Phoenix Homeopathy

Deaths from medicines soar

As the modern pharmaceutical industry has grown, so deaths from conventional medicines have soared. According to a special report in The Independent newspaper, experts estimate that, at any one time, 5,600 UK hospital beds area occupied by patients suffering from drug reactions, at a cost to the NHS of over £450million a year.

We all know that orthodox medicines can be a life-saver, although they often help suppress the symptoms rather than tackling the real root cause of illness. But too often, for hard-pressed GPs with too many patients and too little time, they’re the first port of call, even before a proper diagnosis has been made.

A case of drugs before diagnosis

A member of my family recently developed severe menstrual problems and some double vision. Blood tests revealed that levels of one hormone were excessively high. From the clinical presentation, doctors were understandably convinced that she had a pituitary tumour, and strongly advised that she start taking Bromocriptine (Parlodel) straightaway, a heavy-duty drug used to treat Parkinson’s, with an enormous list of side effects (69% of patients taking the drug experienced some side-effects), including nausea, abnormal involuntary movement, hallucinations, confusion, dizziness, drowsiness, faintness/fainting, vomiting, asthenia, abdominal discomfort, visual disturbance, ataxia, insomnia, depression, hypotension, shortness of breath, constipation and vertigo. Nice.

Not wanting to risk upsetting her body chemistry unless and until she found out that this treatment was the only, and an essential, treatment option, and unwilling to take a drug like this on an unconfirmed diagnosis, she quite rightly insisted on an MRI scan to find the suspected tumour and confirm the diagnosis, first.

She had the scan, no tumour was found, and doctors now consider that the high hormone level is probably due to polycyctic ovary syndrome, meaning that Bromicriptinene would have been entirely the wrong drug for her to have taken, and she would have unneccesarily risked serious side-effects.

Find out if you’re at risk

Deaths from adverse reactions from suspected adverse reactions to prescription drugs has more than doubled in the past 10 years, so if you’re taking conventional medicines, especially if you’re taking more than one, or are elderly, make sure that you know what side-effects to look for and let your doctor know if you suspect your drugs are making you ill.

And if you’d like to discuss finding a natural way to get your body back into balance, contact Phoenix Homeopathy.

The latest copy of health store Holland & Barrett’s magazine Here’s Health asks “should homeopathy be available on the NHS?”. Faculty of Homeopathy member and reknowned homeopath Peter Fisher gives the ‘yes’ case, and homeopathy-sceptic Professor Michael Baum opposes it.

Readers are asked to vote on the issue.

Why not register your views?

Homeopathy has always been a controversial area of holistic or complementary medicine.

Those with an opinion about homeopathy tend to fall into one of two diametrically-opposed camps: some think it’s scientifically implausible or impossible for homeopathic remedies to work, while others know from their own experience that homeopathy does work, even though we don’t yet have a verifiable way of explaining how. The recent US medical school debate about homeopathy illustrates this perfectly.

There’s nothing wrong with being sceptical about things: in fact, scepticism can be extremely healthy. I just don’t think that it’s healthy to ignore evidence from hundreds of thousands of satisfied patients who are convinced that homeopathy was the treatment that helped them to restore their health.

After all, the healthiest of minds tends to be an open one.

Earlier today, the University of Connecticut Health Center in the US hosted a historic debate on homeopathy. The event marked the first time that a major US medical school has examined this subject in this depth. It also marks the first time that the clinical, historical and basic science data has been examined simultaneously.

Beginning with a speaker who argues that homeopathy is implausible, and continuing with a discussion of recent investigations into the nature of water, the debate continues with intelligent and articulate arguments for and against homeopathy, including a final presentation arguing that consistently-suppressed historical records demonstrate that homeopathy has been spectacularly effective in reducing mortality rates in epidemics of infectious diseases, including pneumonia and influenza.

You can view the recorded debate online.

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.

Whether you’re generally healthy, but are tired all the time (what doctors call ‘TATT’), or you live with a more serious disorder like chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), it can be extremely hard sustain energy throughout the day. CFS, of course, encompasses many more symptoms than fatigue: sufferers often cope with brain ‘fog’ or poor recall, dizziness, muscle pain and so on.

For those without CFS who are tired all the time, it’s worth considering the possible effect on our system of the day-to-day demands we place on ourselves. Human beings evolved over millenia to cope with sudden, short bursts of stress (much like when a wild animal flees from sudden danger), but our body chemistry just hasn’t had time to evolve to cope with the long-term, daily stress like that experienced day-to-day in a busy metropolis. No wonder that homeopathic remedies like Phos-ac, Sepia and Adrenaline, which can all help with worn-out states, are prescribed so frequently in the Phoenix Homeopathy clinic.

Possible causations for the fatigue that can be part of a CFS symptom-picture also vary: for some CFS patients with fatigue, a history of repeated vaccination may be implicated. Other patients report that candidasis (which may be linked to so-called ‘leaky junctions’ in the gut, and to connected food intolerances) may be the culprit. Sometimes contact with toxic chemicals (including pesticides or mercury from dental amalgams), parasites in the system, or lingering or past viral infections (like flu or glandular fever) are suspected. With other patients, long-suppressed emotions may be causing havoc to the body’s subtle energies, and may need to be acknowedged, felt, appropriately expressed and released. No wonder hard-pressed GPs (doctors in general practice) sometimes struggle to help CFS-related fatigue and related symptoms!

Working out why energy levels or stamina have dropped can therefore be a tough task, but a randomised double-blind trial involving 62 patients with energy-sapping ME found that 33% of patients in the group receiving homeopathic remedies showed definite improvement compared with none in the placebo group (Awdry R. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 1996; February, March, April).

And in a triple-blind randomised controlled trial of 86 patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, patients in the homeopathic medicine group showed clinically significant improvement with significantly more improvement on fatigue, compared to patients receiving placebo (Weatherley-Jones E, Nicholl JP, Thomas KJ, Parry GJ, McKendrik MW, Green ST, Stanley PJ, Lynch SPJ, A randomised, controlled, triple-blind trial of the efficacy of homeopathic treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome, Journal of Psychosomatic Research 56 (2004) 189-197).

Fortunately for homeopathy patients, although an understanding of the possible causes of each individual patient’s chronic fatigue and related symptoms can be very helpful, homeopathy concentrates on information from the patients themselves. Appropriate homeopathic remedies are carefully chosen for each separate patient, based on that particular patient’s experience of their particular symptom-package.