THE WORST CRIME OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Carolyn Dean, MD, ND and
In America and in the West, the public is conditioned to believe that modern (allopathic) medicine is the supreme healing modality. Propaganda machines that rely on media in need of content and not necessarily truth eagerly spread this notion. Scientific journal articles promoting drugs are little more than press releases by pharmaceutical companies signed by doctors for hire. In the midst of the recent “outing” of unsafe drugs by whistleblowers; the thousands of law suits against drug companies for drug damage; and a plethora of books and articles enumerating the side effects of drugs and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost we see drug companies and the WTO determined to control of dietary supplements through Codex and international trade agreements in their global quest for power.
Why is this happening? Simply because most of the world does not use modern medicine and the ‘powers that be’ want to control those other forms of medicine to make way for a seamless, worldwide assembly line-style of health delivery by government decree favoring the highly-profitable, patented products and services of modern (allopathic) medicine.
One of the forms of medicine that is being targeted for control is homeopathy –the topic of this week’s column. Both Elissa and I have a deep and abiding love of homeopathy and we speak up for it whenever we can.
Homeopathy is one of those systems of medicine that is all encompassing and could be a life-long project of study. I wanted to make it my prime modality after medical school and began learning it during my naturopathic training. That might have had something to do with genes because my grandmother was a nurse and a homeopath. And my father, while still in high school, was on the lists to enter Boston University School of Medicine, which, at the time, was a homeopathic medical school. I found, however, that I’m much too eclectic to stay in one place for too long. But I stayed long enough to see some miraculous cures take place. In the hands of a skilled homeopath, it is one of the best existing modalities for all conditions. I recommend it to parents as the best form of medicine for children and the best for most acute conditions and advise people to have a homeopathic kit on hand to treat emergencies.
Elissa’s reasons are even more personal. After a lifetime of ill health due to a missed diagnosis of mercury poisoning from her dental fillings (a disease that is not recognized by either the American dental community or modern [allopathic] medicine), Elissa was diagnosed by a homeopath and from the first dose of a homeopathic remedy, she found her salvation. Up until then, she had experienced not just debilitating symptoms of serious chronic illness, but numerous extreme adverse reactions from such things as penicillin and Tylenol. To find out why she was misdiagnosed all those years and why she was never referred to homeopathy, a medical philosophy that has specialized in the diagnosis and treatment of medically-induced mercury poisoning for 200 years, prompted Elissa to become the health policy expert she is today. She earned her expertise by delving into the depth and breadth of the history of American medicine and how politics and the clever actions of several self-interest groups, over time, created today’s modern medical monopoly folly.
The story of how homeopathy first came to America, became the second most practiced healing art by public demand, and then was virtually destroyed by Big Pharma and its allies, the AMA and the practitioners of modern (allopathic) medicine, is why we have called our article “The Worst Crime of the 20th Century.” This history bears witness to how the self-interest of just a handful of people, by creating an allopathic medical monopoly, continues to cause the needless deaths of millions of people and the ongoing suffering of millions more.
As the story goes, back in the mid-1800s, homeopathy had arrived on our shores from its homeland, Germany, and the public eagerly flocked to homeopathic physicians. And no wonder. The “modern (allopathic) medicine” of the day included draining people of up to 32 ounces of blood and dosing them with lethal amounts of mercury in a product called “calomel.” Calomel caused profuse salivation and doctors measured the amount of saliva by the pint as a means of determining the success of the treatment. Calomel was considered the all-purpose elixir for most ailments along with the bleeding, so you can see why homeopathy spread rapidly. Homeopaths found allopathic treatment barbaric.
What confounded the practitioners of “modern (allopathic) medicine” of that era was that homeopaths were well-educated and had quickly fallen into favor with the educated, politically powerful and wealthier clientele, as well as the masses. Worse yet, while their medical philosophy confounded the average practitioner of “modern (allopathic) medicine,” every time an allopath actually took an honest look at how homeopathy was practiced, another convert to homeopathy was born. In fact, in many cases, practicing homeopaths were actually converts from “modern (allopathic) medicine.”
