If I could write like this I would feel truly blessed.

What a sweet way to learn history!

Thank you Mr Stephenson!

This fascinating book shows how language can be used to unlock the riddle of our past, like DNA strands can unlock our genetic structure.

Well worth a read!

Daughters of Fire by Barbara Erskine

This wonderful novel lights up the Celtic World in great brilliance.

It is a great story and also great history. It is well researched and takes into account all the recent archaeology and also the current arguments, fights and debates in modern historical and archaeological academia. Very clever indeed!

Celtic history has come a long way in the last two decades. This book illuminates all the dark corners and finally dispels all the prejudice and character assassination that has gone on for the last two thousand years, including some very dubious histories written by British historians who hero worshiped the Romans above all and who were embarrassed to know their ancestors couldn’t mix concrete! How useful such prejudicial beliefs were in the forging of the British Empire and in conquering all those naked savages and Barbarians!

At last, it is dawning on people how educated and civilised our ancestors really were and how old their civilisation really was. Erskine even mentions the startling fact that Pythagoras learnt his stuff from his Druid teachers, something that is obvious from a close study of the Time Lines and from the fact that Stonehenge is full of ‘Pythagorean’ geometry, as are many of the prehistoric stone circles. Indeed, the golden wizard hats detailing the so called Greek Meton cycle was attributable to the Northern European cultures centuries before the Greeks ‘discovered’ it, which clearly demonstrates that Greek knowledge was first and foremost proto Celtic knowledge.

Even democracy, always synonymous with the Greeks, was actually common practice in Indo European tribes across Europe and Asia Minor, and it is well known that common people in the so called ‘Barbarian’ World elected their leaders from candidates put forward for them to vote for, centuries and centuries before our modern era, and this is described in detail by Erskine in her novel.

The Greeks were influenced by the proto Celts because they were part of this ancient intelligence, given credit because they wrote it all down, whereas anything the Celts wrote down, and yes they wrote and spoke Greek, Latin and Celtic, was destroyed by later peoples. Rome valued and appropriated Greek culture which they did not regard as a threat to them, unlike the Celts with their Druids who terrified the Romans!

The Celts and the Greeks were the inheritors of the Beaker People, the Urnfield Culture and their sites at Halstatt and La Tene were very cultured. They were knowledgeable and at peace with the World they lived in. They could not conceptualise the true horror that was Rome and they paid a terrible price, and so did we! There is no reason today why we should keep on paying it, is there? The Romans set out to destroy us utterly because we represented an alternative to their universe that would, could and did really threaten them and their propaganda, and the Roman Church kept this awful tyrany going for far too long.

In this book, the full glory of who and what we were and are and will be again shines forth. It is time for the ancestors and for these truths to be restored to the proper place in history and in the modern mind. It is not acceptable to continue to describe these wonderful people in terms that would shock and horrify if they were applied to others.

The story also describes modern Druidry in clear terms that does justice to ancient and modern practice. The book describes the modern co-operation between the Protestant Church at its finest and the spirituality of the ancient world, as if some fundamental healing is now actually occurring, or is it re-emerging like the Celtic Church? The melding of beliefs described in this story satisfies our heritage as the ancestors themselves determined, before it was rigorously suppressed and destroyed by a Roman Church which does not seem to have any interest in diversity, only in ruthless control. I like especially the way the author outlines most clearly the fact that Druidry is not a religion, it is a way of living in the World, and it co-exists with Christianity in its best and finest form. This is the way forward for our modern world, where all the beliefs of the people are given pride of place and not suppressed by super forms of religion that only know how to control and destroy. The Inquisition can never be forgiven! Far too many people have been slaughtered! They cannot be swept under the carpet of history!

The clever melding of the characters in this novel also shows the close interaction between the past, the future and the present, and clearly describes the beliefs of the ancient Celts. It is the underpinning of modern healing practice. All things must be considered. In homeopathy especially, there is no clear distinction between the Worlds. The term ‘wholistic‘ has not been completely comprehended in the modern World. It is a difficult concept to get across. This book manages to explain it very nicely, and in such a way that by the end of the story, this concept is understandable. Today, modern healers are practicing healing as the ancients understood it, by accepting the melding of the past, the present and the future and in the full understanding that we are more than the sum of our parts. However, just a quick look at Wikipedia’s entry on healing will demonstrate the physicality of modern definitions, which dare not go too close to faith healing in case… well in case people laugh at them and ridicule them, because we all know that science can cure everything, don’t we?

