Has anyone here with Vaccine Injury tried Homeopathic medicine? *Please tag fellow users of users of Homeopathy*

[JES]

To be clear, if there are homeopathic supplements that have demonstrated their effect, I would no longer have any problem with using those supplements. In fact I use quite a few supplements daily and not all have a huge scientific backing, but the difference is those supplements have at least a plausible effect. Homeopathic supplements are typically diluted in water in some minuscule concentration, there is not even a hypothetical scientific model for how they would work. But oh well, at least you avoid the dreaded side effects and "herxes" that ME/CFS people tend to get from normal dosing of certain supplements.

 

[Fat Viking]

You're still quoting what others (jncluding me) have said about homeopathy in this thread. Until you read a little first-hand info for yourself, you're never going to really know what you want and what's possible. And by first hand information I dont mean promo from some Drs office or from a site that sells homeopathic treatments. I mean from, say a homeopathy textbook, or something written by someone who really knows their stuff.

I'm tied up at the moment with other things so I can't look deeper into this, that's why I'm asking for people who's reversed Vaccine Injury with Homeopathy.

 

[Hip]

Clinical trials and research studies cost a lotttttt of money, which isn't a problem for BigPharma, but is a problem for most herbals and all of homeopathy.

If you search PubMed, you will find many studies analyzing the effects of herbs and supplements on various conditions. And you will find many in vitro studies analyzing how herbs and supplements affect various aspects of biochemistry in a cell line in a test tube. In vitro studies are quite cheap, because all you need is a few cells in a test tube.

To give a completely random example: this in vitro study indicates how a compound from thyme essential oil has anti-inflammatory effects, via inhibiting COX-2. For any herb or supplement, you will find studies like this which show the biochemical effect of the substance. As a herb or supplement enters the body or is placed in contact with cells in a test tube, it elicits very definite effects.

But you never find any such studies showing that homeopathy has any biochemical effects. So until such time that some demonstrates that homeopathy can have biochemical effects, it remains very questionable.

Globally the homeopathy market is worth $4 billion,1 so there's no shortage of money to fund a few studies.

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

Here’s a direct quote from the article you linked under “1”, regarding the putatively enormous income generated by homeopathy. The caps and underlining are mine::

“A marked presence of several small and medium enterprises (SME) renders the competitive landscape in the global homeopathy product market moderately fragmented, finds Transparency Market Research (TMR). In 2015, THE LEADING FIVE PLAYERS COULD ONLY ACCOUNT FOR MERE (sic) 27.0% SHARE OF THE GLOBAL MARKET pointing toward the fragmentation in the market.”​

Globally the homeopathy market is worth $4 billion,1 so there's no shortage of money to fund a few studies.

As the article you quoted re: the global dollar growth of homeopathic manufacturers points out, however large their GLOBAL income share is, it’s going to a huge number of extremely fragmented players, with no one player really in a position to fund studies.

Here’s a listing of the countries this bounty is spread around in, and from: US, Canada, Mexico, South America including Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, along with pretty much all other Central and South-American countries, all of Europe, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, India, China, the ASEAN countries (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), Japan, New Zealand, Australia, the GCC (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman), So. Africa, Israel, Turkey, the entirety of the MENA (Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Palestine, and Yemen. Ethiopia and Sudan are sometimes included).

Given a spread of this size, $4 billion starts looking like pretty small potatoes once it’s broken down between all the players.

It’s true that it’s not difficult to find research and testing on almost any herb or supplement you’re interested in. This is because those products, and their manufacturers and distributors, command HUGE markets, and enormous amounts of money. Way more than the comparably pitiful little market that homeopathy commands.

And it’s also true that BigPhrma often has a marked interest in those substances.

