Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Please read what I said in #60 Trailblazer, 4 minutes agoI'm curious about what you were taught. I have an MD degree from a major American university medical school that followed four years of undergraduate studies, as well as Board Certification in internal medicine after three years of internship and residency. Internal medicine is the science of medical diagnosis and therapeutics in adults. We're the people other doctors refer their adult patients with problems needing to be identified. If you have a bone coming through your arm or pus in your ear canal, a specialist in diagnosis is not needed. But when you are dealing with fatigue or shortness of breath, or unexplained weight loss or ankle swelling, for example, and you don't know why, you consult the internist to make the diagnosis. When you have abnormal lab tests that you aren't trained to interpret, you ask the internist to solve it. Why are the electrolytes abnormal? Why is the hematocrit depressed?
To do that requires a comprehensive understanding of man in health and disease down to the cellular and biochemical level. And you need a comprehensive knowledge of medical microbiology and pharmacology (we called them bugs and drugs in school). If your remedies are capable of changing physiology for the better, they are capable of doing damage, and you need to know for whom the therapy is contraindicated, and how to monitor for toxicity. Do you know how the liver metabolizes the substances you provide, or how the kidney excretes it? Do you have any training in clinics or hospitals?
What I have described is scientific medicine, based in the study of how the body works, it's therapies grounded in controlled studies. No therapy makes it into the medical armamentarium until it is shown to be more efficacious than placebo by a statistically significant amount.
Of course, if all you are administering is placebo, none of that knowledge is necessary, but you also aren't going to get any results. That's because homeopathy is not scientific. It is based on a principle believed by faith, not empiricism. The idea that vanishing small concentrations of substances can mitigate or cure illness is as ungrounded in empiricism as the chiropractic principle that all disease originates from misalignment of the spinal cord or the prescientific medical belief that bleeding evil humors is how illness is purged. None of those ideas bears fruit. Yes, the chiropractors can have success with physical therapy for musculoskeletal problems, but that's just medicine.
I liken homeopathists to shamans, except shamans use substances that can modify physiology and biochemistry, generally gentle herbals. That is also medicine.
Which brings me to this: There is only medicine, placebo, and toxin, not homeopathic or allopathic or naturopathic or herbal or ayurvedic medicine. If it can improve symptoms and/or function, or enhance longevity, it's medicine. If it does the opposite, it's a toxin, and if it does neither, it's a placebo. Scientific medicine has accepted therapies that come from outside of its own investigations such as acupuncture and gingko biloba, but only after controlled clinical trials showed them to be efficacious. These two passed, and are now considered medicine, not alternative medicine. There is no value in making that distinction.
No homeopathic treatments have passed that test. None are included in the medical armamentarium for reasons already given.
I don't think you know what addiction is, but I don't suppose you have a problem with it in homeopathy if you're basically prescribing water.
Addiction is self-destructive behavior that an individual has difficulty resisting. Seeking drugs is one such behavior, as is the unhealthy pursuit of sex, shopping, or gambling.
This needs to be distinguished from tolerance, which is the change in a body's physiology over time due to the chronic use of a drug, resulting in unwanted symptoms when the drug is withdrawn too quickly. A person doesn't even need to be conscious to suffer withdrawal. If a person in a coma develops tolerance to say, a steroid (one is not likely to be receiving narcotics if comatose), the body will demonstrate objective signs of distress if the drug isn't tapered slowly - perhaps increased heart rate or a fall in blood pressure. But this person is not addicted, because there is no self-destructive behavior involved, and if the patient recovers and awakens, no expectation of drug seeking behavior.
If you relapsed off your antidepressant, it just means that it was helping you until you stopped it, not that you were either addicted to it (a psychological condition), nor dependent on it (tolerant of it, a physical condition).
That's surprising. You are in Washington state, correct? In both California and Missouri, I could have been disciplined for that. The medical profession has standards of care, and physicians who violate them knowingly are rogue, and those violating them unknowingly are incompetent. I was also a hospice medical director, and would visit the terminally ill at their homes. Often, I would see a bag of marijuana on a nightstand beside the patient, which is a sensible addition to palliative care, since it treats anxiety, insomnia, pain, and poor appetite without harmful side effects, but I was prevented from endorsing the treatment by medical oversight at both the state level and federal (Drug Enforcement Agency), and so gave the family a wink and a nod, and asked them to have it put away whenever any member of the hospice team was visiting.
I'm pretty sure that prescribing homeopathic remedies would result in my license being disciplined by the state medical board if it were reported by a concerned family member. We're simply not permitted to go off the reservation like that.
And this shows a misunderstanding of the science. A therapy must be compared to placebo to determine its efficacy. Prozac has such studies, and one can find out how well it works by reviewing those. I doubt any homeopathic remedies have such data available showing efficacy with statistical significance, but if if there were such data available, one only need compare the two studies to compare them.
Furthermore, the mechanism of action isn't relevant to the comparison, just the efficacy and toxicity of the two.
Also, modifying the regimen to optimize effect is done done in medicine as well. Did you want to compare the results of that to the efficacy of Prozac alone?
Incidentally, mixing antidepressants rationally requires an understanding of the neurochemistry of depression, and which antidepressants modify which neurotransmitter levels. Prozac is an SSRI - a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor - meaning it causes an increase in the concentration of synaptic serotonin. This is one of three major neurotransmitters relevant to depression, and SSRI's modify the brain by causing released serotonin to remain in the synapse longer as the body tries to remove it through reabsorption. Paxil or Zoloft and Celexa are also SSRIs. If Prozac gives a partial response at the highest safe dose, and one wants to enhance it safely, adding another SSRI is a mistake. You can read about serotonin syndrome here, if that wasn't already covered in your medical studies.
No, a scientific choice would be to add a norepinephrine or dopamine modifying antidepressant like Wellbutrin to an SSRI. I don't imagine you have to consider such things in homeopathy, especially if all treatments are just placebo.
Incidentally, your personal anecdote does not convince me that homeopathic remedies cured depression in you. The condition often remits spontaneously: "The results revealed that 23% of adults will experience remission of depression without treatment in three months, 32% in six months and 53% in a year." Did they teach you that in your homeopathic studies?
Now I am out of here. I have a long list of posts to read and respond to on other threads.