Modern healers attempt to understand how we heal, how we become ill, how we live and how we die. At least we try!! This book illustrates the concepts behind modern healing more clearly than I have ever seen it described before. I would call it Shamanism, and people use that term because, as Barbara Erskine points out so smoothly in her novel, ‘it would not be acceptable in the modern age to be prejudiced against Native American Indian beliefs’ now would it? But they are identical to Celtic belief at heart, so how can you accept one and cast aspersions on the other? That is not very politically correct is it? Shamanism is the basic belief structure of the ancient World from Siberia to Alaska, from Iran to Ireland - why? Because all Proto European belief structure had the same origins, that’s why! And it is millenia old and it spread easily and effortlessly around the Northern hemisphere after the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, across to North America, across Asia, across Europe and Asia Minor. It shares similarities with beliefs across the known World that date back many millenia around the World. It is THE basic belief structure that underpins everything, including our newer ‘religions’, because it emerged with Homo Sapiens Sapiens 60,000 years ago and it is still with us, whispering all around us.

It is time we grew up and look directly into the heart of this remarkable truth and stop piddling around with wars, chemicals and prejudice. We have paid a terrible price for the loss of such ancestors and it is time we grasped this particular nettle with both hands.

There is indeed ample evidence of Celtic writing, which is interesting because of the assertion that the Celts never wrote anything down. In fact it seems they wrote all the time and in many languages, for example, the many Tessera Hospitale and inscriptions located all over south west Europe, written in Celtiberian, Latin, Lepontic, Gaulish, Iberian, Lusitanian, Greek, Galatian and Noricum, Brythonic, Goidelic and with possible links to Basque. The Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn provides ample evidence of the survival of Celtic writing dating back to at least 2400 BCE. Funny how so little has survived! I wonder what happened to it all?

Stephen Oppenheimer claims the origins of the Celtic peoples could date back to the Beaker Culture or before and date to the Neolithic around 5000 BCE which would wipe the Central European origin theory dated to 300 BCE off the map. His book outlines a much older ancestry and indicates that the ‘accepted dating’ is based on a misunderstanding by Herodotus which may have misled historians for a thousand years!

His tracing of recurrent patterns of colonisation of the Western British Isles along the Atlantic trade routes following the copper and tin trade echo the archaeology and begin to explain the east - west genetic split so evident from the DNA evidence. The Celtic languages could have come into the western British Isles in the Bronze Age.

I especially appreciate Oppenheimer’s emphasis that culture, language and people combine to make a ‘racial‘ package. This use of the term ‘blood‘ to indicate invasion is increasingly ‘politically incorrect‘ and so it should be! Of course culture and language can move independently of gene flow, as is easily evident in the modern world and grossly misleading when applied to the ancient world. Modern European countries simply did not exist until the Middle Ages redefined the map!

Oppenheimer reviews the colonisation of Europe as the ice sheets retreat, presenting a genetic blank sheet. About 17000 years ago, ice age cultures occupied refuges in south west Europe, Italy, Ukraine and the Balkans, which formed founding populations in these areas by about 16000 years ago in the Paleolithic period. The Magdalenian culture of southern Germany dates to this time, and it spreads eventually from Belgium to Poland. The north west corner of Europe develops the Creswellian Culture about 15000 years ago. These founding populations are seen to imprint the genetic landscape by providing the pre glacial mitochondrial DNA seen in 21% of modern populations, with 51% surviving from post glacial migrations, and a further 15% surviving from Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age migrations, which equals an astonishing 97% of modern populations! 75% of all British male Y chromosones also date to this time! This is called the ‘founder effect‘.

Oppenheimer gives a very detailed explanation of modern genetic research, so be warned! Basically, his tracing of the male Y chromosone indicates that these early peoples walked the coast lines from the various ice age refuges, the Basques and south west Europeans up the Atlantic coast around the Western British Isles = Celtic language groupings; and the Ukraine and Balkan Europeans along the edge of the retreating ice sheets directly across Europe and the land mass now under the North sea to Eastern British Isles = Germanic language groupings. Old English is therefore a fourth branch of the Germanic language group that has been spoken in England since the Bronze Age! This Celtic/Germanic split in the British Isles thereby predates the ‘Anglo Saxon’ invasions in the 5th century AD by about millenia!

Thus is our history turned upside down!

