Alternative Therapies - baby and bathwater

[Duncan MacIntyre]

Hello all,

I thought we should start another thread on this rather than clog up the Blue Tongue pages. There are many "alternative therapies" and it is very important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Or babies, there may be more than one alternative worth considering in apropiate circumstances.

First of all thanks to Di for the offer of a birthday present in late April. I still have the last present she gave me, many years ago at Stoneleigh. A nice little cow, not sure if short or non short but eats very little and still as mobile as ever. Quite a lot of white on the belly though, but eats very little. Never had a calf though, in all those years, but then I never got a plastic bull to go with her.

Much as it may surprise some of you, the last time I took Arnica was after a visit to the Chiropracter. My mind is not closed to all medicines except modern pharmaceuticals, far from it. Having injured my back calving a cow about 15 years ago I went to a Chiropracter after having it made worse by doctors and physiotherapists armed with various heat tortures. After two visits I was more mobile at the age of 42 than I had been since before leaving school. The chiropracter encouraged me to take up serious exercise, this resulted in a bit of road running for the McMillan Nurses, and I have run a 10k race and often another sponsored run of up to 22 miles every year since. I have no doubt that for certain back problems chiropracters and possibly osteopaths are streets ahead of conventional treatment. I suspect though that they may achieve this by loosening up and mobilising areas of our bodies we have not used for too long, and allowing us to keep free of pain etc by maintaining our bodies in better shape. I am not convinced that they can reposition vertebrae etc as they claim, but they do get results.

Herbal stuff I am quite comfortable with, and many of our modern drugs had herbal beginnings. Arnica in fact is a bit confusing as it seems to be available both as a herbal remedy and in homeopathic form. Some herbal remedies certainly contain active components, and some, such as St John's Wort, to my mind need serious watching as they contain compounds similar to Ragwort which are capable of causing serious liver damage. But in carefully controlled small doses they may have a beneficial effect.

Acupuncture is a bit of a baffling one to understand, but the results can be clearly demonstrated. My daughter uses acupunture in animals and I have seen the results. I am not sure why cats which hit the roof when I produce a hypodermic needle allow her to insert 8 or 10 needles at a time with no restraint at all.

People waving crystals and tickling the soles of feet are unlikely to be doing anything more than is apparent, and as for redirecting the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, I have to ask "is this likely?"

Homeopathy I had hopes of even though I did not understand how it worked, and at one stage of my career I referred a number of clients to vets who did a lot of homeopathic stuff. Almost without exception they also used antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs, etc at the same time. The philosophy of homeopathy asks us to believe that water which contained a substance causing similar symptoms to those we wish to cure (eg for vomitting use extremely dilute infusions of a herb which would itself cause vomitting) but has been diluted again and again and again till, by definiition can not contain even a single molecule of the original active substance in any given dose, will have a beneficial effect. More than that, we are led to believe that the more dilutions have taken place the more powerful the dose will be. The secret, we are told, is in the shaking during the dilutions. There is no doubt that there are many anecodat accounts of homeopathy appearing to work, but there are no proper controlled trials showing any benefit. Have a look at news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2710107.stm .
We often here acocunts of how beneficial homeopathy has been when it has been used to treat conditions which were almost certainly self limiting anyway. EG ringworm. I am particularly concerned that in dealing with infectious disease people will be tempted to rely on homeopathic "vaccines".