Explain how homeopathy is better for:

[geni]

Strep throat can easily and successfully be treated with the right homeopathic remedy and a patient would recover more quickly than with conventional treatment. A homeopathic remedy will not suppresses the symptoms as will antibiotics, meaning recurrences and probably making a patient more susceptible to more serious conditions. Antibiotic treament that is.

Antibiotics kill bacteria. This is supressing the symptoms?

 

[Lisa Simpson]

Antibiotics kill bacteria. This is supressing the symptoms?

That's one of the things I've been curious about homeopathy. More or less, I understand the mechanism by which antibiotics work. They kill the bacteria, but not other cells.

But what exactly is the mechanism by which homeopathy works? NH, can you answer please?

 

[Rolfe]

Antibiotics kill bacteria. This is supressing the symptoms?

I'll tell you something else. The antibodies produced against the strep are liable also to attack the heart muscle, in an "autoimmune" reaction. This is why it is important to kill the strep as stone dead as possible with the right antibiotics - allowing the body to mount the full-blown immune response will no doubt eliminate that infection in the end, but it is also likely to leave the patient susceptible to rheumatic fever.

Antibiotic treatment for something as trivial and indeed self-limiting as a strep throat has been criticised by some as misuse of antibiotics. However, this point of view has been rightly shredded by showing that this treatment dramatically reduces the incidence of rheumatic fever - in fact the condition is now seldom encountered, thanks to the (mis)use of antibiotics on the strep throat.

Far from "suppressing" the symptoms of strep throat, antibiotics not only cure it completely, they also prevent the much more serious and indeed life-threatening consequence, rheumatic fever.

Allowing the patient to get better on their own (a.k.a. homoeopathy) is grossly irresponsible in the case of a known strep throat infection, and may later endanger the patient's life.

Nice one, Naturalhealth.

However, on a slightly different tack, how did Naturalhealth know that this patient had strep throat? The only way you can know that is to take a throat swab, send it to the lab, and get a report back bearing the words Streptococcus pyogenes. Was this done? If so, why? Is it not axiomatic in homoeopathy, the teaching of the Great Profit Hahnemann himself, that one must not seek to find out what the internal cause of disease might be, but focus entirely on the symptoms?

Face it, Naturalhealth neither knew nor cared whether the patient (assuming he even existed in the first place, not a reliable assumption given Naturalhealth's track record of telling bare-faced lies) had an actual strep throat. What we have here is someone with a sore throat of indeterminate cause, who was treated with nothing at all, and got better anyway. Gosh, how unexpected!

The rest is simply illfounded (and indeed perverse, as Geni points out) attacks on real medicine, coupled with a regrettable tendency to hijack "allopathic" diagnoses (which should be entirely eschewed by homoeopaths) in the interests of sounding clever.

I suppose the good bit about all this is that the patient is in reality at little risk of developing rheumatic fever, as he had in reality little probability of having a Streptococcus pyogenes infection in the first place. So protestations that homoeopathically treated "strep throat" patients don't get rheumatic fever may be taken in the light of that information.

OK, Naturalhealth, did you get a bacti report on the throat infection? Did it come back as Strep. pyogenes? If so (leaving aside why did you bother anyway), how can you justify not treatiing with antibiotics? (Oops, sorry, you can't because you're not authorised to prescribe real medicines.) If not, why insult our intelligence by declaring that the patient had a "strep throat".

If I correctly predict that Naturalhealth will now ignore all this, do I win the million?

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

But what exactly is the mechanism by which homeopathy works? NH, can you answer please?

O, this should be good, assuming you get an answer! (It's about one illness driving out another, and giving the vital force a little nudge to get it back to real health, and lots more words than mean nothing at all, but I can't wait to hear it all from the true expert in all this, the never-got-into-med-school-failure, Naturalhealth herself.)

Rolfe.

 

[Quasi]

Strep throat can easily and successfully be treated with the right homeopathic remedy

I am curious how many people visit the homeopath and do not tell them they are also using antibiotics. Given Naturalhealths and others disdain for allopathy, patients might avoid mentioning it as they are "hedging their bets." This would explain the homeopath's phenomenological and subjective data/belief they are actually doing something, its actually the standard treatment, and they are unaware of this. This is also quite likely as homeopaths have no methods at all of telling what medications someone is taking other than trusting the ill person to give an accurate history. Of course, there is only one way to find out who is right here, and that is to test Corallinus's theory, using only homeopathy and only allopathy, separately. I can only assume this would be acceptable? Further, upon the positive results for homeopathy (better than antibiotics) you can even do a simple repeat for the JREF one million?

