Surgery? How Homeopathy can help

Having surgery, whether dental or otherwise, can be a stressful, painful and restless time for all those involved. It may be essential surgery. It might be surgery made necessary by the failure of pharmaceutical drugs and/or their side effects. Surgical treatment is often accompanied by anxiety and anticipation as well as shock and injury, which can feel as painful as the operation itself. 

This list below illustrates several homeopathic remedies which can be very helpful in alleviating the discomfort experienced, whether physical or emotional.

They can be used alongside, and in accordance with any conventional medicine which you have been prescribed. 

Arnica - this is the first choice of remedy for shock and bruising. Take Arnica 30C immediately after surgery, and then whenever you feel necessary. If you are particularly scared of the treatment, then take the remedy before the surgery as well.

Calendula - this is specific for open cuts and wounds and is used externally by applying as a cream or diluted tincture to the area around the incision. Please note, Calendula heals rapidly and can seal dirt into the wound so ensure the wound is clean before applying 

Hypericum - this remedy is predominantly used if you have injuries to the nerves, when the pain shoots along the nerve tracks. Hypericum is often used instead of Arnica, or if Arnica does not work, after operations to areas such as the nose, fingers, toes, eyes, ears or gums

Phosphorous - this remedy will stop excessive bleeding after an operation, such as a tooth extraction. In addition, it can help alleviate the post-anaesthetic“spaced-out” feeling

Staphysagria - consider using this when you feel that the operation has invaded your private space, such as rough dentistry or childbirth involving an episiotomy or forceps delivery. In addition, Staphysagria is also useful when the pain or scars are slow to heal

(Homeopathy for Common Ailments by Robin Hayfield)

This article first appeared in the ARH Newsletter, "Homeopathy Healthy Medicine"

Homeopathy and Horses: more effective, less expensive, and safer too!

More people own horses now than for many decades - and the numbers are increasing. Every horse owner faces the prospect of illness and disease - and large vet fees as a direct result. Yet homeopathy has been used in the treatment of injuries and the general well-being of horses, including racehorses - and it is more effective, less expensive, and safer than conventional treatment.

In fact the idea of using homeopathy, as a treatment for animals, termed veterinary homeopathy, dates back to the inception of homeopathy when Hahnemann, the founder of Homeopathy in the late 18th century  wrote and spoke of the use of homeopathy in animals other than humans.

The owners and trainers of horses have found this natural system of medicine hugely benefits the racehorse as it treats the totality of the animal, stimulating the body’s healing process whilst having no side effects or withdrawal symptoms.

Homeopathic remedies can help horses with physical, mental, and emotional conditions and because the Horses, and their relationship with homeopathy remedies come in tiny pills or drops, they are extremely easy to administer.

There are a number of homeopathic remedies for horses but some of the most common ones available include:

Arnica helps with wound, tendon, and sprain injuries.

Aconite can help with laminitis and gastric ulcers

Arsenicum can help with colic and indigestion

Thuja helps with skin conditions such as warts, rain rot, and swelling from vaccinations

For more information on treating animals through homeopathy, please visit the Faculty of Homeopaths or the British Association of Homeopathic Veterinary Surgeons website.

This article was first published in an ARH Newsletter, "Homeopathy Healthy Medicine".

The Diabetes Epidemic. What the Media does not tell us!

Given that BBC News are reporting that the current epidemic of Diabetes threatens to bankrupt the NHS, here is what the BBC, and the rest of the mainstream media, is steadfastly refusing to tell you! Lots of Big Pharma drugs cause diabetes!

The BBC reported (28th September 2006) that the number of people diagnosed with diabetes has increased by over 100,000 in the previous year, and that its prevalence had jumped from 3.3% to 3.6%, or from 1,766,000 to over 1,890,999 in just one year. These figures were taken from the Government's Information Centre. 

In the same article, Douglas Smallwood (Diabetes UK) said that 

      "up to 750,000 people have diabetes and are not aware of it. This means that thousands of people are going about their daily lives unaware they have a condition that reduces their life expectancy".

Another BBC News report, 16th March 2007, said that the number of under-fives with diabetes had increased 5-fold, and affected one child in every 1,000 in 2004. The number of under-15's with diabetes had almost doubled during the study, which focused on 2.6 million people in the Oxford region between 1985 and 2004. The charity Diabetes UK said that the trend applied to the whole of the UK, as other studies had revealed similar rises. Professor Polly Bingley, who led the study, said the rate of childhood diabetes was increasing all over Europe , particularly in the very young. She said that these increases were too steep to be put down to genetic factors alone, and blamed 'changes in our environment', 'being exposed to something new', or 'reduced exposure to something that was previously controlling our immune responses'.

The problem is now getting so big, it is 'threatening to overwhelm the NHS' (The Independent, and other papers, 24th February 2009). This article said that the number of people newly diagnosed with diabetes has more than doubled (from 83,000 in 2006, to 167,000 in 2008, and that more than 2.2 million people in Britain now suffer from the adult-onset type of the disease.

