Homeopathy? Not at Any Cost
I thought maybe we’d take a slightly different direction today. That is, a Western medicine one. Those who read this blog regularly probably assume, and rightly, that I do have an alternative medicine slant, this being an organic blog and all.
However, I do still believe in Western medicine.The way I see it, the two fields are both legitimate precisely because they don’t really overlap all that much. Alternative medicine primarily has to do with health. Maintaining it, strengthening it, putting us in line with nature so our bodies, products of nature, can more easily and efficiently move through their environment.
Western medicine, on the other hand, has more to do with sickness. Meaning, when your body is way off center, you might need some sort of technological intervention to get you back. A U-turn, a sharp curve left, something that’s out of the ordinary, because if you stay on the nature path when you’ve got a serious problem, you cannot forget that nature also has the capacity to kill you. Sometimes, nature is actually our enemy, and we must circumvent it. Failure to recognize this truth can be deadly.
The reason I’m writing about this now is that a case was just reported out of Sydney where a middle-aged couple was convicted of manslaughter for not seeking medical help for their 9-month old daughter who died of severe eczema, (pictured here) a common skin ailment among babies that is easily treatable. My nephew even had it for a few weeks.
In this case, the eczema was left untreated for 5 months, and the baby, Gloria, died of infections from open wounds in her skin as a result of the rashes. They finally brought her in to hospital when an eye infection was literally melting her corneas, but by then it was too late. The reason they did not take her in is that the father, Thomas Sam, a college lecturer in homeopathy, resorted to homeopathic techniques instead.
Homeopathy is a theory of treatment based on the assumption that an extremely diluted mixture of a substance that would otherwise cause similar symptoms at higher doses in a patient can actually cure a patient of those symptoms. This is fine, even if a bit strange, because it can’t really hurt you. But relying on that to the exclusion of Western intervention can, indeed, kill you, as it did to this baby.
Recently, my wife was prescribed a series of homeopathic treatments, to which I raised my eyebrow, but was OK with because other forms of treatment were also included. I remember being opposed to the practice because I didn’t see any scientific merit in it, but thought that, on the off chance that there’s something scientific to it that we just haven’t discovered yet, I’d be willing to give it a shot. But not at any risk.
Back to the story at hand, Sam refused to take Gloria to a hospital even after her hair actually turned white from the disorder. By the time he finally did, it was too late.
“Gloria was subjected to significant pain over an extended period of time and the omission of the offenders to seek proper assistance for her may be characterized accurately as cruelty,” Johnson said. “Each offender fell profoundly short of their parental obligations to their infant daughter.”
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I’m in a solar mood today. I often am. I really think it’s the future of the energy market, because, when it comes down to it, everything is solar powered. The sun is the Earth’s only source of energy, ultimately speaking.