 

[Lisa Simpson]

(It's about one illness driving out another, and giving the vital force a little nudge to get it back to real health, and lots more words than mean nothing at all, but I can't wait to hear it all from the true expert in all this, the never-got-into-med-school-failure, Naturalhealth herself.)

Rolfe.

So if someone were to put some strep bacteria into a petri dish and some of whatever homeopathic remedy you wanted to try, it would have no effect since petri dishes have no vital force. How convenient.

 

[Rolfe]

Strep throat can easily and successfully be treated with the right homeopathic remedy....

I guess this one's worth another jibe.

What on earth has the cause of the illness (strep) got to do with anything? You keep telling us that remedies have to be individualised, according to the exact symptoms (and temperament) of the patient, and that any concept of a single treatment for a single disease in the allopathic sense is completely unhomoeopathic.

You earlier dismissed a paper which showed null-effect of homoeopathy on the basis that all patients with the same condition (neonatal diarrhoea) were given the same remedy. Even though one baby calf with diarrhoea is generally remarkably similar to another baby calf with diarrhoea.

So how can you claim to be able to treat something called "strep throat" with "the right remedy"? Shouldn't that simply be an assertion that patients presenting with symptoms of a sore throat can be treated?

Or do you just get a kick out of using the despised "allopath"s' language? Maybe you think it makes you look clever? Maybe you like doing it because you can pretend you didn't fail to get into medical school? But why do you like doing this when you despise all other aspects of allopathy? Why do you so often forget that your Guru Hahnemann told you never to try to find out what causes a particular disease condition, because this is impossible to know?

(Sorry if I've just repeated myself, but I'm a bit interested in this aspect.)

Rolfe.

 

[geni]

So if someone were to put some strep bacteria into a petri dish and some of whatever homeopathic remedy you wanted to try, it would have no effect since petri dishes have no vital force. How convenient.

Of course following homeopthic ideas the bacteria should do. I wounder if viruses do.

 

[Chris Haynes]

... Why do you so often forget that your Guru Hahnemann told you never to try to find out what causes a particular disease condition, because this is impossible to know?
....

Oh, my! This is rich. So a good classical homeopath has to forget about the past 200 years of science advancement where the causes of many diseases have discovered?

What I do not quite understand: So homeopaths claim to not just work with the symptoms but with the "whole person". BUT... they base their remedies solely on the symptoms... without finding out what is happening to the whole person (like checking for infections or getting non-invasive pictures of the body's interior).

 

[Rolfe]

What I do not quite understand: So homeopaths claim to not just work with the symptoms but with the "whole person". BUT... they base their remedies solely on the symptoms... without finding out what is happening to the whole person (like checking for infections or getting non-invasive pictures of the body's interior).

There is an answer to this, but it's terribly convoluted and it's way past my bedtime.

Something about the remedy nudging the vital force back to health, which is real cure of the whole person, as opposed to whatever it is that real medicine did in about 1800, which isn't much like what it does today.

Of course they're right in some examples, that medicine doesn't cure but only manages a condition - consider diabetes for example. But would many people complain about a chance of a normal life, just because they had to stay on medication? And there are of course other examples where medicine does achieve genuine cure.

Rolfe.

 

[popsy]

Here's a convenient 'out' for homeopathy. A friend, who is a believer, had COPD. His homeopath prescribed whatever it is they prescribe for that but told him -this is the good part - that it could take 2 years before he was cured. He was to keep taking the remedy all that time. Is that good or what?

BTW it has been more than 2 years and you will probably not be surprised to learn that my friend's COPD is not only not improved but actually seems worse.

 

[steenkh]

Is homoeopathic medicine always what it claims to be? My wife was persuaded by friends to see a healer that did iris reading, "conventional" healing and homoeopathy. At the time, she had just recently seen the BBC test of homoeopathy and started being skeptic. The first thing she noticed was that the h-path "medicine" she had got had a terrible taste, which it should not have if it was pure water. The next was that she got severe tummy aches from the medicine and it only stopped when she stopped using the "medicine".

