First principle: any explanation is better than none…. The search for causes is thus conditioned by and excited by the feeling of fear. The question “Why?” is not pursued for its own sake but to find a certain kind of answer — an answer that is pacifying, tranquilizing and soothing. — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
(Article by Richard Gale and Gary Null republished from PRN.fm)
A fundamental foundation of American democracy is our freedom of choice. We have the legitimate right to pursue a career, decide where to live, what to read or watch, the freedom to vote or not, and decide who to marry or live with. Americans hold this these freedoms sacred, at least in theory.
However, during the past decades, an ethos has arisen, associated with the American Medical Association, the pharmaceutical industry, professional organizations, medical publications, media health reporters and legislators largely benefitting from the largess of private drug companies adamantly pushing to limit our medical choices. This medical regime wants to choose and dictate the types of medicines available and enforce how we are diagnosed for mental conditions. They have mastered the art of pathologizing life. We have little choice in having access to public water without fluoridation or the right to vaccinate our children or not. To illustrate this point, the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) and FDA curtailing all positive information about homeopathy and making efforts to eliminate it altogether. This is accomplished under the misinformed ruse that it is unproven and has not undergone the rigor of conventional medical science. Therefore, homeopathy should be banned.
Although homeopathy is not banned legislatively, it is not difficult to see where the FDA and HSS are headed because historically the federal agencies and professional medical associations repeatedly state it has no basis in science. It is no more than water. Denying the virtues of homeopathy’s scientific evidence, the medical establishment claims the homeopath is engaging in fraud. Other countries that recognize homeopathy — notably Brazil, France, Germany, India and Switzerland — are never mentioned in their discussions and literature.
As we will present in this paper, there is an appreciable body of clinical trials, including double-blind placebo controlled studies, and basic scientific experiments confirming homeopathy’s effectiveness and safety. For 200 years, hundreds of millions of people have benefitted from homeopathic medications throughout the world. Therefore, why is the entire apparatus of our national and state medical system — the CDC, FDA, NIH, National Cancer Institute, etc. — so rabidly opposed to it? In 2016, the Federal Trade Commission demanding that homeopathic producers include on the label that they do not work is one extreme case.[1] And why is there no sincere and objective effort underway to scientifically validate or invalidate its safety and efficacy? Why does the media, including the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as the liberal media, such as Mother Jones, The Atlantic and Slate that otherwise pride themselves in criticizing pharmaceutical malfeasance and profiteering, fail to give any serious attention to homeopathy’s successes?
Our conclusions clearly show that homeopathy is a legitimate medical system and an effective intervention. It deserves its place as a viable option for healthcare choice. However, it faces a formidable and dishonest force, including Wikipedia, with a mission to demean, discourage and ultimately destroy it.
Very often after using conventional medicine and discovering either no improvement or severe drawbacks from drugs’ adverse effects, people seek alternative treatments. Some may hear about homeopathy and want to investigate it. Often they search the internet and more often than not will be led to Wikipedia where they will discover in the first and subsequent paragraphs that homeopathy:
“….is a pseudoscience – a belief that is incorrectly presented as scientific. Homeopathic preparations are not effective for treating any condition; large-scale studies have found homeopathy to be no more effective than a placebo, indicating that any positive effects that follow treatment are only due to the placebo effect, normal recovery from illness, or regression toward the mean…. Outside of the alternative medicine community, scientists have long considered homeopathy a sham or a pseudoscience, and the mainstream medical community regards it as quackery. There is an overall absence of sound statistical evidence of therapeutic efficacy, which is consistent with the lack of any biologically plausible pharmacological agent or mechanism. [2]
Certainly a patient suffering from an illness, which may possibly be treated successfully with a homeopathic preparation will read Wikipedia’s entry and say “no luck there” and move on.
If we listen solely to the Skeptics – a quasi-rationalist movement of scientific idolatry — and the advocates of Science-Based Medicine (SBM), and now increasingly government health officials, homeopathy’s explanation is always the same. Homeopathy is only water. It is foolish and unscientific. Worse, we are told it is dangerous and even life-threatening. Homeopathy, so the Skeptics believe, fails to meet the standards of modern evidence-based medicine and should therefore be avoided. That is the end of the story.
