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Wednesday 20 July 2016

A Cure for Multiple Sclerosis? Conventional medicine discovers Homeopathy - again!

The headline rings out in the MediCures website"British researchers may have just found the cure for multiple sclerosis!

Great news, surely? Or is this just another over-hyped 'cure' heralded by conventional medicine. They have done it so many times before, and they never seem to materialise. The article explains further"

          "A new study published in the journal Nature Communications shows that scientists may have discovered a way to stop autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or Type 1 diabetes by retraining the immune system. The study was published by researchers from Bristol University, and shows that the immune system can be taught to stop treating harmless everyday proteins as if they were dangerous invasive diseases.

Ahh! A problem. "We (that is, medical science) can teach the immune system!" That sounds like the typical arrogance of conventional medicine - "we know better than the body", "we can do better than the body", "we can force it back into health by our cleverness". Yet we must read on....

          "In Multiple sclerosis (MS) the immune system attacks the myelin sheaths which protect nerve fibers. These nerves carry messages to and from the brain, and if they are disrupted, it leads to a host of problems such as loss of mobility, vision impairment and fatigue. By synthesizing proteins from the sheaths in a lab and then injecting them into the blood stream at increasing doses, the body begins to learn that they are safe and no longer attacks them."

The name for this type of therapy, apparently, is allergic desensitisation. The article, correctly, says it has been used for treating some allergies. But in fact, what this conventional medical research has stumbled on, as it has done before, is homeopathy.

Homeopathy, at its simplest, is a medical therapy based on the principle of "treating like with like". And this is what this technique clearly does. It does so clumsily, and with too much complexity. But this is, in fact, what it is doing - using something that is causing the problem to resolve the problem. Listen to the description of the study’s author, Dr. Bronwen Burton.

          “The immune system works by recognizing antigens which could cause infection. In allergies the immune system mounts a response to something like pollen or nuts because it wrongly believes they will harm the body. But in autoimmune diseases the immune systems sees little protein fragments in your own tissue as foreign invaders and starts attacking them. What we have found is that by synthesizing those proteins in a soluble form we can desensitize the immune system by giving an escalating dose.”

It would have been nice if the authors had paid tribute to homeopathy, but with the conventional medical establishment in crisis, and wanting to undermine homeopathy whenever it can, this is not surprising. And for the patient it matters little. A cure, is a cure, is a cure. And conventional medicine has so few.

This is my fourth blog about how conventional medicine is now utilising homeopathic principles. The first, "Superbugs. Homeopathy is proven to work - treating like with like" concerned the treatment of Clostridium difficile. The second concerned a new treatment for peanut allergy, "Peanut Allergy Treatment - another success for Homeopathy". The third, "Dust Mite Allergy.  A new conventional treatment - and it's homeopathy?" concerned another allergy treatment.

It seems that conventional medicine has decided that as it cannot beat homeopathy in either its safety or effectiveness in the treatment of illness, it has to join it. Fine. We should all be pleased with a late convert. But it the conventional medical establishment were not always attacking homeopathy, it would quickly learn that the treatment of illness is much simpler than some of the complicated procedures they come up with. Still, it is learning, however slowly!