By John H. Biggs BSc, NCP - Owner Optimum Health Vitamins

Recently while in Mexico I got several nasty insect bites on my legs. Thinking they might involve something poisonous, I showed the resident MD at the resort, telling him I had used a homeopathic APIS Gel on it (for insect stings and bites). He shrugged his shoulders, and said “We use the same thing.” He said to watch it, and to come back if it got worse…but it resolved.

Now, if the recent episode of CBC’s Marketplace (Jan 14/11) slamming homeopathy is true, then is this MD just an idiot? Are all the French, and other European MDs that use homeopathy as a first line of defence in all kinds of medical situations just clueless? Does the Queen mother, who can procure any treatment in the world, carry around her black box of homeopathic remedies just for show? How about the millions of people in more than 100 countries, or the 400,000+ healthcare practitioners world-wide that use homeopathy? (*1) Are they just working on blind faith, or do they use it because it is effective, and the best available therapy?

The episode went after homeopathy with the same old negative spins the media has used over and over again in years past, i.e. that homeopathy is so dilute that there is nothing in it, and that it is just placebo effect…(blah, blah, blah).

Yet, that homeopathic remedies are diluted to this degree happens to be the first thing every homeopathy student learns…so tell us something we don’t know. But appealing to the Western mindset, which holds that if our modern technology can’t explain it, then it doesn’t exist, (and also that we already know everything), the show kept beating on the placebo effect, and that homeopathic remedies are just sugar and water.

So tell me, when your 0-5 year old child is asleep but coughing his or her lungs out in the middle of the night, and they wake up enough to swallow a teaspoon of homeopathic cough syrup, and are back asleep immediately… about 10 minutes later when the coughing subsides completely for the rest of the night, was it “just the placebo effect”? And when this happens many times over several years, (boy that placebo effect sure is consistent), yet cough syrup purchased from the drug store doesn’t work nearly as well…was it just a “selective placebo effect” that the child decided on during sleep? (Please note: several pharmaceutical kid’s cough syrups have been recalled because they have resulted in deaths, or come with severe warnings on the label.)

Do veterinarians and trainers that give their animals homeopathics…because they work…rely solely on the placebo effect? And if so, why don’t other approaches work as effectively? Why choose homeopathy?

It isn’t because of marketing, because homeopathic companies, relatively speaking, do very little marketing. When was the last time you saw a TV ad for one? Now consider when the last time you saw a TV ad for a pharmaceutical drug was? Yesterday? Today perhaps? If the placebo effect applies to anything, it is most likely pharmaceuticals, because it is suggested to us constantly that they will produce the result they claim to, (while the possible side effects are read at almost inaudible speed).

So why choose homeopathy? My take on it is because in many different health circumstances, homeopathy produces the most desirable results, and it’s the result that is the most important. Did it work to do what you wanted it to? Did it do it without undesirable side effects, and was it reasonably priced? If the answer is “yes, yes, and yes”, then a person is wise to use it again. And this is why homeopathy is gaining so much popularity, while being promoted mostly by word of mouth.

Yet, there was something very coincidental about the timing of this Marketplace episode. The company that the journalists went after was Boiron. A French company that just happens to produce the most popular, (and thousands I’ve talked to say most effective), homeopathic remedy for flu in the world. It is called Oscillococcinum, and interestingly that same week we heard all over the news how the number of people getting flu shots were way down this year, and that we were seeing a surge in the flu (like we see every year in January/ February, when peoples vitamin D levels are the lowest). Whichever station you were watching then had their resident publicist/M.D. come on and tell you that you should go get a flu shot. This seemed more than purely coincidental to me!

Earlier in the season CTV news reported on yet another study which said Echinacea didn’t work…(again). And again they gave you no specifics on which kind of Echinacea was used, or for which active ingredients it was standardized, or how it was dosed, or when in the course of the cold it was started…all of which can make a big difference. Then the CTV News channel went to commercial, a station in which almost every ad series contains at least one ad for a pharmaceutical product. And do you think the drug companies that pay for all those ads have a big influence on what does, or does not get aired? I would say they do.

So for all the thousands of Canadians who have used reputable standardized brands of Echinacea, dosed them heavily and repeatedly at the first sign of cold symptoms, and stopped the cold from developing in the first 24 to 48 hours, (which is the way it is supposed to be used)…..I’ve got bad news. Even if you were surprised at how well it worked, because you weren’t expecting it to, and even if you woke up the next day and the cold was gone….it was just the placebo effect.

My sincere apologies for all the sarcasm, but I find the way the media herds public thinking and opinion simply appalling. People are so open to suggestion when they watch TV that they have a tendency to forget to be critical. They forget that many of the so called “truths” that get aired are present because they are to the supporting sponsor’s monetary advantage. We forget that what appears on TV is very controlled by huge monetary interests.

In Western culture, we are taught to replace our own experience with science. We are taught by the establishment to trust the reported results of “scientific” studies more than how we actually feel, or what we observe with our own eyes. We are conditioned to believe that what we experienced may not have been “real”, i.e. it might have been placebo effect. i.e. You might have just “thought” that you felt better, when in fact you actually didn’t, (???). Better to trust the “objective” science. But problems with this thinking arise when the scientific studies are simply not objective. Studies supposedly done in the public interest, are often actually done to support vested interests, and may have nothing to do with reality, or “truth”.

As I have said for over twenty years now, “When it comes to your health, if what you are doing is working, keep doing it. If it’s not, do something else. Go with the result! It’s the result that is of primary importance. The science that does, or does not back it up is secondary.” After all, particularly in the field of health, what is considered quackery this year is often accepted as scientific fact in the next. It largely just depends on who is making the money. 

(*1) stat taken from letter by Majid Djoudi, president of Boiron Canada. To read the letter, click here…

John