Proof that homeopathy worked was widespread. Every epidemic in Europe and America starting with the cholera epidemics in the 1840s became an advertisement for the virtues of homeopathy. Homeopaths saved lives in such large numbers and compared to the competition it was obvious that allopathic methods were a complete failure. In rapid order, the practice of homeopathy became widespread in New England, the Middle Atlantic States, and the Midwest. And, true to form, while the South had been slow to catch on, the 1878 yellow fever epidemic converted many patients and doctors there, too.
The formation of the American Medical Association in the 1840s was in direct response to the onslaught of a superior medical system. From the beginning, the AMA stood firm with a hostile “them or us” attitude about members consorting with the competition. Well-educated homeopaths, often graduates of Harvard, Yale and other such schools, were banned from joining the AMA. In AMA meetings, any discussion about homeopathy was banned. If any member of the AMA, or its state chapters, were seen consorting with a homeopath, that doctor was expelled.
Voluminous and vicious literature was written and circulated about the worthlessness of homeopathy. When the drug industry emerged as an economic force in the 1870s, flush with its profits from selling mercury medicinals to the Union Army, the AMA found the sugar daddy of its dreams that could fuel and finance an all out war against its most serious competition. This polemic propaganda continues today because the 1500 or so effective homeopathic remedies that have been developed over 200 years represent serious competition for Big Pharma. Furthermore, homeopathic remedies have proven to have no dangerous side effects, are not patentable, can be manufactured and sold for pennies and have a very long shelf life.
Those who practice medicine in the allopathic tradition, then as now, know instinctively that homeopathy, by its very principles, is a rejection of the assumptions held near and dear to modern medicine. In fact, it is important to know that homeopathy is actually the invention of a German medical genius named Samuel Hahnemann, and it comes from Hahnemann’s rejection of what he was taught as an allopathic physician in his day, 200 years ago.
What Hahnemann saw was a failure to truly heal people. As a linguist with knowledge of many ancient and modern languages, including several from the Arab world, Hahnemann made a good deal of his living translating scientific and medical texts. This gave him access to some of the greatest minds in the world’s medical traditions and it was when he was questioning the conclusions of British doctor, William Cullen, regarding the use of Peruvian bark to treat malaria, that Hahnemann experienced a flash of insight that fostered homeopathy.
At the height of its popularity in America, homeopathy was second only to allopathy in the number of practitioners. It had its own schools, its own pharmacies and even had a monument erected to honor Hahnemann in Washington, D.C., considered by many to be one of the great geniuses in the history of medicine. [Read] [Read]
At the time this monument to Hahnemann was unveiled, there where 22 homeopathic medical schools in America. One of the more interesting ones was The New England Female College founded in 1850 as the world’s first women’s medical school. During its time, it graduated the first black woman doctor and after it was absorbed into Boston University to become Boston University Medical School in 1873, it became America’s first coed medical school. In 1897, the new school graduated its first black doctor, who went on to become America’s first black psychiatrist.
Ironically, four years after the monument was erected, and 10 years before the publication of the Flexner Report, the blueprint of the allopathic medical monopoly, the trustees of Boston University were told by AMA officials that if they didn’t convert the medical school curricula to all-allopathic, their graduates would have difficulty taking and passing state medical licensing examinations. At the time, there were 645 practicing homeopaths in Boston alone.
So, what allopathic assumptions does homeopathy reject? At its core, homeopathy is based, not on a biochemical or mechanistic model like allopathy, but on the idea that each person has a vital force, a resonating frequency, if you will. This vital force, called Qi or Chi in Asian healing arts, is basically the energy or essence of the person that can be observed and measured. In the simplest terms, when you are ill, according to homeopathic philosophy, your frequency changes and symptoms occur as a result of your body trying to restore you to a healthy frequency. The symptoms serve as the means by which restoration of health can be achieved. The very symptoms that allopaths suppress are the ones the body uses to get well and that a homeopath surveys to find the appropriate remedy to help the body heal.
To a homeopath, an office call is basically devoted to systematically interviewing the patient to determine what makes them tick as well as gathering as much information about each of their symptoms as possible. Then, after analyzing this information, the homeopath has available 1500 or so catalogued remedies that are inventoried according to symptoms and constitution.