However, this is not the story’s end; it is only the beginning.
How many people actually know who are the Skeptic authors and editors working within Wikipedia and the mainstream media to discredit homeopathy and other legitimate alternative and integrative medical disciplines? These individuals claim to be the final arbiters of truth. We know who they are as well as their leading gurus basking in the citadels of materialist reductionism and speaking on behalf of Skepticism’s worldwide movement. These are the people who suffer from a kind of philosophical and irrational unconsciousness who find pacifism, tranquility and soothing, hearkened in Nietzsche’s quote above, in an extreme reductionist view of the world that is buried in repressed fantasies and fears. A salient psychological feature of fundamentalism, either religious, Skeptic or scientific, is its intense fear of being proven wrong, which it battles against with absurd irrational arguments. For this reason it is a serious social and health problem because its inherent capacity to inflict enormous harm.
The priests in this Citadel who serve the scientific and technological elite of postmodernity, namely federal health agencies and the pharmaceutical industrial complex, in fact properly speak their truths about homeopathy and other non-conventional medicine. But their truths only exist within a very specified, narrow, and limited context or field from which they criticize science they either don’t or refuse to understand or are incapable of accurately explaining. For this reason they are easy to criticize because in fact they are the self-anointed spokespersons for the dire failings of modern scientific culture, conventional medicine and repressive government health policies.
Dr. Steven Novella, the acknowledged founder of Science-Based Medicine describes homeopathy as;
“a prescientific philosophy-based system on magical thinking…. Essentially, homeopathy uses fanciful treatments that are based on silly ideas, such as the personality of the patient, but also “sympathetic magic.” The belief is that homeopathic remedies contain the magical essence of symptoms and can be used to cure those same symptoms.”[3]
Another spokesperson for the SBM movement is oncologist and breast cancer surgeon Dr. David Gorski (aka ORAC). Gorski writes, “Homeopathy is the perfect quackery. The reason that homeopathy is so perfect as a form of quackery is because it is quite literally nothing.”[4] But are the Skeptics perhaps accurate in their assessment about homeopathy? Is over-diluting a substance in water whereby the atoms are no longer detectable any more bioactive than plain water? Yes, we need to ask these questions. But it is also wise to parallel this inquiry and ask whether most conventional drug therapies safely work and properly improve and save lives.
For 2018, it is estimated that 1.7 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer and there will be over 600,000 cancer deaths. On the positive side, cancer cases and mortality have decreased slightly. This would hardly seem to be the case given the toxic chemical-filled environment average Americans live in. Is the drop in cancer rates due to better chemotherapeutic drugs and more precise radiation therapy and surgery? Or is this decline partially due to the fact that millions Americans are now turning to alternative medicine and healthier lifestyles as a preventative measure and adopting healthier lifestyles. A search on the NIH’s medical database produces over 28,000 studies published about green tea, over 13,000 for curcumin and 8,300 for ginseng. For this reason, the health benefits of these natural products cannot be utterly ignored, although Skeptics make every attempt to do so. Fortunately a growing number of people are not listening to the Skeptics’ message.
SBM Skeptics are unable to answer this question nor do they entertain the possibility of alternatives’ effectiveness. More unfortunate, our federal agencies show no interest in finding answers either because disease prevention is low on the medical establishment’s priority list. American medicine has regressed to disease management and the dire statistics of pharmaceutical drug induced injury and mortality bear this out.
In the UK, six out of ten cancer patients also use alternative medicine, primarily Western and Chinese herbal preparations.[5] In Canada, 54% of cancer patients use alternative medicine as well, including homeopathy, and approximately half of that percentage abandon chemo and radiation altogether.[6] In an eighteen nationwide survey of 65,000 cancer patients in 2011, 40% were following Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) protocols.[7] That percent has very likely increased during the past seven years as people become progressively disillusioned with the promises of allopathic drug-based medicine. Increasingly patients are becoming victims of pharmaceutical drugs’ adverse effects and are witnessing drugs’ lethal consequences in family members and friends who place their faiths solely in the dominant medical paradigm.
