believing.

This is just my first, off the cuff sense of it.
It is an interesting book that gives a good view into the opposition of the AMA to homeopathy, takes sides with the the Quackbusters (starting with Fishbein in the 1920s), and shows NO understanding about homeopathy as a practice, its place in medicine, or the reasons for its demise.

JW

As an example...

On page 244 we find the following:

(in a discussion of using the word "complementary" to describe "alternative" or unconventional medical practices)

"The word 'complementary' had actually first been used in 1889 by a homeopath when Dr. E. B. Nash wrote in the Transactions of the International Hahnemannian Association that 'in regard to complementaries we often see the reports of cases in our journals, when some marvelous result with some particular remedy have been accomplishes, that this remedy had to be followed by some other remedy to finish the cure.'"

The sheer ignorance!!

Nash is discussing the concept of *complementary remedies* and NOT coining a word to describe an 'alternative" practice.

This is what happens when an author attempts to write about homeopathy without having ANY basic understanding about homeopathy itself.

The lack of understanding of homeopathy by the author is overwhelming.

JW