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Non-Homeopathic Belladonna

Rodney

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In the March 16, 2007 Swift, Randi quotes Reader Dana Turgeon, of Regina, Saskatchewan, as stating: "I guess it's a lucky thing that it's all a bunch of homeopathic hooey – who'd want to give an infant an actual, real dose of belladonna?"

Randi Forum participants might be interested to know that Sidney Kirkpatrick begins his book "Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet" with the story of 3-month-old Tommy House, Jr. who, in February 1909, was on the verge of death, suffering from convulsions every 20 minutes. The infant's father was an M.D. who concluded, along with two other doctors, that there was no hope for Tommy Jr. Cayce prescribed a measured dose of belladonna, to be followed by wrapping the infant in a hot poultice made from the bark of a peach tree. Dr. House consented to this seemingly absurd (and dangerous) treatment only because he thought there was no hope for his son and because his wife insisted that Cayce's treatment be tried. The bottom line: The treatment cured Tommy -- he made a complete recovery and never had a convulsion again. He and his father spent the rest of their lives promoting Cayce. Tommy became the manager of a company that produced health care remedies based on Cayce's readings, and lived until 1972.
 
Some people have survived gunshot wounds to the head and lived to tell about it. Would you prescribe it for a brain tumour?
 
Rodney said:
In the March 16, 2007 Swift, Randi quotes Reader Dana Turgeon, of Regina, Saskatchewan, as stating: "I guess it's a lucky thing that it's all a bunch of homeopathic hooey – who'd want to give an infant an actual, real dose of belladonna?"

Randi Forum participants might be interested to know that Sidney Kirkpatrick begins his book "Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet" with the story of 3-month-old Tommy House, Jr. who, in February 1909, was on the verge of death, suffering from convulsions every 20 minutes. The infant's father was an M.D. who concluded, along with two other doctors, that there was no hope for Tommy Jr. Cayce prescribed a measured dose of belladonna, to be followed by wrapping the infant in a hot poultice made from the bark of a peach tree. Dr. House consented to this seemingly absurd (and dangerous) treatment only because he thought there was no hope for his son and because his wife insisted that Cayce's treatment be tried. The bottom line: The treatment cured Tommy -- he made a complete recovery and never had a convulsion again. He and his father spent the rest of their lives promoting Cayce. Tommy became the manager of a company that produced health care remedies based on Cayce's readings, and lived until 1972.
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An anecdote nearly 100 years old does not make it any less an anecdote. But let's look at it anyway...

...measured dose of belladonna...
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...means how big a dose, and at what strength, exactly? Or did he just use a ruler?

If it was a genuinely potent dose of belladonna, where does "homeopathy" come into the picture at all? In fact, the description of the Cayce treatment does not accord with homeopathic treatment in any way at all. So what's the connection?

Was there any diagnosis of what caused the convulsions in the first place? What did the three M.D's actually come up with?

What treatments were used prior to Cayce's treatment? Describe them fully, including the child's medical history.

How soon after them did Cayce take his shot?

Can you please describe what effects "a hot poultice made from the bark of a peach tree" might have on an infant? Nothing? Something? If so, what?

What ELSE was done to the child during and after the Cayce medication?


In short, you have an AWFUL long way to go to proving Cayce was administering homeopathic anything, and that he or it was responsible for the infant's recovery.
 
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Darn. I'm trying to post what Wiki has to say about belladonna, but I'm a noob.

enDOTwikipediaDOTorg/wiki/Belladonna#Modern_medicine

enDOTwikipediaDOTorg/wiki/Atropine

Belladonna contains atropine. The description of what atropine does has lots of big words and has left me utterly confused. "Generally, atropine lowers the "rest and digest" activity of all muscles and glands."

So... it causes tremors and fits?
 
Atropine is a useful drug found in belladonna. For people who don't have access to pharmaceutical atropine, belladonna might make sense, or it might have made sense once upon a time in human history. Atropine can act as an anti-spasmotic. It inhibits involuntary muscle action, which I suppose you could call the "rest and digest" muscles.

It's impossible to tell what the child in the OP suffered from, or if the atropine was helpful, or even if the story is remotely true at all.

I think we can interpret Turgeon's comment as meaning that atropine should only be administered in purified form and only when it is justified by a medical examination.
 
