In 1831 a terrible epidemic of cholera swept through Europe. Thousands died, as usual, but this year was unique because in some treatment centers the death rate was very low.

The new centers were using a recently introduced medical modality called homeopathy. In the Raab Centre in Hungary only 6 out of 154 patients died. Orthodox treatments in the same area had a 59% death rate.

All over Central Europe a similar pattern emerged. The death rate in homeopathic hospitals varied between 2½% and 22%, compared with a minimum rate of 50% using the orthodox methods.

Millions of people died of the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918. Of those able to get to doctors 60% died. But those doctors who used homeopathic remedies saved 98.5% of their patients.

There was an outbreak of smallpox in Iowa in the early 1900’s. The success of the homeopathic doctors and remedies was such that the State of Iowa named the homeopathic remedy an official alternative to the standard vaccinations.

Coming closer to our day a meningitis epidemic occurred in Brazil in 1974. Homeopathic doctors there set up a clinical trial of their remedies that was calculated to be 99.8% effective in saving children from the epidemic.

The success in 1831 followed by an equal measure of success in the Crimean War epidemic of typhus and cholera in 1854 led to Queen Victoria acquiring a homeopathic physician. She lived and ruled a very long time in days when life expectancy was in the 40’s in many areas. Since then all the British Royal Family have had homeopathic physicians.

The men in the British Royal Family usually end up for a while in the Army or Navy. King George V, when I was a little boy in the 30’s suffered from sea sickness, a bit embarrassing to someone wearing the uniform of a high ranking naval officer. When treated with homeopathic remedies his sea sickness disappeared. The current Queen Elizabeth II takes her little box of remedies with her wherever she goes and she is in her eighties. Her mother lived to be over a hundred. The Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles, and various Dukes and Duchesses all have homeopathic physicians. My point here is that all these people can insist on, and are expected to receive the best health care, not disease care. And that is found for them under the aegis of homeopathy.

So, how did this system come to be, and why don’t we hear much about something obviously very effective? Actually the second most used system of healing in the world. Good questions. I’ll answer both.

A man by the name of Samuel Hahnemann worked his way through the university of Leipzig as a student with unusual talents in languages, mathematics and botany. He took up the study of medicine and chemistry and became a qualified physician in 1791.

He practiced medicine for nine years and then gave up his orthodox career because of his dislike of the cruel and often useless treatments, such as blood-letting, and the administration of very poisonous drugs with purging. If you check the final illness of George Washington you will probably come to the same conclusion as I did. His doctors killed him with their treatments.

Anyway, Hahnemann lived pretty much in a self imposed poverty for years rather than have a high income doing more harm than good.

Because he was a fine linguist and a qualified medical man he was able to make some sort of living by translating medical books and one of them was A Treatise on Materia Medica by Dr. Cullen of Edinburgh, Scotland. In this book he read of the discovery that the bark of the Cinchona tree could cure malaria and its widespread symptoms of sweating, fever and chills. Cullen’s opinion was that it was the bitterness of the bark that did the trick.

Hahnemann doubted that a taste could cure anything and experimented with small doses on himself. Giving medicine to a healthy person to see what happens wasn’t an idea that had occurred to many. He found to his surprise that to a mild extent he experienced the symptoms of malaria when he took it. When he stopped taking it then the symptoms stopped too. His seminal discovery was just that. The bark that cured the disease gave the symptoms of the disease to a healthy person.

Hippocrates, the great Greek physician had said that disease could be cured by similars and Hahnemann set out to verify that very ancient and disregarded hypothesis.

He tested dozens of herbs and chemicals on himself. When some of these substances were given in extremely diluted or attenuated form to patients with matching symptoms, some amazing cures resulted, and still do, I must add.

Homeopathy was the name he gave his system from the Greek homoios (similar) and pathos (suffering or disease), to distinguish it from orthodox medicine that he called ‘allopathy’ the opposite of suffering, which was basically, and still is, not a system that cures but a system that suppresses the symptoms.

His amazing success with typhus in the Napoleonic campaigns made his reputation, and many orthodox physicians were converted to the effective homeopathy.

The history of science, (not taught in medical colleges) is full of stories like that of Hering, whose medical professor asked him to write a paper refuting the homeopathy hypothesis. When Hering researched the matter he became convinced of the efficacy of the method and then had to go to another college to finish his degree because of the opposition of his professor who was an authority with a made up and closed mind. Lots of those in universities.