If conventional anti-cancer regimens are as effective as the SBM community would have us believe, why would patients turn to treatments outside the medical establishment? Frequently patients start conventional treatments and after it fails to provide relief turn to alternative modalities. Criticisms against the growing popularity in homeopathy and natural medicine are fierce. Conventional healthcare is increasingly losing the public trust, and for excellent reasons. More and more people realize that to remain healthy we must educate ourselves and become responsible for our own health. Besides, for a growing number of Americans, healthcare is out of their financial reach. This trend is anathema to Skeptics who throw their entire weight into the gospel word of conventional medicine. However the most often cited studies published in journals such as The Oncologist and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, which argue against the use of alternative medicine alone are observational and often present conflicts of interest with private drug companies manufacturing anti-cancer drugs.[8]
Today, India has over 200,000 practicing homeopaths and approximately 12,000 new graduates begin practice annually. The Banerji Homeopathic Research Foundation in Kolkata, India, has been successfully treating severe brain, breast and lung cancers for several decades.[9] According to the American Brain Tumor Association, life expectancy for highly malignant brain glioblastoma tumors is 2-3 years with conventional chemo and radiation treatments. Gliomas are largely regarded as incurable.[10] Banerji’s homeopathic protocols, on the other hand, find 30% of glioma patients surviving well beyond this threshold without any anti-cancer drugs or radiation. Patients also experience a higher quality of life without the serious adverse and debilitating effects suffered from chemo drugs. Between 1990 and 2005, the Foundation has treated over 17,000 cancer patients with a 19% complete regression rate for severe malignant tumors and 21% became stable or improved after treatment.[11]
Prasanta Banerji has been practicing homeopathy for over 55 years and his clinic now averages 800-900 patients daily, 300-400 are treated free of charge. His protocols for brain and breast cancer have been studied at the prestigious MD Anderson Cancer Center’s department of molecular genetics in Houston, which confirmed that the Foundation’s preparations selectively killed cancer cells without harming normal cells. Their paper “Ruta 6 selectively induces cell death in brain cancer cells but proliferation in normal peripheral blood lymphocytes: A novel treatment for human brain cancer” was published in the International Journal of Oncology and a joint-investigation with the National Cancer Institute was published in the journal Oncology Reports. Today, the Banerji model is being used in over 80 countries.[12] Banerji’s work, as well as that of other homeopathic doctors condemned by Skeptics and SBM physicians, is also featured in a penetrating new documentary film Magic Pills: Promise or Placebo directed by Canadian homeopathic practitioner Ananda More.[13]
Sir Karl Popper noted that an absolute truth can never be established because it would require an infinite number of experiments and trials. However, absolute falsity CAN be settled because any absolute Skeptic claim, such as there being no scientific basis for homeopathy whatsoever, is immediately falsified once a single exception is found. And Banerji’s clinical results, and an indisputable systematic and meta-analysis review of individualized homeopathic studies conducted by Robert Mathie at the British Homeopathy Institute[14] provided many exceptions to discredit the Skeptics’ absolute scientism. According to Dr. Alex Tournier, a physicist and founding director of the Homeopathic Research Institute in London and the Water Research Laboratory in Germany has stated that no one in the Skeptic or medical science communities has been able to debunk Mathie’s work. Otherwise, the 800 million people globally who rely on homeopathy regularly are suffering from a mass hallucination. Moreover 95% of all French general practitioners, dermatologists, and pediatricians who prescribe homeopathy for their patients are possessed by pseudoscience’s phantoms.[15] This is what Skeptics and Science-Based Medicine want us to believe and consistently promulgate while ignoring conventional medicine’s litany of false promises.
