Over the recent holiday weekend, the British mainstream media featured a strange story of a man who had injected himself with snake venom, and that his body was now "almost immune from it", and that "he was donating his blood to science".
The story was presented with incredulity; but the homeopathic community would not have thought it at all unusual! And his blood would not have been donated to science!
A similar story was featured by the BBC earlier that week: a man whose peanut allergy nearly killed him; but now he eats them every day for breakfast.
"But then his mum heard about a clinical trial at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London that would change her son's life. It would test whether adults like Chris with serious peanut allergies could be desensitised by training their bodies to tolerate the very thing that could kill it, calming down the immune system when it would usually over-react".
Yet this 'new' treatment for nut allergy is not a 'new' treatment offered by conventional (drug-based) medicine. I wrote about this same 'breakthrough' in 2014 in this blog, again based on more 'incredulous' BBC reporting.
And yet again, in 2016, I wrote this blog about a 'new' treatment for multiple sclerosis.
So what do all these 'conventional medical treatments have in common? As I said in those earlier blogs, what conventional medicine is doing is using the primary medical principle of homeopathy.
Homeopathy is based on the ancient principle of "Like Curing Like", that small, dilute amounts of a substance that is causing illness and disease can cure that same illness and disease. It was a principle used successfully in ancient Greece, and by many people throughout the ancient and medieval world. Homeopathy uses snake venoms as remedies - but not in doses that might be harmful or lethal to the patient. The contribution of homeopathy is that the dilution of substances strengthens, rather than weakens, the medical effect of the substance used. It cures, but does so safely.
Conventional, pharmaceutical medicine is based on drugs that kill (eg., pain killers), block (eg., beta blockers), inhibit (eg., ACE inhibitors), suppress (eg., appetite suppressants, immunosuppressants), and oppose (eg., antagonist drugs. The are all 'anti-...' drugs), anti- something that is happening to the body of a sick patient. This adversarial approach to the body does not work; it has never worked; and will never work. It is this approach to medicine that causes side effects (at best), adverse reactions (at least), and epidemic levels of chronic disease and death. It is why pharmaceutical medicine is failing - so badly.
The Conventional Medical Establishment has spent the last 30 years attacking Homeopathy: they say it does not work; it cannot work; it is placebo; it is quack medicine, and the like. It is denied to patients on the British NHS. It is denied to patients around the world in which drug companies have control of state-supported medicine.
Yet when conventional medicine stumbles on a treatment that is based on the principle of homeopathy, 'like curing like', it has the audacity to crow about it, to describe it as a 'breakthrough', and without acknowledging the source and inspiration of the 'new' treatment.