About 25 or 30-so years ago, tryptophan supplements disappeared from shelves everywhere, The story given out thru mass media was that multiple people had suffered various degrees of bad effects, including I think a couple of deaths, from a batch of tryptophan that had been contaminated during its production due to ….a) faulty lab equipment …..b) poorly maintained production machinery …..c) production machinery that hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned before being put to work in the production chain, and was contaminated with highly toxic chemicals. Take your pick. The explanation kept evolving and morphing.

Within no more than a year or two at the outside, a miraculous new series of treatments for migraine headaches appeared, called tryptans and sumatryptans, all based on tryptophan. The same tryptophan that we used to be able to buy OTC at that time. And they produced an enormous haul for multiple drug companies, who fell all over themselves to get their version out first. Tryptophan, which had been proven in multiple research studies to be highly effective on some forms of migraines, stayed off the market for, like, ever.

Which explains large pharmaceutical companies' interest in supporting and sometimes contributing financially to numerous research projects in the natural or alternative-healing market.

As a herb or supplement enters the body or is placed in contact with cells in a test tube, it elicits very definite effects.

But you never find any such studies showing that homeopathy has any biochemical effects. So until such time that some demonstrates that homeopathy can have biochemical effects, it remains very questionable.

As @Wayne pointed out, the action of homeopathic treatments isn’t biochemical. Homeopathy works entirely differently from biochemical medications and treatments, and on different levels. Comparing it to those forms of medications/treatment protocols is, as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, like comparing apples and Fennic foxes.

Here’s @Wayne’s quote:

I only perused a few posts on this thread, but noticed some familiar arguments against homeopathy; that it is so "diluted", it can't plausibly be beneficial. What most people don't realize is that unlike modern medicines that depend on molecular structures of drugs and other medical concoctions, homeopathy works on an energetic or vibrational level.

We all are going to believe, or be open to, what we're going to believe or be open to, and those beliefs are sometimes unshakable. Often, they order our world. Without those firm convictions, it all falls apart.

But as @Wolfcub and @Wishful have said, homeopathic treatments carry virtually no risk, and can be nullified by sucking on a peppermint or drinking a cup of coffee, so maybe a little anecdotal testing might be a good thing.

After all, the plural of anecdote is ..... data.

EDITED ..... FOR SOME SERIOUSLY STUPID TYPOS ...

 

[JES]

But as @Wolfcub and @Wishful have said, homeopathic treatments carry virtually no risk, and can be nullified by sucking on a peppermint or drinking a cup of coffee, so maybe a little anecdotal testing might be a good thing.

Which can also be said about placebo. What treatment other than placebo doesn't come with any side effects? ME/CFS patients are typically very sensitive and tend to react to any type of treatment. If there is no negative reaction from any of the treated patients, the first suspicion should be that the treatment is a sugar pill.

Of course delivering placebo treatment is an interesting proposition itself and lots of studies have shown people really improve, both mental and physical symptoms reduce, following placebo administration. The simplest explanation is the placebo response, it doesn't need to be anything more complicated than that.

If it's not placebo, then the easiest experiment in the world to perform would be to offer patients plain water and homeopathic diluted water and see if there is any difference. I suspect both will provide equal improvement as long as the patient believes he is given the working treatment.

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

If it's not placebo, then the easiest experiment in the world to perform would be to offer patients plain water and homeopathic diluted water and see if there is any difference.

That's not the way a true homeopathic remedy is administered, at least not if you want it to work. Even the very simplest ones. It's not like an Alka-Seltzer you can dump into a glass of water and voila !!!

For one thing, a genuine homeopathic treatment protocol is extremely personalized and tailored to both the patient and the condition under consideration, and usually consists of multiple treatments, each dealing with a separate level of an illness, until the whole illness in all its manifestations has been treated, in every organ system affected. A first appt with a true homeopath can take as long as 3 or 4 hours of questions, probings, and close examinations of everything from your dietary preferences to room temps that you find either comfortable or uncomfortable. It's exhaustively comprehensive.