It really wouldn't surprise me if some of the things used in homeopathy might turn out to be useful sometimes when given in non-homeopathic doses.

I basically agree with Christine. We'll never know.
 
Zep said:
An anecdote nearly 100 years old does not make it any less an anecdote. But let's look at it anyway...

...means how big a dose, and at what strength, exactly? Or did he just use a ruler?

If it was a genuinely potent dose of belladonna, where does "homeopathy" come into the picture at all? In fact, the description of the Cayce treatment does not accord with homeopathic treatment in any way at all. So what's the connection?

Was there any diagnosis of what caused the convulsions in the first place? What did the three M.D's actually come up with?

What treatments were used prior to Cayce's treatment? Describe them fully, including the child's medical history.

How soon after them did Cayce take his shot?

Can you please describe what effects "a hot poultice made from the bark of a peach tree" might have on an infant? Nothing? Something? If so, what?

What ELSE was done to the child during and after the Cayce medication?

In short, you have an AWFUL long way to go to proving Cayce was administering homeopathic anything, and that he or it was responsible for the infant's recovery.
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You misunderstood my post. I was saying that, according to "An American Prophet", Cayce prescribed a non-homeopathic dose of belladonna. Specifically, at p. 6: " . . . the sleeping Cayce had prescribed an unusually high dose of a toxic form of deadly nightshade. Even if the peachtree poultice could somehow leach the poison out of the infant's system, administering such a large dose of belladonna to a child as small and weak as Tommy House Jr. was tantamount to murder."

However, according to "An American Prophet" at p.8, Cayce's treatment immediately cured Tommy. Regarding the diagnosis, the book states at p.4: "The infant had been suffering convulsions since his premature birth three months earlier. The convulsions had become so frequent that they now occurred every twenty minutes, leaving the helpless child too weak to nurse from his mother's bosom or to wrap his tiny hands around her fingers. Tommy House was on the verge of death from malnutrition and lack of sleep, a diagnosis confirmed by the child's father, a doctor, and by the family's two personal physicians, Dr. Jackson, a general practitioner in Hopkinsville, and Dr. Haggard, a pediatric specialist from Nashville who had been attending the child since birth."

This summary obviously does not answer all of your questions, but I think it's more than a garden variety anecdote, particularly when you consider that Tommy's father later ran Cayce's hospital in Virginia Beach, Virginia and Tommy went on to design medical equipment based on Cayce's readings.
 
Rodney said:
You misunderstood my post. I was saying that, according to "An American Prophet", Cayce prescribed a non-homeopathic dose of belladonna. Specifically, at p. 6: " . . . the sleeping Cayce had prescribed an unusually high dose of a toxic form of deadly nightshade. Even if the peachtree poultice could somehow leach the poison out of the infant's system, administering such a large dose of belladonna to a child as small and weak as Tommy House Jr. was tantamount to murder."

However, according to "An American Prophet" at p.8, Cayce's treatment immediately cured Tommy. Regarding the diagnosis, the book states at p.4: "The infant had been suffering convulsions since his premature birth three months earlier. The convulsions had become so frequent that they now occurred every twenty minutes, leaving the helpless child too weak to nurse from his mother's bosom or to wrap his tiny hands around her fingers. Tommy House was on the verge of death from malnutrition and lack of sleep, a diagnosis confirmed by the child's father, a doctor, and by the family's two personal physicians, Dr. Jackson, a general practitioner in Hopkinsville, and Dr. Haggard, a pediatric specialist from Nashville who had been attending the child since birth."

This summary obviously does not answer all of your questions, but I think it's more than a garden variety anecdote, particularly when you consider that Tommy's father later ran Cayce's hospital in Virginia Beach, Virginia and Tommy went on to design medical equipment based on Cayce's readings.
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You're right - I misread the OP. Apologies!

However, why homeopathy had to be mentioned in regard to this case, I'm not sure. If you leave it out of the story, you get a dose of belladonna/atropine involved, at Cayce's recommendation. As seen above, it MAY have been instrumental in assisting the child's recovery, maybe not.

As for the hot poultice, I would suspect that the application of heat by any means would have been the contributing factor, one way or another.

Note also that young children can have convulsions simply by being too overheated.
 
Zep said:
You're right - I misread the OP. Apologies!