And remember, all the time we were still linked to Denmark before the North Sea flooded, so the passage of peoples between eastern ‘England’ and the ‘Viking‘ and ‘Germanic‘ populations was automatic and implies a homogeneous family from the outset, whereas the vast expansion of the forests in the Mesolithic and the inexorable rise in sea levels would entrench the routes between the old ice age refuges and stream the populations into habitual migratory pathways, confirming the familiar and familial and etching the Celtic/Germanic east west divisions in our islands even more deeply.

There is a lot more in this book, but the essential claim is clear. Our historians have lost us in their confusions and they have disappeared us almost completely! The histories of the last 2000 years are racist in essence and they reflect deep prejudices, poor scholarship and fashionable ideologies which change ‘like a pendulum’ as each new academic, celebrity or TV documentary strives for fame and headlines. They continue to contain gross inaccuracies which have been continuously whipped up by politicians and the media. Far from being a ‘mongrel race’ as a result of repeated ‘invasions’ by ‘genetically unrelated’ and ’superior’ historical ‘racial’ groupings, or of our need to be a ‘melting pot‘ (which we have been for 17,000 years) - our recent welcome immigrations in the last two centuries fit into the patterns of all so called ‘historic’ invasions = 6-9% (compared with Normans 3%, Vikings 13% - the rest too small to be measured!) it seems we have always been family with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Huguenots and everyone else that came along.

Far from being different ‘races’, we are in fact all the same family and we always have been. British DNA is fundamentally unchanged since the Neolithic! According to Oppenheimer’s survey of current genetic studies, 88% of the Irish, 81% of the Welsh, 79% of the Cornish, 70% of the Scottish and 68% of the English arrived here before the first farmers in the new Stone Age.

Historic ‘invasions’ can thus be seen to be typical of the sort of population movements that have been occurring in the British Isles for almost 17,000 years, with no one individual event contributing even a tenth of our modern genetic mix. And remember, these historic invasions have been by members of our own family, such that even geneticists cannot differentiate them from British populations. In fact genetic analysis of some of our most famous ‘invaders’ show that their homeland populations are more like the British than the British are, for example 25% of Iceland shows British DNA.

One little point. Oppenheimer never mentions the Romans. They occupied Britain for 400 years and during that time, they must have left some mark? Why does he not mention them? This is quite mysterious. However, I think we can guess. The Romans said they originated in Troy, and the penultimate city to thrive on that hill was destroyed by fire about the same time the Romans tip up. They certainly were new comers to the Italian peninsula in the 9th Century BCE of thereabouts, and as soon as they are a strong empire, they rebuilt the final stage of Troy which became a tourist destination in the 1st Century AD. So if we take their claims at face value, ’cause no one knows the truth because the Romans practiced cremation and so we have very few bodies to study. If their claims are true, then they would be from the Ukrainian and Balkan ice age refuge and already related to us. In fact, they would be cousins of the Germans. In fact, they would be ‘Anglo Saxon’! They might even be Vikings!! Using Oppenheimer’s reasoning, and using their physical appearance, short, dark etc, they could well have actually come from the Basque ice age refuge which would make them Celts!!! I do hope British history teachers and politicians get to see this book! It really is about time they stopped using us as political shuttlecocks! Especially as the Ice Age refuges disgorged peoples who went south, making us cousins of the Berbers and all the peoples across the north African coast, close family so long cut off from us by dangerous politicians and their dubious rhetoric!

When the ice caps retreated, Europe was populated by the peoples who emerged from the ice age refuges in Iberia, the Balkans and Ukraine. They travelled everywhere in Europe, and far from being ‘diluted’ by ‘invaders’ these populations have been mixing, merging and expanding for millenia, even though the genetic markers can still identify which refuge their ancestors emerged from. The ancestors of the people in the ice age refuges are also related as they all come from the Black Sea area where they have lived, mixing and merging for over 40,000 years before dispersing out to mix with earlier migrators to become Indo Europeans. Our ancestors are all related as they all emerged out of Africa.

So it is racist to set us all against one another and use family members to separate us for political gain. Our fates have been twisted together by time far more effectively than power elites can twist and manipulate us apart today, no matter that they have done so for 2,000 years.

That time is now over!

Oppenheimer has truly and fundamentally turned British history on its head.

Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn

It was merely fascinating - ‘we can change the World’ - until I came across this paragraph about INFOTOXINS:

“The marketers, spin doctors and PR agents who produce this propoganda realize what we as a society hate to admit: Disinformation works. Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth’s climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let’s undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest that any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a “grassroots” group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the das of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch your infotoxins spread - and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come.”

Wow! That sounds a familiar tactic! So I went back to the beginning of the book and read more carefully!

Kalle Lasn first sat up and took notice when:

“This did not fully hit home for me until 1989, when a spate of nightmarish environmental stories suddenly appeared on the news: acid rain, dying seals in the North Sea, medical waste washing up on New York beaches, garbage barges turned away from port after port, a growing hole in the ozone layer, and the discovery that the milk in American mother’s breasts had four times the amount of DDT permitted in cow’s milk. In that year, a critical mass of people saw the light and became “environmentalists… The premonition of ecocide - planetary death - became real for the first time, and it terrified me. It still does.”

So I read on. Lasn identifies the mechanism behind consumer capitalism and accuses ‘being cool‘ as the Huxleyan “soma” behind modern cynicism, and how this is perpetrated by ‘the dark side of cool’, when we watch too much TV and don’t bother to vote, become compulsive shoppers and ignore the existentialist terror of big business spending our children’s inheritance. Lasn calls this post modernist malaise and strongly argues that we all wake up and ‘unswoosh‘ this hypnotic Lemming like tendency to dream on as the World dies around us.

Culture Jam is a book containing a manifesto to ‘detournement‘ - a ‘perspective-jarring turnabout’ to shock us all out of ‘cool‘.

Lasn recounts the drear history of corporations becoming more important than people:

“President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned, “Corporations have been enthroned… An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people… until wealth is aggregated in a few hands… and the Republic is destroyed.”

Lasn reports the legal event that “would not be understood for decades” - the Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad:

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886) was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with taxation of railroad properties. The case is most notable for what it did not hold, but was later misunderstood to have held–namely, that juristic persons are entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Lasn explains:

” In the post-World War II era, corporations continued to gain power. They merged, consolidated, restructured and metamorphosed into even larger and more complex units of resource extraction, production, distribution and marketing, to the point where many of them became economically more powerful that many countries. In 1997, fifty one of the World’s hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries. The top five hundred corporations controlled 42% of the World’s wealth. Today, corporations freely buy each other’s stocks and shares. They lobby legislators and bankroll elections. They manage our broadcast airwaves, set our industrial, economic and cultural agendas, and grow as big and powerful as they damn well please.”

Lasn continues:

“We, the people, have lost control. Corporations, these legal fictions that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more rights, freedoms and powers than we do. And we accept this as the normal state of affairs.”

So I read on, more and more certain that I know this stuff, deep in my innards, and then Lasn surprises me again. He quotes David Grossman’s book ‘On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society‘ and the incontrovertible link between TV violence and real-world crime:

“More than two hundred (scientific research) studies have identified a clear cut cause-and-effect relationship, and every credible agency from the American Medical Association to the Surgeon General’s Office to the United Nations has accepted this conclusion. Yes this news has somehow escaped most American parents (or parents elsewhere in the World)”

So much for evidence based social policy!

So Lasn says we have to take back our lives from these evil infotoxic meme wars, and in a new Media Carta, we have to become true Meme Warriors.

I’m in! How about you?

Read a preview of Supporters of Homeopathy here

Conventional medicine adherents have consistently asserted that its methods are scientifically verified, and they have ridiculed other methods that are suggested to have therapeutic or curative effects. In fact, conventional physicians have consistently worked to disallow competitors, even viciously attacking those in their own profession who have questioned conventional treatments or provided alternative modalities.

And yet, strangely enough, whatever has been in vogue in conventional medicine in one decade has been declared ineffective, dangerous, and sometimes barbaric in the ensuing decades. Surprisingly, despite this pattern in history, proponents and defenders of “scientific medicine” tend to have little or no humility, continually asserting that today’s cure is truly effective.

The good news about conventional medicine and one of its remarkable features for which it should be honored is its history of consistently and repeatedly disproving its own treatments. The fact that only a handful of conventional drugs have survived thirty or more years is strong testament to the fact that conventional medicine is honorable enough to acknowledge its mistakes.

Medical history uncovers an obvious pattern in the discovery and application of drug treatments. Initially, there is great excitement about a new drug’s discovery. Research has seemingly proven its safety and efficacy and leads to widespread appreciation for the drug’s ability to provide relief. Over time, there are minor concerns about the drug’s side effects, until more research and clinical practice uncover more serious concerns about its side effects.