The exceptions are the milder condition treatments, available OTC from health food stores to CVS and Walgreen's, like oscillococcimin, a surprizingly effective (at least for me, my husband, and everyone I've turned on to it) flu intervention and treatment, and other simple, one-size-can-fit-all treatments for things like headache, mild arthritic pain, muscle strain, teething problems, diarrhea, stomach upsets, etc.

With all due respect, you seem to be criticizing and dismissing something you appear to have a limited knowledge of, beyond the most basic "Everything's too dilute to have any real value so the whole discipline is utter crap..." thingy.

I've done the round-and-round-the-bush-we-go thing before with determinedly set minds, and I just don;t have the energy for it right now.

Which can also be said about placebo.

I don't know of any treatment, placebo or otherwise, which, upon expression of distressing symptoms in the patient, can be immediately reversed with a peppermint candy or a cup of coffee. This is particularly true of many of the most currently over-prescribed biochemical allopathic treatments for anxiety and depression, or even antibiotics like the fluoroquinolones, which, once they've started causing seriously distressing problems, can take years, and a truck convoy of money, to reverse, and often leave lifetime, irreparable damage in their wake.

I've done my best to debunk the common misconceptions about homeopathy, and I have no intention, or even a faint, flickering hope, of changing anyone's mind. I felt it was necessary to balance the ledger, as it were, and present some basic information about homeopathy that went beyond the common prevailing dilution arguments.

So my work here is done.

Peace out.

 

[Fat Viking]

From my little research, it seems Homeopathy CAN work but it's very niche, that's why there's no Clinical studies or trials, which is a shame.

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

@Fat Viking
Don't be discouraged by the nay-sayers. If you dont have the time and energy to learn a little more about homeopathy on your own, be comforted by the fact that at the very least, homeopathy will do no damage, even if the wrong cure is administered. It just won't do anything.

Save your efforts in the research dept for finding a really good homeopath, not a naturopath looking to expand their practice, or someone who has zero accreditation from a respected school of homeopathy, but figures, "Hey, how hard can it be?"

Good luck, Viking, and onward and upward !!!!

 

[Fat Viking]

@Fat Viking
Don't be discouraged by the nay-sayers. If you dont have the time and energy to learn a little more about homeopathy on your own, be comforted by the fact that at the very least, homeopathy will do no damage, even if the wrong cure is administered. It just won't do anything.

Save your efforts in the research dept for finding a really good homeopath, not a naturopath looking to expand their practice, or someone who has zero accreditation from a respected school of homeopathy, but figures, "Hey, how hard can it be?"

Good luck, Viking, and onward and upward !!!!

I mean it's my only hope to reversing Vaccine Injury as all other options are out. Homeopathy and Herbs.

 

[JES]

I don't know of any treatment, placebo or otherwise, which, upon expression of distressing symptoms in the patient, can be immediately reversed with a peppermint candy or a cup of coffee.

Sure it can, this can be demonstrated by a simple example. If a doctor gives a patient a placebo pill and then proceeds to tell the patient that he had just given him/her a poison, then it's not uncommon for the patient to start experiencing strong symptoms, because the patient would be thinking they had just ingested a real poison. This is called the nocebo response.

If the doctor then tells the patient here is the remedy, just take some peppermint and it will clear the poison out of your system, the patient will start to feel better. With all due respect, maybe I don't understand everything about homeopathy, but you proved you don't understand the placebo response very well. We are all, me included, prone to be persuaded by things which might not all be true. This is why I presume CBT tailored to reverse "false illness beliefs" was reported to be helpful by some patients in the PACE trial.

 

[Hip]

Given a spread of this size, $4 billion starts looking like pretty small potatoes once it’s broken down between all the players.

Not if all those individual players get together fund some research that demonstrates homeopathy works. It would be very much in their interests to obtain proof that it work. (Of course, if you suspect that homeopathy does not work, then it would not be in your interests to conduct any research, otherwise it may damage your market).