However, why homeopathy had to be mentioned in regard to this case, I'm not sure. If you leave it out of the story, you get a dose of belladonna/atropine involved, at Cayce's recommendation. As seen above, it MAY have been instrumental in assisting the child's recovery, maybe not.
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I just found it ironic that Dana Turgeon asked: "Who'd want to give an infant an actual, real dose of belladonna?" The answer, apparently, is, no doctor would, but Cayce would.

Zep said:
Note also that young children can have convulsions simply by being too overheated.
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Yes, but according to Kirkpatrick: "The infant had been suffering convulsions since his premature birth three months earlier. The convulsions had become so frequent that they now occurred every twenty minutes . . ."
 
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And this was in 1909, when appendicitis was considered a deadly affliction, drugs of addiction were only just being controlled, when antibiotics were decades into the future, when most home kitchen medicine cabinets contained laudanum (opium tincture in alcohol), and when medical quackery was pretty much rife and unchecked. It was also when most average doctors knew less about medicine than most educated adults today.

A perfect environment for the Cayces of the world to operate in.

Rodney said:
according to Kirkpatrick: "The infant had been suffering convulsions since his premature birth three months earlier. The convulsions had become so frequent that they now occurred every twenty minutes . . ."
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That's merely a description, not a diagnosis. WHY did the infant have convulsions? Is that information available to us now?
 
from OP "The bottom line: The treatment cured Tommy -- he made a complete recovery and never had a convulsion again."

Here's the main problem. The facts are that Tommy was given a strange treatment and that Tommy recovered. There's not one piece of evidence to show that the two are directly related. The real reason Tommy recovered is more probably because his mother stood on one leg for 10 minutes when Tommy was most ill, or because Cayce had invoked the spirit of a long-dead Inca chieftain without bothering to mention it.

The reason why medicine depends on prospective, double-blinded trials for SCIENTIFIC proof of efficacy is precisely because correlation is NOT the same thing as cause and effect.
 
Spiro said:
from OP "The bottom line: The treatment cured Tommy -- he made a complete recovery and never had a convulsion again."

Here's the main problem. The facts are that Tommy was given a strange treatment and that Tommy recovered. There's not one piece of evidence to show that the two are directly related. The real reason Tommy recovered is more probably because his mother stood on one leg for 10 minutes when Tommy was most ill, or because Cayce had invoked the spirit of a long-dead Inca chieftain without bothering to mention it.

The reason why medicine depends on prospective, double-blinded trials for SCIENTIFIC proof of efficacy is precisely because correlation is NOT the same thing as cause and effect.
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So, if you were Tommy's parent, would you have allowed the belladonna to be administered?
 
Rodney said:
So, if you were Tommy's parent, would you have allowed the belladonna to be administered?
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I am Tommy's parent (well, not that Tommy), and I would not have allowed it.

Atropine can induce convulsions so, from the point of view of a Homoeopath, it would make sense to give Atropine in a homoeopathic dose. But it was given in a therapeutic dose (or was it a lethal dose?). Why? Or are you saying that it was not intended to be a homoeopathic treatment?
 
I would suggest that this story is about fifth or sixth hand, and that a significant amount of detail has been left out, with the remainder being transmuted in time and detail to suit the writer's desire to find evidence to support Cayce (obviously).

To be frank, it reeks, and scores zero on my credibilitometer.
 
Stories fresher than that have suffered worse, so I don't doubt you are right.
(Well, I do, but you know what I mean)
 
BillyJoe said:
I am Tommy's parent (well, not that Tommy), and I would not have allowed it.
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So would you have done nothing and hoped for the best?

BillyJoe said:
Atropine can induce convulsions so, from the point of view of a Homoeopath, it would make sense to give Atropine in a homoeopathic dose. But it was given in a therapeutic dose (or was it a lethal dose?). Why? Or are you saying that it was not intended to be a homoeopathic treatment?
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Cayce recommended a radical (presumably unheard of) non-homeopathic dose of belladonna.
 
Rodney said:
So would you have done nothing and hoped for the best?
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That's right. I would not try a remedy that someone pulled out of their @$$. Similarly, if I get cancer, I'm not going chasing rainbows in Mexico. I'm not going to have mistletoe injections. And I'm not going to drink Noni juice "just in case".
 
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