The homeopathic literature comprises over 1,000 clinical trials and 2,200 basic science experiments and observational studies. Unfortunately, homeopathic science has suffered, and even been set back, from a lack of large randomized clinical trials. This is due to negligible funding and obstruction from governments, private interests and Skepticism’s propaganda to obstruct investigation into homeopathy’s energetic principles and medical benefits. One rigorous case study concerns a severe 1988 meningococcal outbreak in Brazil. At the time, the Brazilian government didn’t possess sufficient vaccines; therefore a group of physicians and homeopathic doctors immunized over 65,800 children with a homeopathic meningococcal Nosode preparation. Another 23,500 children were not immunized. After a six month follow up there was a 95% efficacy rate and a 91% efficacy after 12 months.[16]
In 1994, a joint randomized double-blind clinical trial conducted by the University of Washington and the University of Guadalajara in Mexico to treat Nicaraguan infants and children under 6 years of age suffering from acute childhood diarrhea reported a statistically significant decrease in the duration of diarrhea compared to the control group, thereby throwing out the Skeptic’s claims of improvement due to a placebo effect.[17] The flagship medical journal Pediatrics published the study, and the journal’s editor faced a vicious backlash for its publication. The same study was replicated four years later with Nepali children.[18]
A Swiss randomized double-blind placebo controlled trial, alongside a separate clinical observation study, successfully noted statistically positive scientific evidence for the homeopathic treatment of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), particularly in areas of behavioral and cognitive dysfunction.[19] (Be reminded that Skeptics make no distinction between a placebo and a homeopathic remedy — in their mind it is only water).
There are scores of patented psychoactive drugs, both stimulants and nonstimulants, prescribed for ADHD: Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, ProCentra, Wellbutrin, Guanfacine or Intuniv, Desoxyn (a methamphetamine) and others. Yet consider for the moment the extensive list of adverse effects from these drugs’ long term use, including vomiting, weight and hair loss, dizziness and blurred vision, agitation, insomnia, increased blood pressure, repressed sexual drive, etc.[20] This is for Adderall alone. In addition. Adderall was issued a black box warning from the FDA after 51 children died; yet it is estimated that 4.8 million people take Adderall including 63,000 children 5 years and younger.[21] For Procentra the drug’s medication guide includes psychotic and manic symptoms in children, including hearing voices. It can worsen bipolar tendencies and in adults there is heightened risk for sudden death from strokes and heart attack.[22] Ritalin, one of the most over-prescribed drugs for ADHD and ADD has been compared to cocaine and its overuse has been associated with delirium, toxic psychosis and hallucinations.[23]
Dr. Tim Errington is head of The Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia Medical School. “Replication,” says Errington, “is supposed to be a hallmark of scientific integrity.”[24] Reproducing a study’s results simply means that a trial or experiment conducted in a laboratory should be reproducible in another. Homeopathic researchers understand the essential importance of follow up studies to validate homeopathy’s clinical performance.
Dame Ottoline Leyser at the University of Cambridge remarks that current conventional medical research has become “a culture that promotes impact over substance, flashy findings over the dull, confirmatory work that most science is about.” Ottoline argues that the private institutions funding the studies are a major problem in their eagerness to get the “biggest bang of their bucks” and to make headlines with “exciting breakthroughs” in the peer-review literature.[25] In other words, proprietary science is completely different than objective, independent science. Moreover because there is such a desperate need for independent research and reproducible studies, conventional drug-based efficacy increasingly fails in the long term.
Failures to reproduce clinical studies plague the pharmaceutical medical industry. Bayer was only able to reproduce 25% of its published work; biotech giant Amgen could only replicate six out of 53 of its studies. In one case, Errington’s lab received the same tumor cell lines, drugs and methodology from the laboratory performing the original research but failed to replicate the first trial’s results.[26] In other words, although we will find these flawed and unconfirmed studies throughout the medical literature, JoVE, the publisher of PubMed’s medical video database, reported that only 10% of them are reproducible. A drug maker could conduct 100 clinical trials, 99 fail, and only the single study with a positive result would find its way into a professional publication for fanfare. JoVe’s CEO Dr. Moshe Pritsker explained this in terms of the large amount of wasted tax dollars for useless research. He writes:
“On a practical level, the US government gives nearly $31 billion every year in science funding through NIH only, which is mainly distributed in research grants to academic scientists. The 10% reproducibility rate means that 90% of its money ($28 billion) is wasted…. How are the tax-payers supposed to respond… Would you give more of your money to someone who delivered you such a result?”[27]
This is a serious dilemma in cancer research and anti-cancer drugs. The obvious question is whether or not the studies’ premises or methodologies were scientifically valid in the first place.