A lot of science is done on the basis of small contributions from various parties, including ME/CFS research which is funded by thousands of patients each contributing.

And it's not just the homeopathy manufacturers, but also the millions of users of homeopathy: people who use homeopathy tend to be very passionate about it, so this is another group who might like to contribute to research.

As @Wayne pointed out, the action of homeopathic treatments isn’t biochemical. Homeopathy works entirely differently from biochemical medications and treatments, and on different levels. Comparing it to those forms of medications/treatment protocols is, as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, like comparing apples and Fennic foxes.

Here’s @Wayne’s quote:

I only perused a few posts on this thread, but noticed some familiar arguments against homeopathy; that it is so "diluted", it can't plausibly be beneficial. What most people don't realize is that unlike modern medicines that depend on molecular structures of drugs and other medical concoctions, homeopathy works on an energetic or vibrational level.

The trouble with that argument is that there isn't really any scientific meaning to the statement "homeopathy works on an energetic or vibrational level". We all understand what the word "vibes" means in everyday life, as in "I walked into the room, and everyone was looking at me, and there was a bad vibe". However, to be scientific, you have to be much more precise that just saying "it works on a vibrational level". You need to detail the exact mechanism of operation.

But if homeopathy is claiming it works on some vague and unspecified "vibrational level", then the only thing you can do it check whether or not it can cure or improve disease. So you can still be scientific about it.

 

[Hip]

According to this article:

About 200 clinical studies of homeopathic remedies are available to date. With that sort of number, one cannot be surprised that the results are not entirely uniform. It would be easy to cherry pick and select those findings that one happens to like (and some homeopaths do exactly that). Yet, if we want to know the truth, we need to consider the totality of this evidence and weigh it according to its scientific rigour. This approach is called a systematic review. Over a dozen systematic reviews of homeopathy have been published. Almost uniformly, they come to the conclusion that homeopathic remedies are not different from placebo.

The thing is, if homeopathy is indeed mainly just placebo, then any discussion like this one which throws doubt on the efficacy of homeopathy is going to damage that placebo effect. The placebo effect is going to be strong one, because of the strength of belief that homeopaths have in their treatments. But these discussions will erode that placebo effect. It's also likely factors such as a the caring empathy of the homeopathic practitioner that patients really appreciate.

So if you want to get the full benefits from homeopathy, you are best off avoiding reading discussions such as these!

 

[Wayne]

We all are going to believe, or be open to, what we're going to believe or be open to, and those beliefs are sometimes unshakable. Often, they order our world.

My understanding of the principles of vibrations (which homeopathy is based on) supersedes the often very limited understanding of what science offers us. Or perhaps more accurately, "supersedes the interpretations of what science offers us", as most interpretations of medical science today are colored by political and/or financial interests.

Living a life fundamentally based on vibrations makes eminently more sense to me than striving to live a life somehow based on science. I think my own philosophy is summed up quite nicely in a quote I just ran across a few minutes ago, (which I think pertains to the topic of this thread).

"If you make a meal, put love into it instead of the frustrations of your day. Because whatever is put into the food is a reflection of what you have inside yourself, and it goes out to your family, it goes out to your friends. And it makes a very real difference."​

 

[Hip]

My understanding of the principles of vibrations (which homeopathy is based on) supersedes the often very limited understanding of what science offers us.

Supersedes quantum field theory or general relativity and the difficult mathematics they involve?

striving to live a life somehow based on science

I don't think anyone should strive to live a "life based on science", just as a car mechanic should not strive to live a life based on his garage tools. People I think should aspire to live a full life that encompasses all aspects of human culture.

But when you car is broken, the received wisdom is taking it to mechanic, rather than showing the car love and affection and hoping that will make it start!

 

[Wayne]

rather than showing the car love and affection and hoping that will make it start!

But it can't hurt!

