“Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you.”

Luke 6:26



A recent editorial in the leading medical journal, The Lancet 2005; 366: 690-692 and 726-732 of 27th August issue), about Homeopathy makes very sad reading and bares the attitude of the vested interests in modern medicine who wouldn’t want anything other than the modern medical clap trap to exist! Heinemann was himself a medical doctor and he founded this system out of his frustrations about the limitations of modern medicine of his times. Modern medicine has, of course, come a long way from the time of Heinemann. It claims today, if one is to believe the claptrap of modern medicine, that it could even prolong life and prevent death. The truth however, is otherwise and here is a piece from the Institute of Nutrition report in the US that would give the reader an idea of where modern medicine is going.

"A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good…. The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. The total number of iatrogenic deaths….. is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251.”

Modern medicine today almost agrees with Heinemann’s original thought that most, if not all, diseases start in the human mind. Indian ancient system of healing, Ayurveda, was the one that originated this concept of mind over matter Centuries earlier. If that were so, homeopathy, as a good placebo effect, should do wonders for the majority of ill people in the world today who suffer from minor illness syndromes. The largest sick absenteeism today is from viral upper respiratory diseases that respond very well to homeopathic remedies. Other major groups of illnesses: the-doctor-thinks-you-have a disease and the patient-thinks-he/she-has a disease, syndromes also should respond well.

The modern medical objections to homeopathy, according to the editorial in The Lancet referred to earlier, are based on a meta-analysis of 110 studies of homeopathic and allopathic remedies, done by Dr. Matthias Egger and associates, from the University of Berne in Switzerland, after searching 19 electronic databases covering the period from 1995 to 2003, reported in an article in the same issue of Lancet. Let us look at this peculiar statistical method called meta-analysis, to verify scientific data in medicine. I vaguely remember some one describing three lies in this world-ordinary lies that ordinary folk speak, the super lies that politicians pontificate on (Politicians even give solidity to pure air according to George Orwell in his book Animal Farm) and the highest lie that is statistics!

Meta analysis is, in a manner of speaking, describing a basket full of fruits of various types-peaches, nectarines, mangoes, oranges, apples and grapes, as identical. This is called mix master technique by a great statistician himself, Steven Milloy, in his booklet Science without Sense. Those 110 studies were done at different times, at different settings, with different cohorts of patients, and by diverse group of researchers in search of fattening their CVs! How, on earth, could they be identical? They are as varied as an apple from a mango. To cap it, we draw our inferences form those studies to say that a whole system of medicine, existing for hundreds of years, as useless. This is most unscientific, to say the least.

If one went one step further one finds the hollowness of the very basis of controlled studies, the foundation of modern medical science. Controlled studies compare two cohorts of human beings, the matched groups, where only a few parameters of their phenotype like sex, age, BMI and, may be, a few more characteristics are matched. Two human beings could never be matched like that. Their genes and their consciousnesses are excluded in this grouping. That makes the groups totally dissimilar and not comparable with scientific precision.

Conventional bio-chemists would certainly swear that with the homeopathic dilutions there will certainly not be any drug molecule in the diluents to affect any cure! They are right in their limited knowledge of the chemistry of water. If they study the structure of water which is as varied in different states, i.e. ice, steam, et cetera they would soon realize that the homeopathic drug would certainly leave its footprints by changing the structure of that water which, in turn, might have great therapeutic effect not known to bio-chemists. In fact, this was shown elegantly by a French biochemist, Benveniste. (Benveniste J, Nature 1988; 134: 69) Nature ordered investigations into Benveniste’s claims and their investigators did confirm Benveniste’s claims.

The very conservative editor of Nature, J. Maddox, then wrote to say that these claims might not hold good always. These experiments, however, were reproduced by many others in France and outside, but the doubts expressed by Nature put an end to Government funding for Benveniste and he had to close his laboratories! Let us, for a minute, examine the reductionist science of modern medicine vis-à-vis water. If the bits were to make the whole, as we claim in reductionist science, water must be highly volatile as its bits, hydrogen and oxygen, are both volatile. This is a good lesson for medical scientists to know that their theory of studying a cell and then projecting it on to an organ or to man will not work that way in reality. Modern medicine has been predicting the unpredictable future of man in every disease situation as also in screening healthy people!

Modern medicine has done very well in areas of emergency management and in surgery in selected areas, but has been an utter failure in chronic illnesses and minor illness syndromes. A judicious mix of the best in other known systems of the healing arts put together, after scientifically verifying their claims, would bring forth a new system that will be both accessible to the majority in this world as also would do a lot of good to mankind. It is time to stop destroying the complementary systems by comparing them with modern medicine and its reductionist scientific base. There are good things in every system and no system could claim superiority or exclusivity in human healing process. Eventually, what heals is the patient’s own immune system. The latter needs the help of a humane doctor, a good human being, who has the good of the patients at heart: all the drugs and surgery, are only complementary.

“I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.”

Woodrow Wilson.