Although diet and lifestyle factors are an important contributory factor in this epidemic, NHS-ConMed drugs are also implicated. WDDTY March 2007 (reporting the Lancet 2007; 369:201-7) said that "it's been suspected for nearly 50 years that antihypertensive drugs provoke diabetes because they lower a patient's glucose tolerance levels". But a definitive statement has been hard to come by as many patients with raised blood pressure are simply more likely to develop diabetes in any event. But it says that researchers from Rush Medical College in Chicago arrived at these conclusion after re-examining 22 clinical trials involving more than 143,000 patients who did not have diabetes when they started taking an antihypertensive drug to control their blood pressure.

In a story published in the New York Times (17 December 2006), Yahoo News (17 December 17 2006) and Consumer Affairs (18 December 2006) evidence had been obtained by an attorney representing patients in a lawsuit suggested that Eli Lilly covered up concerns about its schizophrenia drug Zyprexa. Although the company denies this, the documents suggest that the company withheld important information about the drug's links to obesity and increased blood sugar levels for the 10 years it was being marketed. The drug is implicated in causing diabetes.

The British Heart Foundation Statistics website, in 2010 outlined the following statistics:

    * Over 4% of men, and 3% of women in England have been diagnosed with diabetes.

     *The estimate that there are just under 1.9 million adults with diagnosed diabetes in the USA.

     * It says that the Health Survey for England found that not all diabetes is diagnosed, and that 3% of men, and 0.7% of women aged 35 and over have undiagnosed diabetes. As a result, they estimate that around 2.5 million adults in the UK have diabetes.

     * In 2001, just under 7,000 deaths due to diabetes were officially recorded in the UK. This, they say, is likely to be a huge underestimate because other diseases caused by diabetes (such as cardiovascular disease) are normally given as the cause of death.

      * They say a better estimate is found in the World Health Organization's 'Global Burden of Disease Project'  (Murray CJL, Lopex A (1996) The Global Burden of Disease. WHO: Geneva) which suggests that in countries like the UK there are about five times as many deaths indirectly attributable to diabetes as directly attributable. This would mean that there are about 35,000 deaths a year in the UK attributable to diabetes - or about 1 in 20 of all deaths.

So what has caused the epidemic of diabetes? No doubt there are many factors, including diet and obesity. But Conventional Medical drugs are also implicated, including Beta Blocker drugs, and diuretics.

When will our news media begin putting the spotlight on pharmaceutical drugs? They know that they cause 'side effects'. So why do they not investigate when the 'medicines' we are being given to make us healthy are actually causing these epidemics of chronic disease?

For more information about diabetes and pharmaceutical drugs, click on this link.

People who hate Health Freedom

These are pen-pictures of the people who hate Health Freedom, who want to deny you Patient Choice, who want you to continue taking conventional pharmaceutical drugs, without asking questions, people  who don't want you to know their dangers, sometimes the lethal dangers.

These are the people who head up, or belong to, Big Pharma funded and/or supported groups. They attack alternative medical therapies, like Homeopathy, and seek to perpetuate the failing, dangerous conventional, drug-based health system that so dominates our National Health Service (NHS).

They are people who don't want an NHS dominated by Big Pharma drugs. They want an NHS in which Big Pharma drugs have a complete monopoly.

These pen pictures were first published by the magazine, "What Doctors Don't Tell You" (WDTTY). They are trying to stop its publication because it seeks to tell us the truth about conventional medicine. They are trying to stop its sale in major retail outlets.

This is not a hall of fame, it is a hall of infamy. These are people who believe that their drug-based medicine will only prevail if you and I don't get to know what it is doing to us!

• that it is making us ill
• that it is causing epidemic levels of chronic disease
• that it is bankrupting the NHS.

If you would like to know the 'quality' of their argument, and the abuse they aim at people who seek to find out the truth about conventional medicine, read these blogs. Some of the people described below are regular abusers of this blog!

http://safe-medicine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/militant-skepticism-and-homeopathy.html

http://safe-medicine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/militant-skepticism-and-homeopathy-what.html

http://safe-medicine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/quack-just-another-personal-attack-from.html

"Meet the people who would dictate your health care"

As you know, we have been the target of a concerted campaign to get the store chains to stop stocking us. The architects of this campaign are the same people who spend a good deal of time attacking and harassing alternative practitioners of every variety.

Their numbers aren't large (there're only about 80 of them in total), and they aren't well followed (Alan Henness of the Nightingale Collaboration, for instance, has just 462 followers on Twitter; Simon Singh, just 44 actively following him), but they are well organized and fuelled by a good deal of self-righteous passion about their mission, which is to stamp out what they view as quackery (ie, natural medicine of every variety, particularly the likes of homeopathy).

So we thought we should shine a light on the qualifications of the most vocal proponents of a group who believe they have the right to determine what you can or can't read about your health or indeed the kinds of medical treatments you should be allowed to have access to.