So Hering traveled all over the world trying (proving is the homeopathic term) herbs and snake venoms, and anything that might help the new science. That would be more difficult to do now because the air and water and food are so polluted with chemicals that the sensitivity of the body to small changes in its environment is largely absent in the modern person. The tiny stimulus noticed by a Hahnemann or a Hering would need to be a hit from a two by four for most modern people.

Hering made his way to America and was persuaded to stay and found the Hahnemann Medical College which grew mightily. It had 70 professors and lecturers, and 300 students at any time. It treated 50,000 patients in a 200 bed hospital and did great work. About 3,500 homeopathic physicians were trained in this college alone.

Another recruit was a Dr. Kent, an American physician whose sick wife had been cured by homeopathy. His Materia Medica is still useful because he categorized patients into constitutional types and showed how different types needed different treatment.

Homeopathy flourished in America because it worked, and because ordinary people could learn enough about it to use its remedies. The pioneer wives traveled across the continent in the Conestoga wagons and used their little black box of remedies to keep the family in good shape when hundreds of miles from any doctor. I use a similar box myself, though mine is white plastic. The remedies are the same and still work the same. No pathogen can acquire immunity from a homeopathic remedy.

These remedies affect the energy body of the patient. They don’t alter the body chemistry so the FDA approves of them. They are very inexpensive, unlike the products of Big Pharm which often sell for several thousands of per cent profit. You can buy them in any good health store, and a few of them sit side by side with the raw chemicals of the pharmacology industry on the shelves of Walgreens and other major stores. They never cause dangerous side effects. Nobody has ever died from homeopathic remedies, unlike the 120,000 to 140,000 who die in this country every year from drug induced problems from FDA approved drugs prescribed by certified physicians.

A homeopathic physician may take over an hour finding out about you as a person, because he knows that different kinds of people need different kinds of treatment. No pigeon holing in this system. No ‘one drug works for all.’ The homeopaths criticized the allopaths for using their strong, dangerous and expensive remedies as a first step instead of seeing first if gentler ways would work.

Then in 1846 the American Medical Association (AMA) was founded to fight the inroads that homeopathy was making into the income of allopathic physicians. It immediately organized itself as an obstacle to public health and hasn’t changed in the century and a half since then. It made it part of their code of ‘ethics’ to forbid AMA members from consulting homeopaths.

Newt Gingrich did the same clever takeover of the language when he gave his colleagues a list of adjectives to use when talking about Democrats as the enemy. The incivility and divisiveness of American politics starting then. The arrogant assertion of AMA superiority over any other modality is another result of co-opting the vocabulary of morality. There was nothing ethical about their decision about homeopaths.

The AMA is not a scholarly organization of exceptionally qualified professionals. That’s the mask, and the act. The AMA is a ruthless trade union, dedicated to keeping up the income of its members. And this is has done well for over 150 years by persecuting every organization that might affect the income of its members and by using its influence to get laws passed that benefit the AMA.

In 1883 the entire New York State Medical Society was expelled from the AMA because they chose to include in their membership all properly graduated physicians even if they did use homeopathy to some extent. To that extent the AMA medicine has become an intolerant religion, persecuting other medical religions because they are the only true one.

The AMA used its money, political clout and drug company contacts to hammer its anti homeopathy propaganda home through every available media; just as it has done since with every medical system that actually promotes health.

It mastered advertising before the homeopaths, so, as often happens today, the voice of the other side isn’t even heard by the brain-washed public or the brain-washed physicians trained in the allopathic system.

Then along came the mechanistic ideas of Samuel Colt and Henry Ford and a new mind set emerged from the idea of the assembly line system. The allopathic method of dealing with the body as a set of separate parts fitted neatly into the new factory analogy. That’s how specialists came to be. Consider why it is that you wouldn’t even think of going to a heart specialist if you had a problem with your eye. Think about it.

When any part of your body is having a problem it’s a message about a weak link in a chain of systems. All your body is affected by the poor health of any system. Your 'eye problem' may have originated in your liver or gall bladder. The site of the pain is not necessarily the site of the cause of the problem.

In allopathic medicine, a pretty recent modality if you think about it, the body is treated as a collection of separate parts instead of as an integrated holistic system as in the millennia old Chinese and Ayurvedic systems.