Then, more research and clinical experience lead to more serious questions about the drug’s real safety and efficacy, until there is general acknowledgment that the drug doesn’t work as well as previously assumed, and there is recognition of an increasingly long list of serious side effects over time.

However, these problems are not really problems because a new drug emerges, with short-term research that suggests it is a better drug after all.

That is, until new research con- firms that it is neither as effective nor as safe as previously thought. And the cycle has continued like this for a century or more.

Like the fashion industry with its regular changes in style, the drug industry makes its profits on the newest drugs rather than on the older ones — and not just any profits, but sickeningly high profits.

In 2002, the combined profits ($35.9 billion) of the ten largest drug companies in the Fortune 500 were more than the combined profits ($33.7 billion) of the remaining 490 companies together (Angell, 2004, 11).1

The only reason these drug companies did not maintain this shocking financial advantage is that the oil companies’ profits have increased considerably with the Iraq War, thus raising the 490 non-drug companies’ profits slightly higher.

But then again, one would assume that the profits of 490 of the largest companies in the world would be substantially more than just ten companies in one commercial field.

This economic information is important, even essential, because learning how to separate the “science” of medicine from the business of medicine has never been more difficult.

The combined efforts of the drug companies and the medical profession, which together may be called the “medicalindustrial complex,” have been wonderfully effective in convincing consumers worldwide that modern medicine is the most scientific discipline that has ever existed.

Before discussing homeopathy, it is important, if not necessary, to raise basic questions about what “scientific”medicine is — and is not.

Physicians today rarely run drug companies. Instead, businessmen run them. It is, therefore, not surprising that Marcia Angell, MD, a Harvard professor of medicine and former editor of the famed New England Journal of Medicine, wrote:

Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. … Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the U.S. Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself. (Levi, 2006)

There is big big money to be made in drug sales, and brilliant marketing has led too many of us to ignore or excuse this bully side of medicine.

Yes, a gorilla is in the house, but anyone who refers to him as a gorilla is usually called a quack or a crank. This gorilla was not born yesterday; he has been growing for generations. A part of his self-defense propensities is to eliminate competing forces, whether the other side seeks cooperation or not.

Any competitive force is frequently and soundly attacked. The history of homeopathy shows this side of medicine, for from 1860 to the early twentieth century, the AMA had a consultation clause in its code of ethics that members were not allowed to consult with a medical doctor who practiced homeopathy and weren’t even allowed to treat a homeopath’s patients.

At a time in medical history when doctors bloodlet their patients to death and regularly prescribed mercury and various caustic agents to sick people, the only action that the AMA considered reprehensible and actionable was the “crime” of consulting with a homeopath.

In fact, the entire Medical Society of New York was kicked out of the AMA in 1881 simply because this state’s medical organization admitted into its membership any medical doctors who utilized homeopathic medicines, no matter what their academic credentials were. They only rejoined the AMA twenty-five years later (Walsh, 1907, 207).

This King Kong, however, is not a monster to everyone. In fact, this big gorilla is wonderfully generous to executives, to large sales and marketing forces, to supportive politicians , and to the media from whom he buys substantial amounts of advertising (and thus, an incredible amount of positive media coverage).

And this gorilla is wonderfully generous to stockholders. While it may seem inappropriate to criticize profits, it is important and appropriate to do so when profits are unbelievably excessive, when long-term efficacy hasn’t stood the test of time, and when common use of more than one drug at a time is rarely if ever scientifically tested for efficacy.

Although these observations just mentioned may seem harsh and offensive to some people, they are made with the concurrent acknowledgment that most of us know someone whose life was saved or at least whose health was significantly restored by conventional medical treatments. I myself am the son of a fabulous father who was a physician and insulin-dependent diabetic. In other words, I would not be alive today if it were not for some important conventional medical discoveries such as insulin.

We should not “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” nor do we want to ignore the bathwater in which we place our babies. Most of us also know someone whose health has been seriously hurt, or whose life was cut short, by modern medical treatments.

Drug companies defend their large profits by asserting that they spend tremendous amounts of money on research and development, but they tend to hide the fact that they spend approximately three times more money on marketing and administration.

And the obscenely high profits of the drug companies take into account all known expenses. Ultimately, drug companies are wonderfully creative in convincing us all that their drug treatments are “scientific,” and too many of us actually believe them.