I've heard several times from friends who follow the same spiritual orientation as mine, that they will often notice after getting a new vehicle, that things start breaking down more often than would seem likely. They chalk it up to their vibrations taking time to attune to the vibrations of the car they purchased. I know, seems outlandish to most people. But it's pretty much accepted as standard fare when looking at life from a vibrational viewpoint.

People I think should aspire to live a full life that encompasses all aspects of human culture.

Couldn't agree more!

 

[Hip]

I've heard several times from friends who follow the same spiritual orientation as mine, that they will often notice after getting a new vehicle, that things start breaking down more often than would seem likely. They chalk it up to their vibrations taking time to attune to the vibrations of the car they purchased. I know, seems outlandish to most people. But it's pretty much accepted as standard fare when looking at life from a vibrational viewpoint.

What I would say is that people often have beliefs that enrich their lives or state of mind. A friend of mine's mother believes that when the leaves shake on the houseplant in her living room, that's her beloved grandfather visiting in spirit.

It would be sad and dull world if such beliefs were eradicated by some cold logic that demanded we only believed things that are proven to be true. Most of the time such beliefs cause no harm, and often enrich lives.

But sometimes what you believe can have consequences, and it's in these circumstances that we have to be more careful about what we hold to be true. The story springs to mind of a young man who believed that polar bears are basically friendly and can be approached without danger if you do it carefully. He went into the wilderness to try to prove his belief. The result was that his belief ended up being his demise.

 

[Fat Viking]

What I would say is that people often have beliefs that enrich their lives or state of mind. A friend of mine's mother believes that when the leaves shake on the houseplant in her living room, that's her beloved grandfather visiting in spirit.

It would be sad and dull world if such beliefs were eradicated by some cold logic that demanded we only believed things that are proven to be true. Most of the time such beliefs cause no harm, and often enrich lives.

But sometimes what you believe can have consequences, and it's in these circumstances that we have to be more careful about what we hold to be true. The story springs to mind of a young man who believed that polar bears are basically friendly and can be approached without danger if you do it carefully. He went into the wilderness to try to prove his belief. The result was that his belief ended up being his demise.

You're a firm believer of evidence but sadly Homeopathy is niche so there won't be much evidence to support it but when Vaccine Injury sites promote it, I don't think it's just Marketing, I think the Creator of the site did their research and know what they're on about.

 

[Wishful]

If there is no negative reaction from any of the treated patients, the first suspicion should be that the treatment is a sugar pill.

Hey, sugar pills would make my ME worse (and give me insomnia). Water hasn't caused any noticeable effects on my ME, so make those ineffective treatments "water pills".

 

[Fat Viking]

This Vaccine Damage site praises Homeopathy and says it cures Vaccine Injury http://thinktwice.com/reversal.htm

The Creator of the Site stated "Our site does not support Homeopathy. In fact, we don't support any particular health modality. However, we do provide the names of several organizations that treat autism, developmental disabilities, and vaccine-related damage. If you have any concerns regarding claims that some organizations may or may not have made, you should directly contact those organizations for clarity."
So now I believe in Homeopathy even more.

 

[JES]

The Creator of the Site stated "Our site does not support Homeopathy. In fact, we don't support any particular health modality. However, we do provide the names of several organizations that treat autism, developmental disabilities, and vaccine-related damage. If you have any concerns regarding claims that some organizations may or may not have made, you should directly contact those organizations for clarity."
So now I believe in Homeopathy even more.

Just curious, I'm wondering what lead you to this particular site and how did you establish that it's more relevant than say, a random website that promotes the ketogenic diet, Chinese herbs, acupuncture or detox as cure for illness X?

A random website doesn't even count as reliable anecdotal evidence since anyone can put up a website and post stories that may not be authentic. If you want to know if homeopathy is effective, you need to study the evidence for and against from homeopathy trials and systematic reviews of trials. This is how you establish if a treatment is effective.

Even this forum is a much better place to start than a website. You can begin by asking real people in here how many of us have been cured or helped by homeopathy.