The New Weapon in the War on Bugs
You've spent hours preparing for an all-important company meeting. You arrive early to make last minute changes to your presentation. Your colleagues file through the door, but you are so focused on what you are doing that you barely notice. You are about to begin your presentation. All eyes are fixed on you and the room becomes silent. Then your cell phone rings. “Hello, this is Angela from Roosevelt Middle School, I'm the school nurse. Billy started to feel sick about 15 minutes ago. He's complaining of a sore throat and a headache. I just took his temperature and it is 103. You'll have to come pick him up and take him home. ” Señor Murphy (as in Murphy's Law) is at it again.
In my previous articles I've discussed Classical Homeopathy's amazing ability to reverse severe chronic diseases present for years, and even decades. What about acute diseases such as strep throat, croup, pneumonia, ear infections and influenza? Can homeopathy cure these problems without you resorting to antibiotics, steroids, or other pharmaceuticals? Absolutely. And what about the frightening prospect of another worldwide flu pandemic – is there any evidence of homeopathy's effectiveness in epidemics, or its ability to reduce mortality? You bet. Homeopathy offers a revolutionary treatment approach for epidemic diseases which very few people are aware of. Certainly Western (allopathic) medicine can be used as a first-line treatment – if a child or adult were in respiratory distress, lethargic, or had a dangerously high fever. I. e. , in true emergencies. But many patients suffering from acute illnesses can be safely cured using homeopathy.
David is a four-year-old boy who was in Iowa with his family when he came down with a sore throat. Many of his classmates had already been diagnosed with strep and treated with antibiotics. His sore throat started on the left and moved to the right side, and the pain radiated to his ear, both strong indications for homeopathic Lachesis. I had treated David previously for strep throat with antibiotics, but this time his Mom wanted to avoid them. I instructed her to give David Lachesis 30C, four pellets, three x a day.
He slept well the first night and awoke feeling much better the following day. He was more active. However, the morning he was coming in to see me he awoke at 4:30am with ear pain, and again at 6:30am with a sore throat. His tonsils were enlarged and both ears were mildly infected. Although the rapid strep test was normal, I sent a throat culture to the lab and continued the Lachesis. David’s ear pain and sore throat completely resolved shortly thereafter. His throat culture did eventually come back positive for strep.
Sophie is an adorable nine-year-old girl who presented with a five-day history of cough, bad sore throat, vertigo, earaches, exhaustion, puffy eyelids, and fever. Her temperature reached 102.5 the night before she came in to see me, and her cough was wet but nonproductive, worse lying down and better with cold drinks. Her physical exam was remarkable only for distinct crackles in the base of her left lung, which did not clear with cough. I diagnosed her with left lower lobe pneumonia, gave her a single dose of homeopathic Kali carbonicum 1M, and instructed her mother to call me if Sophie's condition worsened. At a follow up appointment in four days, her mom told me, “Sophie took the remedy at 4:30pm or 5pm. By 6pm, she jumped off the bed wanting to do her homework, feeling a lot more energetic. No fever since she took the remedy. Her cough is 90% better. It was miraculous. ” The crackles in her left lung were markedly improved and had resolved completely at her next follow up, along with all her symptoms. I wish I could say that all patients with pneumonia respond as quickly and dramatically as Sophie – though that’s not the way it always works. However, her case does show what is possible when a patient receives the correct remedy at the correct potency.
The Spanish Flu of 1918 infected one billion people across the globe (a quarter of the world’s population) and took 20 to 40 million lives… in just over four months. Experts have been warning that it is not a matter of if but when another flu pandemic will emerge. (Influenza caused by the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus poses a very real threat – it is deadly, and several cases of bird to human transmission have been documented. Thankfully, the virus has not yet figured out how to mutate to enable human to human transmission).
During the 80 years since that fateful year, allopathic medicine has not made a great deal of progress in the treatment of influenza. Although drugs such as Amantidine (Symmetrel), Rimantadine (Flumadine), Zanamivir (Relenza), and Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) exist, their side effects and meager benefits leave a lot to be desired.
Although no double blind studies exist which directly compare allopathic and homeopathic treatments of influenza, homeopathic doctors in 1918 very effectively treated thousands of patients with homeopathic remedies and saved countless lives.¹ Average mortality in patients treated with Western Medicine ranged between 2.5-10%, compared with no more than 1% in those treated homeopathically.
Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, pioneered a radical and extremely effective approach in the treatment of epidemic diseases. After treating numerous patients suffering from the same epidemic disease, he determined which single remedy or few remedies out of several were most curative (“genus epidemicus”) and then treated subsequent patients with those remedies alone. He also found that giving healthy people one of these remedies very effectively helped prevent them from coming down with the disease (prophylaxis). Should a new epidemic emerge, homeopaths from around the world now have a forum and message board so that clinical information can be quickly shared and lives saved.
The more I use homeopathy in my practice, the more passionate about it I become. As I write this on the first day of Hannukah, The Festival of Light and Miracles, and a few weeks before Christmas, there is much gratitude in my heart for this wonderful healing art.
¹ Perko, Sanra J. The Homeopathic Treatment of Influenza Benchmark Homeopathic Publications, San Antonio, Texas 2005 (2nd Edition)