Phoenix Homeopathy

Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Please remember that homeopathic remedies should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.

The Daily Mail’s front page story today carried warnings of a more severe than usual flu season this winter. Yet it seems that the flu vaccine may not give as much protection against flu as is commonly thought, despite it being aggressively marketed and available in many high street pharmacies.

Does the flu jab work?

The flu vaccine’s creator, Dr Graeme Laver, is reported as saying of the flu jab “I have never been very impressed with its efficacy” and “It is better than nothing and I wouldn’t want to advise people not to take it, but you can’t rely on it doing any good.”

What’s in the jab?

This might come as a bit of a shock to the 15 million Britons who have the flu jab each year, and is a pretty worrying confession, given that recent flu vaccines have been reported as containing thiomersal (can lead to poor memory and confusion), formaldehyde, three different antibiotics, as well as three strains of flu virus - in my view, not ingredients to have injected into one’s body lightly!

Are there any risks?

According to the Lancet (1998; 351), the flu jab can be a trigger for asthma, and has little effect against flu, flu-like illnesses or pneumonia for older people living in their own homes (Lancet 2005; 366).

Side effects of the flu jab include flu-like symptoms, allergic reactions to the egg protein it contains, and joint or nervous system inflammation.

Flu in vaccinated people

There are many flu-like illnesses, and flu viruses are constantly changing and mutating, meaning that the strains of flu in the jab may be superseded pretty fast. At best, the jab may give three months’ protection from the flu strains included in it. Homeopathic remedies don’t have the same problem. This is because the remedies don’t have any direct effect on the virus itself.

Instead, they seem to modify our body’s response to it by enabling our defence mechanisms towards a better recognition of what needs to be fought off.

Flu treatment options

Last winter in the Phoenix clinic, two patients reported suffering flu: incredibly, both had been vaccinated against flu during the preceding month!

Dr Laver is concerned that new flu treatment medicines like Tamiflu should be made more widely available in order to save lives.

Certainly, flu needs to be taken seriously, because it can kill, and quickly.

However, given the excellent survival statistics for homeopathy in the terrible 1918 Spanish (bird) flu epidemic (at the time, homeopaths reported a 1% mortality rate, whereas conventional doctors were losing at least 30% of their patients), at home we put our trust in homeopathic remedies like Gelsemium (Yellow Jasmine), my number one homeopathic remedy for flu and flu-like illnesses (indicated where there is great weakness and heaviness of the limbs, eyes, head and body, and the patient is thirstless and has chills), Eupatorium perf (indicated for flu with bone pains as if the bones are broken, or flu where even the eyeballs are sore), or Bryonia (can help where the patient is very hot, dry, thirsty for cold drinks, and needs to lie perfectly still) .

Homeopathic help

Given the latest concerns about a flu pandemic, now might be a good time to consult a homeopath for:

• constitutional treatment to address current health problems and boost immunity
• specific remedies to help to prevent flu-like illnesses
• acute remedies to aid recovery from fever and flu

Phoenix also has limited stocks of a free Flu Information leaflet, available to registered patients.

Roaccutane, a drug used for severe acne, has long been suspected of being linked to depression.

Historically, Roche, the drug’s manufacturers have always denied any links to depression and suicide amongst users of Roaccutane, blaming the acne itself instead.

Though as well-known veterinary homeopath and author, Chris Day, writes in his blog on Roaccutane, wasn’t the drug meant to cure the acne?

We all know that orthodox drugs have side-effects, but who knew that the contraceptive Pill could make you blind? Sounds like a bad joke, doesn’t it, but that’s what one woman claims in The Daily Mail. Read her story here.

It happened to me, too, but with steroids

In a desperate attempt to reverse my worsening neurological symptoms, back in 1995-6, doctors gave me increasing doses of intravenous and oral steroids. Soon after, I too, experienced raised intra-cranial pressure from too much fluid building up, which was removed over time, via repeated lumbar punctures and Acetazolomide, a diuretic.

Meningitis-like headache

The headache I developed from the pressure building up in my skull was so intense that the sound of someone buttering toast on the other side of the room was agony, and I was given Pethidine to help me to endure it. Through the haze of drugs, I was vaguely aware at the time that these symptoms were unusual for the disease I’d been diagnosed with, but I was never told that the problem could be an effect of the steroids.

It was only years later, as a practising homeopath researching possible steroid side-effects for a patient’s case, that I realised the likely cause of that terrible episode.

Informed choice about adverse drug effects

I don’t blame the doctors: they were doing their best to suppress my worsening neurological symptoms, not realising that these symptoms were a sign of a deeper disorder - the stress of being on the wrong life path, from suppressing rather than acknowledging and releasing my emotions, not to mention an unhealthy and fast-paced lifestyle.

Would it to have helped, at the time, to know that I was one of the quarter of a million people in the UK admitted to hospital due to adverse drug effects? Maybe not, but being warned about possible side-effects, no matter how rare, would at least have empowered me to make an informed decision.

After (rather inaccurately, in my view - click the research tag) announcing ‘the death of homeopathy’ recently, The Lancet is at it again, publishing another article that fails to give readers a balanced view of modern homeopathy. No wonder more and more people are asking: is this the latest in a series of attempts to repress homeopathy in the UK?

Here’s the Society of Homeopaths’ response to the Lancet article, which makes interesting reading:

Letter to the Editor of The Lancet

Dear Sir

We read your Special Report on homeopathy in Britain (Vol 370) with interest. For a publication that bills itself as the world’s leading medical journal, we were surprised that Udani Samarasekera’s report merely rehashes time-worn arguments, without presenting any new information to your readers.

As you know, we provided you with a six-page set of responses to questions posed in connection with this report. We find it fascinating that not one of those responses was actually printed.

To better inform your readers, we would like to point out that The Society of Homeopaths is the largest professional organisation registering homeopaths in Britain, representing more than 2,300 members overall. We are committed to fostering an integrated, patient-centred approach to health and wellness, treating each person’s symptoms as unique and each person’s care as an individual programme.

Society registered homeopaths have satisfied The Society’s educational and professional requirements and agreed to practise in accordance with The Society of Homeopaths’ Code of Ethics & Practice, the Core Criteria for Homeopathic Practice and the National Occupational Standards for Homeopathy.

We concur with our colleagues across the medical profession that proper regulation is essential to delivering integrated, patient-centred care and we welcome increased regulation of the homeopathy profession. In fact, it is something that we, as the leading professional organisation, have been advocating for years.

Kind regards,

Paula Ross
Chief Executive

Society of Homeopaths
11 Brookfield, Duncan Close, Moulton Park, Northampton NN3 6WL
Tel: 0845 450 6611 Fax: 0845 450 6622 Email: info@homeopathy-soh.org

In answer to the recent media criticism of homeopathy, Jeanette Winterson, award-winning author of ‘Oranges are Not the Only Fruit’ and other works, spoke out in favour of homeopathy this week in UK national newspaper The Guardian, describing her own dramatic experience with the remedy Lachesis, and defending the forthcoming symposium on homeopathy and HIV. Read the full story here.