The story of how the AMA made sure that only schools based on its principles received grants from business interests is as sickening as it is fascinating. Now as then.

Just one recent example that I mentioned a blog or two back. Most people recognize the Sloan Kettering Institute as having an authoritative voice about whether a treatment works or not. Well Sloan and Kettering were executives of General Motors, not distinguished physicians. They helped the system whereby certain businesses financed medical schools with syllabuses that agreed with the business interests.

The Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital is publicized as doing anti-cancer work, though it does so in areas involving the only modalities accepted by the AMA, severe and expensive surgery, expensive and powerful drugs, chemotherapy and radiation. A financial backer of the Hospital just happened to be James Douglas, a metallurgist and uranium mine owner. That’s how radiation treatment was written into the contract as part of his agreement.

The Rockefeller family with its Standard Oil money and pharmaceutical clout from drugs made from petrochemicals adopted the then Memorial Hospital.

The director and president of Sloan Kettering lied in public in the 70’s about Laetrile and its value as a cancer treatment. The story should have closed the Institute but money, not truth is the king of Allopathia. The AMA had posters sent to doctors all over, after the Sloan Kettering public lie. Those posters said ‘Laetrile is dangerous.’ Some of my older readers may have seen them in doctor’s offices. The only danger was to the profits of the cancer industry.

Dr.Manning had proved that 90% of metastases in his experimental animals were totally cured using Laetrile, enzymes and vitamin A. But Laetrile could not be patented because it is derived from almonds, a naturally occurring substance. Sloan Kettering tried to influence the Canadian government by asking them to outlaw the major herb used in the herbal remedy Essiac, which President Kennedy’s personal physician used to cure his own colon cancer.

Anything that affects the money in cancer will be opposed by the AMA and Sloan Kettering, the experts. It is MUCH more profitable NOT to find the cure and to prescribe insanely expensive treatments. The first cause of bankruptcy in American families is medical bills.

The British Board of Health did the same thing as the AMA. In the 1854 Crimean War era epidemic they officially suppressed the fact that the death rate from cholera at the Homeopathic Hospital was 16.4% compared with 50% for allopathic hospitals. When they were challenged about their suppression of a truth, valuable to public health they said this gem of obfuscation:

“The figures would give sanction to a practice opposed to the maintenance of truth and the progress of science.”

That is perfect double-speak from Orwell’s 1984. It means that the figures would show that allopathic medicine is not the best choice for sick people. Therefore the figures can’t be true. The AMA has the same attitude. Only negative things about non-allopathics can be true.

But nowadays as many of you already know, the allopath’s magic bullets, the antibiotics, which produced the assembly line five minute interview, prescription scribble and huge incomes, are no longer effective. In common terms the bugs are mutating fast and winning. The already obscene drug costs are rising.

But the few hundred remedies of the homeopaths still work as well as they did a century and a half ago when they stunned the world with their effectiveness during epidemics.

They didn’t suddenly become useless just because the AMA couldn’t bear to lose their fat fees. They often cost around $5 for 100 tablets, and any literate person, you for example, can read a bit and then become their own wellness coach. It’s a very empowering system.

Cholera and typhus and the other epidemic diseases that were cured by homeopathy can still be cured by homeopathy. The advent of the AMA only altered the propaganda, not the truth. Truth is true whether we agree with it or not, or have been told differently all our lives.

And just in case some sophomoric philosophy major sneers “What is truth?” and expects me to back down over the Pontius Pilate question, here is my definition of truth, ‘That which is so about that which is.’ Deal with that, you compulsive wrangler and debater.

You haven’t heard much about homeopathy in this country because of all the big guns used against it. But in other countries where the pharmaceutical companies don’t run the medical professions homeopathy is practiced all over, to the great benefit of the public.

Homeopathy is MUCH less dangerous and MUCH more cost effective than allopathy, and is officially part of insurable, preventive medicine in Europe. Health care in Europe is health care not disease care.

For example: Thirty percent of French doctors refer their patients to homeopathic remedies, because they work. Twenty percent of German doctors, forty percent of British doctors and forty five percent of Dutch doctors do the same. Those doctors receive medical training in the scientifically investigated properties of herbal remedies and of homeopathic remedies as well as in the chemistry and surgical procedures of allopathic medicine. There were physicians in Europe qualified in acupuncture before Nixon went to China and Americans heard of this ‘new’ method, only about two thousand years old.