Simon Singh.  
Singh is not a medical doctor; he has a Ph.D in particle physics.  As he often signs his letters 'Dr Singh' when writing to Tesco or our distributors, most stores and media naturally assume that he has medical qualifications.  He does not, nor does he have a history of studying or writing about conventional medicine. He's written books about mathematical problems and patterns, codes and code-breaking and even cosmology, but nothing to date about conventional medicine - only one co-authored book (Trick or Treatment?- the clue to the slant is in the title) largely trashing alternative medicine. Singh is the public face of Sense About Science, a charity set up by a holding company in India, whose trustees include Simon Singh and his older brother, Tom, who founded the high street chain New Look. Sense about Science reports that it is supported by donations from a variety of sources, including the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and many pharmaceutically backed charities, such as Cancer UK.

 'Josephine Jones'. 
 'She' is the pseudonym for two people: Michael and Laura Thomason, who live in Warrington. Mike works as a database developer at Catalent Pharma Solutions; there is a Laura Thomason on Linkedin who works as a supervisor at an Esquire's Coffee Shop, but we can't verify if they are one and the same. If so, there can't be many people popping in and ordering cappuccinos because she and her husband seem to have the time to catalogue WDDTY's every move, which they circulate on Josephine Jones' blog as a constantly updated 'Master List'. Presently, they are carrying out a survey of stores we're in, presumably in hopes they might be able to pick us off, one store at a time. Neither professes to any medical qualifications.

Guy Chapman, who created a website called 'What What Doctors Don't Tell You Doesn't Tell You', and writes a good deal of bile-filled statements about alternative practitioners, is a software developer for Dell Computers. He's also a member of a choir.

Jo Brody works two days a week as a public engagement coordinator for a research project which runs across four sites, including UCL, Queen Mary, City University and Swansea University), studying how to make medical devices safer. Jo's job is to update the website and expand the project's online presence.  For the rest of the week she works as an information officer at Diabetes UK. Previously she worked as a secretary for Professor Stephen Wharton. As she freely admits:
'I am not medically trained.'

Alan Henness. 
He and his wife Maria MacLachlan, who live in Harrow, are effectively the Nightingale Collaboration, a tiny organization that was given seed money by Sense About Science, but that spends a prodigious amount of time reporting advertisers and practitioners of alternative medicine to The Advertising Standards Authority. Despite the name, the ASA is not a government body; it's an advertising-industry-sponsored organization with no teeth. The best it can do is place advertisers it deems out of line on the naughty step, listing them on as a 'non-compliant advertiser' on its own website. Evaluations of the advertisements of alternative medicine or practitioners through the ASA are a stacked deck; they are evaluated, as our ads were, by known skeptics like Dr. Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh's co-author of Trick or Treatment?

Henness does not report any other employment, at least on his Linkedin page; previously he was R&D manager for Honeywell Security and Customer Electronics.  Although he appears to have no background in evaluating or studying medicine or alternative medicine, as he writes, "the Nightingale Collaboration was set up to enable my wife, Maria MacLachlan, and I to share our knowledge and experience in challenging misleading claims in healthcare advertising and to encourage anyone who is concerned at protecting the public from misinformation in healthcare promotion to join us in challenging it."

Maria Maclachlan herself is the Community Services Officer of the British Humanist Society, which campaigns 'for an open society and a secular state with no religious privilege or discrimination based on religion or belief,' according to its website. (Alan was former Convenor for the Humanist Society.) On the website Think Humanism (http://www.thinkhumanism.com/humanism2.html), Maria wrote, in a short précis of what it means to be a humanist: 'Humanists embrace the moral principle known as the Golden Rule. This means we believe that people should aim to treat each other as they would like to be treated themselves - with tolerance, consideration and compassion.'

I wonder if this 'Golden Rule' also includes harassing groups, practitioners or organizations who advocate or advertise alternative medicine?

Andy Lewis. 
Set up the 'Quackometer' site, which he claims to be an experiment in 'critical thinking'. Doesn't reveal what his credentials, education or employment history are - says they 'don't matter' nor does an honest debate of the issues because the wording on websites will, through his own use of critical thinking, offer prima facie evidence of 'quackery'. 

That's who they are. WDDTY, on the other hand, has seven medical doctors on its editorial panel, plus several PhDs and highly qualified practitioners of a number of alternative disciplines. Thousands of doctors and health practitioners of every persuasion regularly read WDDTY and comment enthusiastically. The two editors of our magazine have been medical science writers for 25 years, and every word in our pages is checked by a science editor with an extensive history of writing and editing medical studies for the pharmaceutical industry. 

Do you want these eight people to be the ones to determine what you can read about your own health care?

If not, write to Tesco today and ask them to re-stock What Doctors Don't Tell You.  And tell them a bit more about the people who fire off 'complaints' -  that they are neither true customers nor people with either the training or experience to evaluate the information in our pages:
customer.service@tesco.co.uk