Skeptics’ paranoia towards the rising popularity in homeopathy, natural medicine and CAM now entertains conspiratorial delusions that these non-conventional therapies threaten national and global health. However, we do not find homeopaths acting as militant activists on the front lines to enforce their discipline upon the public. Nor is there any effort or desire to monopolize public health information and federal policy. They don’t attack anyone. Nor do homeopathic doctors rake in the salaries and receive the pharmaceutical industries’ financial perks and research grants to throw away on bad scientific methodology. There are no homeopathic militant groups, comparable to Susan Gerbic’s Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia and the Science-Based Medicine blog infiltrating the online encyclopedia to fill its pages with ridicule and misinformation.[28] At the same time there are numerous reasons for being critical and belligerently proactive against conventional medicine, particularly in the US where life-expectancy is dropping and medical error, largely due to prescription drugs, is the third leading cause of death in the US. In a functioning society, absent of Skepticism’s scientific utopian hallucinations, this would be scandalous. Therefore, why are such efforts being made to destroy homeopathy?
We have identified several possible reasons. First, American physicians, and notably the Skeptics, who oppose homeopathy and other scientifically proven alternative medical modalities, are not intellectually capable of understanding the principles of homeopathy and hormesis. Skeptics are victims of their own “strange loops” — a term coined by Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize winning professor of cognitive science and mathematics.
“Strange loops” can account for the paradoxical “irrational rationality” so prevalent in Skeptics’ faulty reason when ranting in their comic diatribes against homeopathy, acupuncture, CAM, etc. Skeptics are victims of scientific ignorance and exist within a local tribal tunnel-reality of their own creation.
Second, and alternatively, SBM advocates are fully aware of the scientific literature supporting homeopathy but have been institutionally conditioned to be biased against it. And third, they are fully aware but homeopathy competes with their own preferred conventional therapies. The first possibility is undoubtedly true for Skeptic organizations, such as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and its advocates. The second and third rationales are likely the case for the medical professionals who follow Science-Based Medicine, and Skeptics like Craig Pearcey who have a very sound grasp of many of homeopathy’s underlying principles as well as quantum mechanics. Allowing SBM’s spokespersons the benefit of the doubt that their blogs and guerrilla tactics are not directly receiving funds from Big Pharma and other private or professional medical interests, nevertheless they all summarily choose to deny any scientific evidence to support homeopathy’s value.
In Switzerland, one of the few remaining countries with a functioning democracy, when the government attempted to pass a measure to cease funding homeopathic healthcare services, 70% of Swiss citizens voted against it. That could never happen in America. The US left democracy behind long ago and replaced it with a corporate-driven oligarchy. This is not our personal conclusion but that of political departments at Princeton and Northwestern universities that jointly reviewed over 1200 signed legislative bills in Washington, the vast majority, they discovered, favored private invested interests over policies benefitting the general population. And Skepticism’s self-idolatry and narcissistic perception of itself finds itself in excellent company with the bastion of these elites.
One of Science-Based Medicine’s more obvious “irrational rationalities” is its accusation that homeopathy kills patients. No, patients die from their disease not homeopathy. And if homeopathic preparations are nothing but plain inert water with no active medicinal properties, then their Hofstadter “strange loop” brings Skeptics back to an absurd affirmation of the paranormal and the miraculous which they categorically despise and condemn. In fact, this is an excellent and practical example of a “strange loop.”
In Skepticism’s ideal utopia, homeopathy, acupuncture, CAM and other non-conventional treatments for disease and disorders would be censored and banned altogether. And this is why Skepticism’s underlying fear and fantasies are so threatening and dangerous. Hannah Arendt, the noted social theorist and one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to define the underlying structures and causes for totalitarianism observed modern science’s amoral trends potentially leading in this direction. We observe this operative throughout Wikipedia’s permission for Skeptics to censor and demonize homeopathy and other therapeutic practices. Following Arendt’s logic, the Skeptics’ and SBM’s reduction of all human life into materialist processes that can only be observed and measured with instrumentation is woefully insufficient for any viable and effective medical paradigm. Consequently Skepticism’s radical introspection, bowing to the omniscience of its faux perceptions of the mind and reason — as well its irrational doctrine of “plausibility” when it fails to understand something — has left its believers trusting only in that which they create themselves. As we noted in an earlier article, SBM’s non-profit Institute for Science in Medicine has a stated mission to influence national health policies. Its objective is to establish medical standards; however these would be standards based upon a hidden ideology grounded in medical determinism and at the exclusion of other medical options that its followers loathe. These are the seeds of the scientific totalitarianism that Arendt warned about.