It is therefore important to understand what is truly meant when drug companies and the media assert that drugs are “scientifically proven.”

How Scientific Is Modern Medicine?

Mahatma Gandhi was once asked by a reporter what he thought about Western civilization, and in light of the uncivilized treatment by the British government of his nonviolent actions, he immediately replied, “Western civilization? Yes, it is a good idea.” Likewise, if he were asked what he thought about “scientific medicine,” he would probably have replied in a similar manner.

The idea of scientific medicine is a great one, but is modern medicine truly, or even adequately, “scientific”?

Modern medicine uses the double-blind and placebo-controlled trial as the gold standard by which effectiveness of a treatment is determined. On the surface, this scientific method is very reasonable. However, serious problems in these studies are widely acknowledged by academics but remain unknown to the general public.

Fundamental questions about the meaning of the word “efficacy” are rarely, if ever, raised.

For instance, just because a drug treatment seems to eliminate a specific symptom doesn’t necessarily mean that it is “effective.”

In fact, getting rid of a specific symptom can be the bad news. Aspirin may lower your fever, but physiologists recognize that fever is an important defense of the body in its efforts to fight infection.

Painkilling drugs may eliminate the acute pain in the short term, but because these drugs do not influence the underlying cause of the discomfort, they do not really heal the person, and worse, they can lead to physical and psychological dependency, addiction, tolerance, and increased heart disease.

Sleep-inducing drugs may lead you to fall asleep, but they do not lead to refreshed sleep, and these drugs ultimately tend to aggravate the cycle of insomnia and fatigue.

Uncertainty remains for the long-term safety and efficacy of many modern drugs for common ailments, despite the high hopes and sincere expectations from the medical community and the rest of us for greater certainty.

The bottom line to scientific research is that a scientist can set up a study that shows the guise of efficacy. In other words, a drug may be effective for a very limited period of time and afterwards cause various serious symptoms.

For example, a very popular anti-anxiety drug called Xanax was shown to reduce panic attacks during a two-month experiment, but once the person tries to reduce or stop the medication, panic attacks can increase 300-400 percent (Consumer Reports , 1993). Would as many patients take this drug if they knew this fact, and based on what standard can anyone honestly say that this drug is “effective”?To get FDA approval to market a drug, most of the studies for psychiatric conditions last only six weeks (Angell, 2004, 112). In view of the fact that most people take anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medicines for many years, how can anyone consider these short-term studies scientifically valid?

What is so little known and so sobering is that research to date has found that placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs-with fewer side effects (Angell, 2004, 113).

Marcia Angell, MD, author of the powerful book The Truth about Drug Companies, said it plainly and directly:

Trials can be rigged in a dozen ways, and it happens all the time (Angell, 2004, 95).

Conventional drugs used today are so new that there is very little long term research on them. There are good reasons why the vast majority of modern drugs that were used just a couple of decades ago are not prescribed any more: They don’t work as well as previously assumed, and/or they cause more harm than good.

Sadly and strangely, physicians do not see that there is something fundamentally wrong with the present medical model. Instead, once an old drug is found to be ineffective or dangerous, doctors and drug companies simply assert the “scientifically proven” efficacy of a new drug.

Despite this recurrent pattern, doctors are prescribing drugs at record-breaking rates:

• • In 2005 the volume of prescription drugs sold in the U.S. was equal to 12.3 drugs for every man, woman, and child in that year alone (compared to 1994, when 7.9 prescription drugs per year were on average purchased by every American). (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2006)
  • According to a 2005 study, 44 percent of all Americans take at least one prescription drug and 17 percent take three or more prescription drugs (This number increased 40 percent between 1994 and 2000). (Medscape, 2005)

The extremely high numbers listed above are considerably higher if one adds in the over-the-counter drugs that doctors recommend or that patients take on their own.

When a patient takes more than one drug at a time, the research conducted on each of the drugs individually becomes virtually meaningless. Considering how many people take two or more drugs together raises serious doubts about the scientific ground on which physicians stand (except in those few instances when a multiple-drug protocol has been tested, as has occurred with some drugs in the treatment of people with AIDS).

One might hope that the American public would greatly benefit from receiving the “best” and certainly most expensive care that modern medicine has to offer.

However, this simply isn’t true.