The information in these reference manuals is drawn from data on literally thousands of patients who have been treated successfully. Homeopathic remedies themselves are developed by a process called “potentization” which renders them not only non-toxic but leaves only a minute vibration in the water of the original substance. These potentized remedies, when they enter the person’s body as a frequency, not a chemical substance, basically help revitalize the person’s own harmonious frequency.
To modern (allopathic) medical practitioners, a symptom is a bad outcome of an illness and suppressing the symptom is the first thing a doctor tries to do to make the patient feel better. Suppression of symptoms is not the same as healing the person.
Each homeopathic remedy is developed by first testing it on healthy people based on an idea called “the law of similars.” The law of similars comes from an old idea that a substance that can create a symptom in a healthy person can cure a sick person suffering the same symptom. The law of similars confounds the scientific assumptions of the biochemically-based allopathic medical community and until you experience the healing process yourself, you will probably scratch your head, wondering what these homeopaths are talking about. Hahnemann came to name his new school of thought homeo (Greek for “similar”), pathy (Greek for “suffering). He then named the old school of thought allo (Greek for “other”), pathy.
These opposing views on the meaning of symptoms and what a doctor does about them is the sharpest of many ideological divisions between homeopathy and allopathy.
For most of the 1800s, allopaths were called allopaths but when the AMA orchestrated the publication of the Flexner Report in 1910, to outline their new medical monopoly, the first order of business was to make sure the word “allopathy” no longer defined them. They wanted ALL practitioners of all “cults” or “dogmas” as they insultingly referred to their competition, to give up their differing medical ideas and “surrender” to modern science.
The Flexner Report was used to convince the financial backers of non-allopathic medical schools, particularly homeopathy, to cease providing funding. Within 20 years, all but one homeopathic school had been closed or forced to convert to allopathic teaching only.
It came to our attention within the last week or so, that Citizens for Health, one of the major national health freedom groups, in conjunction with the National Center for Homeopathy, had organized a writing campaign to the CDC to include homeopathic research as part of its agenda for the next decade. [Read] homeopathic.org/
This campaign, with the deadline of January 15, 2006, is now over. However, we have mixed feelings about how the modern medicine dominated CDC, or the NIH or any other of the usual research organizations could possibly conduct honest and relevant research on homeopathy, given the fact that modern medicine is based on such vastly different assumptions.
We also have concerns because of recent revelations about the corruption in science in all venues as well as the faking of scientific papers being published in prestigious medical journals. We have concerns about the political and economic agendas of those in control of directing what research shall be done and that, somehow, homeopathy will be tainted keeping it in the same false and negative light it has been held for most of the 20th century.
We suggest that there are ample books written by practicing homeopaths about the success of homeopathy for any open-minded person to see its worth. In any case, we are foursquare behind restoring homeopathy to its former position as the second largest medical system in America and give you practical resources at the end to pursue your own investigation of homeopathy.
To sum up the worldview on homeopathy we recently read an article in the New India Press, dated December 24, 2005, titled, “WHO Recognition for Homeopathy.” We thought you might like to read some excerpts from this article to give you a flavor of how homeopathy is discussed in a country where it is widely accepted and used.
In all, the New India Press estimates that “about 500 million people rely on homeopathy treatment in the world. As a system of medicine, it draws support from hundreds of thousands of doctors, teaching institutions and universities where homeopathy is taught.”
We conclude that as allopathic medicine is relegated to its proper place –surgery and emergency medicine, homeopathy and other natural healing arts will once again flourish and inspire.
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© 2006 Carolyn Dean -
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Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor, naturopathic doctor, herbalist, acupuncturist, nutritionist, as well as a powerful health activist fighting for health freedom as president of Friends of Freedom International. Dr. Dean is the author of over a dozen health books, the latest of which is "Death By Modern Medicine".
Elissa Meininger, is Vice President of Friends of Freedom International and co-founder of the Health Freedom Action Network, a grassroots citizens' political action group. She is also a health freedom political analyst and can be heard on the natural health radio show SuperHealth, broadcast weekly on station WKY (SuperTalk AM 930) in Oklahoma City.
Even if natural healing arts products and services are not your cup of tea, look at it this way. Every dime people spend on natural healing arts products and services is spent to support health and to attempt to avoid using costly products and services of modern medicine.