To proclaim itself as the light and truth of medicine, Science-Based Medicine is grossly wrong. It is a deadly deception. SBM would serve the public good and improve healthcare if it undertook more concerted efforts to criticize the deficiencies and ethical bankruptcy being committed on its own side of the fence rather than waste time and professional expertise to discredit homeopathy, chiropractic, Chinese and Ayurveda Medicine, herbal therapy and others. There may even be the potential for them to be humanitarians and contribute something praiseworthy to help solve our society’s ills and healthcare crises. Don’t hold your breath. Accumulatively the more proven and accepted alternative medical practices are as safe as water in comparison to the millions of patient injuries and deaths attributed to conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. Many pharmaceutical drugs now have FDA black box warnings; that is, the drug is so lethal and dangerous to health that even the FDA has to issue warnings about its use.
Drug prescription injuries and cost of human life is astronomical. Among American seniors alone, there are 9.6 million adverse drug reactions annually. Over the counter Tylenol accounts for 150 deaths annually. Almost 8% of Parkinson cases are induced by drugs for treating other unrelated health conditions.[29] Approximately 61,000 seniors will come down with drug-induced Parkinsonism annually. Psychiatric drugs kill 50% more people than heroin overdoses; in 2014, psychiatric medications accounted for 15,778 deaths.[30] In one meta-analysis of 19 trials following over 326,000 patients taking digoxin or Lanoxin, the most common prescribed form of digitalis for atrial fibrillation and heart failure, there was a 21% increase risk of death compared to patients not taking the medication.[31] And other US statistics: 41,000 hospitalized and over 3,300 dead from ulcers caused by NSAIDS; 163,000 cases of serious mental impairment, memory loss and dementia due to tranquilizers, high blood pressure and antipsychotic drugs; 2 million American adults addicted to sleeping pills; 73,000 cases of irreversible drug-induced tardive dyskinesia from antipsychotic drugs.[32] And this is only the beginning. With a growing awareness about drug health risks, a person would be foolish to not explore the benefits of homeopathy and other natural health regimens.
Contrarily, according to Dr. Tournier, during the past 30 years only 4 deaths can be directly associated with homeopathy; and these, says Tournier, are cases of mismanagement, when the patients should have been sent to a medical physician.[33]
Fortunately there is a quantum shift occurring in medical paradigms, a theory of transition in the scientific ethos and psyche proposed in the early 1960s by MIT science historian Thomas Kuhn. More people than ever before are becoming consciously responsible for their own health and adopting alternative therapeutic regimens including homeopathy. Although failing to reach mainstream media’s headlines, these alternative systems have long been tested and proven by evidence-based scientific research. Evidence-Based Medicine, regardless of its many faults, nevertheless seeks to distinguish between medical truths and falsehoods. On the other hand, given the extensive medical literature on alternative health, Science-Based Medicine’s single-minded disinformation is a fallacy, a victim of its absolutist fantasies.
Finally, because homeopathy is extremely cost-effective, Prasanta Banerji has call this 200-year old medical system “the people’s medicine.” And this is one clear rationale for the complete and utter failure of homeopathy gaining an iota of respect within the modern medical paradigm. Even very sound laboratory research conducted at the Indian Institute of Technology on nano-presence of homeopathic solutions are categorically being rejected from medical journals because the word “homeopathy” appears in the paper. In fact, homeopathy is the original nanomedicine, a more recent trend rapidly growing in pharmacological medicine. However, homeopathy is intentionally excluded from being considered as such.
To win the war on medical truth, Skepticism needs to be called out for what it genuinely is, an aberrant form of destructive skepticism masquerading as the arbiters of authentic science. Only by exposing these individuals and organizations, the flaws in their “irrational rationalities,” and the regressive system of healthcare they represent that threatens the well-being of the public, will homeopathy have a chance of gaining the wider acceptance it deserves.
Read more at: PRN.fm
Please contact us for more information.
