Homeopathy Heals You Blog

Doubts Grow Over Flu Vaccine in Elderly
The influenza vaccine, which has been strongly recommended for people over 65 for more than four decades, is losing its reputation as an effective way to ward off the virus in the elderly. A growing number of immunologists and epidemiologists say the vaccine probably does not work very well for people over 70, the group that accounts for three-fourths of all flu deaths.

Homeopathy and the Flu:  Excerpt from FLU: Alternative Treatments and Prevention
by Randall Neustaedter OMD, North Atlantic Books, 2005

Media Hype Gardasil: Merck’s teen girl vaccine Gardasil has been under fire of late, with everyone from The New England Journal of Medicine to The New York Times questioning whether there is sufficient evidence to justify the widespread use of vaccines against cervical cancer.

&“I think the company did a very effective job of glossing over these questions in its marketing campaign and convincing the public that this vaccine would indeed prevent cervical cancer,” said Dr. Timothy Johnson, ABC’s medical editor, last week.

Drug Makers’ Push Leads to Cancer Vaccines’ Rise

Gardisil:(Merck & Co.) is a vaccine against certain types of human papillomavirus (HPV)

Homeopathic Approach: A wart is a small epidermal and papillary elevation of the skin and is also known as verruca. These are actually benign tumors that are caused by the infection of a virus called the HPV or human papilloma virus. Warts may vary in location, symptoms and shape, and accordingly, different types of remedies are administered. . . .

Placebo Makes You Stronger: An Australian researcher today showed that athletes who believe they're taking synthetic human growth hormone, but are instead taking placebos, can actually become stronger.

Audio File: Men run faster, jump higher, get stronger after taking (placebo) growth hormone. By Adaora Udoji and Katherine Lanpher

Placebos: In a recent survey of more than 200 doctors practicing in academic medical centers, 45% reported that they had given placebos to patients in the course of providing clinical care. Nearly all the physicians surveyed agreed with the statement that “placebos have therapeutic effects,” and the condition for which they believed placebos offered the most psychological and physiological benefit was pain.

Candy Cures: The placebo idea was born centuries ago, when doctors intuited that encouraging a patient to think more positively about the likelihood of recovery could actually improve symptoms. One way they did that was occasionally to appease (some may say trick) demanding and desperate people with “medicines” known to be inactive. Doctors soon learned that those supposedly bogus treatments weren't necessarily bogus at all. In fact, about one in three people given a placebo will experience an improvement, says Daniel Moerman, Ph.D., medical anthropologist at the University of Michigan at Dearborn. Though healers have known the placebo effect works, they didn't understand how . Now new research is helping reveal how your thoughts, feelings and beliefs can work such apparent magic-whether or not you're aware of them. “The placebo response is a window into the mind/body connection,” says Jerome Groopman, M.D.

[NOTE: Why not go one step beyond the placebo effect? With homeopathic treatment, the patient is fully heard by a caring practitioner, spends sufficient time to elicit all levels of awareness and sensation, and is guided to become conscious of inner knowing to the extent that change actually occurs in the material realm]