Do h-paths spike their medicines with other things to ensure an effect? (I have heard how traditional Chinese "medicines" are sometimes laced with crushed pills of the conventional type, like viagra). Or do h-paths perhaps sometimes forget to dilute the "medicine" so that there is actually something in them, perhaps something dangerous?

 

[Zep]

Ed knows what's in the stuff they sell, because it's not really regulated in most cases. It might not even be CLEAN plain water that is being used to dilute the "remedies".

 

[Prester John]

Ah yes homeopathy can cure most diseases eventually.

Of course you really shouldn't arse around if you do get a real strep throat, you wouldn't want Scarlet Fever now would you.

http://www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic518.htm

Obviously if homeopathy could cure streptococcal infections it would have made a name for itself before the advent of antibiotics when Scarlet Fever epidemics were prevalent and deadly. But no - that didn't happen.

 

[Corallinus]

I had a patient who came to see me. He went to his doctor and tested positive for strep throat. The doctor wanted to give him antibiotics. He took the prescription and then threw it away and came to see me instead. After taking his acute case the remedy came out as Belladonna. As the case was so acute, I prescribed Bell 200c for him. Within 24 hours he was feeling a lot better. He went back to his doctor and was re-swabbed and tested negative for strep. Surprise, surprise and this was all without antibiotics either.

Homeopathy can also cure scarlet fever too. Belladonna amongs others is also a good remedy for this.

 

[Corallinus]

I had a patient who came to see me. He went to his doctor and tested positive for strep throat. The doctor wanted to give him antibiotics. He took the prescription and then threw it away and came to see me instead. After taking his acute case the remedy came out as Belladonna. As the case was so acute, I prescribed Bell 200c for him. Within 24 hours he was feeling a lot better. He went back to his doctor and was re-swabbed and tested negative for strep. Surprise, surprise and this was all without antibiotics either.

Homeopathy can also cure scarlet fever too. Belladonna amongs others is also a good remedy for this.

 

[Lisa Simpson]

So he took at least some of the antibiotics first?

 

[Chris Haynes]

I had a patient who came to see me. He went to his doctor and tested positive for strep throat. The doctor wanted to give him antibiotics. He took the prescription and then threw it away and came to see me instead.

If he was going to ignore the doctor, why did he go in the first place?

(and I think Lisa is right... he probably did take at least some of the antibiotics... it is recommended to take the full course so that our bodies do not breed drug-resistent bacteria)

After taking his acute case the remedy came out as Belladonna. As the case was so acute, I prescribed Bell 200c for him. Within 24 hours he was feeling a lot better. He went back to his doctor and was re-swabbed and tested negative for strep. Surprise, surprise and this was all without antibiotics either.

Just to let you know... the swabs are not always accurate.

(been there, done that... had to wait over the weekend for the old-fashioned culture growth)

Homeopathy can also cure scarlet fever too. Belladonna amongs others is also a good remedy for this.

This is such an easy thing to test for... if it is true and DOCUMENTED... then you can win the million dollar prize!

 

[Lisa Simpson]

I'm still waiting for the answer to:

"What exactly is the mechanism by which homeopathy works?"

 

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

So he took at least some of the antibiotics first?

Not wishing to defend Corallinus' stream of fiction as a whole, but I took what she wrote to mean that the patient took the prescription, i.e. the piece of paper on which it was written, from the doctor then threw it away.


Having watched Corallinus/NH/HS' career of fibbing around these boards for some time now, these same anecdotes keep surfacing. Why would that be?

Consider this hypothesis. Odd coincidental recoveries occur sometimes and if you are sufficiently superstitious you end up believing in them as miracles. But, miraculous coincidences don't occur often, most of the time you cannot tell what the hell has happened to a case.

However, which stories do you tell people: the vast majority in which you cannot tell what really happened or the tiny minority of apparent miracles?

Which stories do we hear? Exactly those one which were, in reality, odd coincidences.

They are not typical of the homeopaths day to day activities.

These stories keep being trotted out to impress us and the woos are very keen for us to draw the inference that they are frequent occurrences, either because they have fooled themselves or because they wish to fool us.

Mind you, with Corallinus' track record of actual lies, it may be that the anecdote is complete fiction.