Well, those are doctor percentages, how about patient percentages. Here is a recent list of populations having homeopathic treatments in alphabetical order, no favorites: Belgium 5.8%, Denmark 28%, France 32%, Netherlands 31%, Sweden 15%, Britain 16%, U.S. 3%.
In India, where some of the Vedic medical treatments are thousands of years old there are over 100 million people using homeopathic remedies exclusively.

In 1991 three professors of medicine in the Netherlands analyzed 25 years of clinical studies using homeopathic medicines. They published their results in the British Medical Journal, an equivalent of the AMA Journal here.

Their analysis dealt with 107 controlled trials. They found that 76% of them (81) showed that homeopathic medicines were effective, 22% of them (24) were somewhat effective or ineffective and 1.8% were inconclusive (2). The professors concluded “The amount of positive results came as a surprise to us.”

Their findings showed conclusively that homeopathy treatment had been successful in the cases of respiratory infections, diseases of the digestive system, allergies, rheumatologic diseases and many mental and psychological problem and other illnesses. They were impressed with how homeopathic remedies had accelerated recovery after surgeries.

You can find out about investigations into the effectiveness of allopathic drug therapies on the Web. You already know about the 120,000+ deaths every year from prescribed drug issues, and that doesn’t include what may be millions made sick or disabled without dying. There have been no deaths attributed to homeopathic remedies though 500 million people use them world wide.

You already know how doctors prescribe antibiotics against viral diseases, such as the common cold, though such remedies are totally useless. A Congressional Committee investigating the AMA claim that chiropractic was ‘unscientific’ found that 80% of the allopathic treatments had no scientific proof of effectiveness, including major affairs like triple by-pass surgery. The major exception was treatments used in the emergency room. They had been largely validated scientifically. American medicine is NOT a science. It’s a technology. Successful practitioners, and there are some of course, are practicing an art not a science.

You can see from those figures that Americans are being left out of the healing loop because of the profits to be made by treating diseases instead of curing them. The AMA realized that a national health system, such as just about every other industrially developed nation used would adversely impact the ‘charge what you please’ fees of their members. They collected an obligatory contribution from their members and hired a Californian PR company to make the term ‘socialized medicine’ a no-no in everyone’s mind. PR always works in this country.

Many people, and I have seen such at the Walgreen’s pharmacies, are now having to choose between the cost of their drugs and their groceries. But all those financially stressed people just know that socialized medicine is a bad thing. Programmed response.

As Josh Billings said, “It ain’t what people don’t know that’s the problem. It’s what they do know that ain’t so.”

Among the diverse people who visit here, a place they are pleased to call “Spirit Central,” there is a common factor, apart from their awareness of energies not perceptible to the majority of people; allopathic medicine is their LAST resort, not their first. It certainly has a place, but it isn’t a paramount place.

In an unofficial and unscientific survey I asked twenty-five different visitors here what they would use as their preferred healing system if they didn’t feel well. Here are the different replies, some were repeats: Acupuncture, Native American Shaman, Homeopathy, Chinese medicine or herbals, Qi Gong Master, Natropathic doctor, Bach Flower remedies, Aromatherapy, Juice fast, Network Chiropractic, Cranio-sacral therapy, Reiki, Kahuna, Body Talk, Reflexology, Therapeutic Touch.

That’s sixteen different modalities. Not one person thought of allopathic medicine as primary. And mainstream medicine has maligned all these very effective remedies in their usual fashion and always for the same reason, dollars not spent in allopathic procedures. The effectiveness of the other systems was only something to be lied about.

Check the fifteen year law suit of the chiropractors against the lies of the AMA. Every court up to the Supreme Court found the AMA guilty of deliberate lies, persecution and trying to establish a monopoly.

If you didn’t know about some of these modalities, check the Web. If you ever have a problem just check what doctors in England, Germany or France would do about it. Many of the therapies mentioned are part of preventive medicine, true health care, in places where American drug money doesn’t call the shots, though it never stops trying.

As John Robbins quoted,” The physicians won’t get off their pedestals until we get off our knees.” The data is all available to the diminishing proportion of those who can and do read. Use this valuable skill to become your own wellness coach, and Happy Trails! That’s a pretty good New Year’s resolution; learn about health, not disease.