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From: Jennifer Tow, IBCLC (jennifer.vegsource.com)
In Reply to: Homeopathy posted by Cornelius Garbanzo on February 11, 2004 at 7:59 pm:
I spend almost every hour of my working life with anguished parents trying to mitigate the damage done by allopathic medicine to their infants. As I have said before, there is almost no evidence supporting the use of obstetrics in the care of healthy pregnant women, nor in the birth of their infants. To the contrary, according to the Cochrane Database, there is ample scientific evidence to the contrary--that midwifery care provides far better outcomes and that there is little science supporting any of the multitude of obstetrical interventions that are commonly used today. To suggest that the majority of scientific discovery today is based in a desire to prove anything other than what the funders want it to prove is extremely nieve. Little medicine is based in science at all. As someone who is highly skilled in my field, it is terribly difficult for me to see babies who are neurologically and structurally incapable of sustaining their own lives through breastfeeding, due to the trauma of medicalized birth, while I know that the easiest and best solutions are holistic in nature, and that most parents would trust more of the same interventions that harmed their babies before they would trust holistic methods. Every day, the avg person subjects him/herself to allopathic tests, exams, drugs, procedures, surgeries and so on that have never been proven to be safe or effective. I am sometimes shocked by what seems like blatant stupidity on the part of parents who are actually just well-enculturated into seeing the world in one narrow way. I work with parents who will allow every manner of brutal intervention to be employed in the supposed effort to produce a "healthy" child (modern obstetrics cares nothing for the emotional health of anyone), yet they are afraid to co-bathe with the infant w/o the consent of the doctor!!! Our ability to evaluate the efficacy of almost any treatment is lost beneath our fear on anything that doesn't look a certain way. My field is one of the most evidence-based practiced today, and yet no good LC (nor other clinician) would ever discount experience in solving human problems. I routinely see moms, for example, who have recurrent plugged ducts, leading to mastitis.These moms will take antibiotics and often see the problem recur as soon as the drugs are stopped. If the mom is willing to use the homeopathic remedy phytolacca, she almost never experiences recurrence. This is true, whether or not the mother is terribly skeptical (most are, but willing to try anything). Should I wait for a double-blind controlled trial before sharing this treatment option with mothers? Who would make any money by doing this study--remedies are very cheap? Consider that homeopathy has no side effects in almost all cases. Consider that cytotec, a drug commonly used off-label (it is an ulcer med, not FDA approved for use in pregnant women) is very commonly used for labor induction. A not uncommon side-effect is uterine hyper-stimulation which sometimes leads to fetal distress, cesareans and sometimes birth injury, uterine rupture and death of mother and/or infant. Consider that in this country, I would be viewed by many as more irresponsible if I suggested the phytolacca to a mom than would the OB who used cytotec. Someone want to make sense of that? In my personal life, homeopathy has been the single most effective medicine my family has ever used (including for our pets and infants--on whom placebos don't work). I have three children (the oldest is 15) who have never take a drug (except once when ds was in hospital) and have been treated primarily with homeopathy, although we also use herbs and other natural remedies. You can have your attitudes and feel as arrogant and intellectual as you like, but I would rather have healthy children. As I see the insanity of allopathy growing every day, I am happy to be able to rely on a sane form of medicine to care for my own family. BTW, our homeopath is an MD--I have referred scores of people to him over the years and I don't think a single one has left his practice--not b/c everyone I know is stupid, but b/c homeopathy works and that is far more important than someone telling us that it shouldn't work, therefore, we must be wrong. IMO, it is only a matter of time before someone hits upon a method of testing efficacy that will be aligned with the medicine--allopathic models just do not apply. There are so many examples in history where new models of discovery needed to be invented before new worlds could be known. If over and over again, I experience the same event, would it be wiser to look for a way to explain my experience or would it be wiser to pretend I am not having the experience, since I do not have a model that applies?
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