In fact, the following statistics powerfully state the real limitations of what the “best”medical care provides:

• • According to 2006 data, the infant mortality rate in the United States was ranked twenty-first in the world, worse than South Korea and Greece and only slightly better than Poland.
  • Data from 2006 also showed that the life expectancy rate in the United States was ranked seventeenth in the world, tied with Cyprus and only slightly ahead of Albania. (InfoPlease, 2007)

One of the largest drug companies in the world is GlaxoSmithKline. It was therefore a bit shocking, but not surprising, when Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics, acknowledged that “The vast majority of drugs — more than 90 percent — only work in 30 percent or 50 percent of the people” (Connor, 2003). The public is not frequently given this degree of honesty.

Understanding and Rewriting History Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. - George Orwell, author of 1984

History provides us with a tremendously diverse body of evidence about our past, but ultimately, only a small portion of history is told in our history books. The interpretation of our past and the select use of certain historical facts and figures taint our understanding of what really happened.

Historians commonly remark that whichever country wins a war or whichever worldview dominates another, the history is told through that country’s perspective or that dominant point of view.

This is certainly true in the history of medicine.

For instance, medical historians commonly have portrayed conventional medical practice of the past as barbaric, dangerous, and old-fashioned, and yet they have asserted that today’s medical care is at the apex of “scientific medicine.”

The assertion that today’s medical care is “proven” is a consistently repeated mantra.

History also tends to portray those who lose a war and who represent a minority point of view as having less than positive attributes.

For instance, those physicians practicing medicine differently than the orthodox medical practice might be called cranks, crackpots, and quacks. Such name-calling is a wonderfully clever way to trivialize potentially valuable contributions, whether or not one understands what these contributions really are.

Besides name-calling, practitioners of the conventional and dominating paradigm often spin facts to make the strong and solid features of a minority practice into something strange and weird.

The fact that homeopaths use smaller doses than used in orthodox medicine has been portrayed as homeopathy using “wimpy” doses that theoretically could not have any physiological effect.

Accusations that homeopathic medicines could not possibly have any effect are made without knowledge, experience, or humility, and such accusations simply become evidence of the accuser’s unscientific attitude and his or her ignorance of the diverse body of basic scientific work on the effects of nanodoses of certain substances in specific situations.

The fact that homeopaths have used their medicines for more than 200 years is spun as evidence that this system of medicine has not “progressed.” Another interpretation here is that the same homeopathic medicines used 200 years ago are still used today, along with hundreds of new ones, primarily because the old ones still work.

The art of using homeopathic medicines is that they are not prescribed for a localized disease but for a syndrome or pattern of symptoms of which the localized disease is a part.

The fact that homeopaths interview a patient to discover his or her unique symptoms has been spun to make homeopathy seem like a quirky system that revels in inane facts about a patient. However, the detailed symptoms and characteristics of the patient that homeopaths collect may seem inane only to people who are not familiar with the unique and critical nature of these individualizing features of each person.

Homeopathy provides a sophisticated method by which a patient’s characteristics are applied to selecting and prescribing the most effective homeopathic medicine.

In light of the fact that history tends to be written by the victors, this writer predicts that history will soon be rewritten.

For more information on homeopathy, visit www.homeopathic.com. Purchase the book here.

When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it’s even WORSE than he feared.

Prince Charles has set up charity Bhumi Vardaan Foundation to address the plight of suicide farmers.

The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared their father’s body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.

As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India’s economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low. Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide.

Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years’ earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out.

There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on - they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless - as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting.

Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.

As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. ‘He was a loving and caring man,’ she said, weeping quietly.

‘But he couldn’t take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.’

Shankara’s crop had failed - twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India’s ancient story.

But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead. Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts - and no income.

So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.

The crisis, branded the ‘GM Genocide’ by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a ‘global moral question’ - and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.

Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian capital, Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by condemning ‘the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India, stemming… from the failure of many GM crop varieties’.

Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and prominent politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.

The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace ‘the future’ and follow suit.

So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the ’suicide belt’ in Maharashtra state.

What I found was deeply disturbing - and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.

For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.

Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.

Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and ‘agrarian distress’ that is the real reason for the horrific toll.

But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story. In one small village I visited, 18 farmers had committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands - only to kill themselves as well.

Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed - two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.

She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. ‘He cries when he thinks of his mother,’ said the dead woman’s aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.

Village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds.

The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds.

But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were ‘magic seeds’ - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.

Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks.

The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.

But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers’ lives have slid back into the dark ages.

Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years - up to 17 million acres - many famers have found there is a terrible price to be paid.

Far from being ‘magic seeds’, GM pest-proof ‘breeds’ of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.

Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.

With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off.

Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.

But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM seeds contain so- called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.

As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.

Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children.

As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a geneticallymodified plant created by Monsanto.

‘We are ruined now,’ said the dead man’s 38-year-old wife. ‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.’

Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. ‘He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,’ she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her home to pay their respects. ‘He was dead by the time they got to hospital.’

Asked if the dead man was a ‘drunkard’ or suffered from other ’social problems’, as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. ‘No! No!’ one of the dead man’s brothers exclaimed. ‘Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes.

‘He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.’

Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a ‘factor in this tragedy’. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as ‘untimely rain’ or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.

Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds  -  no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.

During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three ‘independent’ surveyors scouring villages for information about suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more expensive - and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent.

(A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is ‘only double’ the price of ‘official’ non-GM seed - but admitted that the difference can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by ‘unscrupulous’ merchants, who often also sell ‘fake’ GM seeds which are prone to disease.)

With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. ‘We just want to escape from our problems,’ one said. ‘We just want help to stop any more of us dying.’

Prince Charles is so distressed by the plight of the suicide farmers that he is setting up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help those affected and promote organic Indian crops instead of GM.

India’s farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant costs of GM seeds.

This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. ‘I told him that we can survive,’ his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell. ‘I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.’

But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way of paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children’s schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country.

Cruelly, it’s the young who are suffering most from the ‘GM Genocide’  -  the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these ‘magic seeds’.

Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.

As the NHS celebrates its 60th anniversary, it should be remembered that the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital has been part of the service since day one.

Please support the RLHH by completing this form.

As a centre of excellence in homeopathy and CAM therapies, the RLHH treats patients from all over the country seeking an answer to their health problems.

Many have long standing conditions which have not responded to conventional treatment but at the RLHH they find help, understanding and support which enables them to improve their health and regain a worthwhile quality of life.

The record of this hospital is second to none and yet its very existence is threatened.

It is clear that there is a small group of medical professionals, untrained in homeopathy, who appear to believe that they know better than the millions who have experienced the benefits of homeopathy and know better than the qualified medical professionals who have trained in homeopathy and now work at the hospital and the patients’ own GP who refers them.

In pursuit of their interests, this group which is funded largely by outside commercial interests have twice written to Primary Care Trusts urging them not to use public money to pay for homeopathic treatment.

By this means they are willing to destroy the economy of selected homeopathic hospitals, to deprive NHS patients of their rightful choice of a treatment option that has been part of the NHS since 1948 when it was set up by agreement with the Government of the day, and to agitate against the principle of choice that is clearly stated current Government policy.

Treatment at the hospital is very cost effective to the NHS.

There is an outcry against the resulting cuts in patient referrals and patients are mobilising and forming groups to protest and campaign against the sudden cessation of their treatment.

Please support the RLHH by completing this form.

From a A Personal Decision by Alan V. Schmukler: The question of whether to vaccinate is a personal and often difficult decision. One has to weigh the danger of the disease and the chance of contracting it, against the dangers of the vaccine.

Neither side in the debate can guarantee 100% protection.

On the one hand, a vaccine might protect you from a disease you were going to get and maybe die of. Benjamin Franklin opposed variolation (smallpox vaccination) and his unvaccinated son died of smallpox. He subsequently changed his mind and expressed regret for his former position.

On the other hand, vaccines have been associated with everything from autism, retardation and immune suppression to death. In the U.S., the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (U.S.) has paid out over a billion dollars to parents of children injured by vaccines.

Vaccine manufacturers, while insisting on the safety of their product, have steadfastly demanded immunity from lawsuit.

So how does one make this decision?

The answer is, by becoming knowledgeable about all aspects of this debate, including alternatives to vaccination.

Homeopathy has for many years been used to prevent illness (homeoprophylaxis).

Samuel Hahnemann used Belladonna successfully to prevent scarlet fever.

During a smallpox outbreak in Iowa, 1902, the homeopathic remedy Variolinum proved 97% effective in preventing the disease.

Thousands of people in Buenos Aires received the remedy Lathyrus sativa during a 1957 polio outbreak. Not a single case of polio developed in those so treated.

In 1974, 18,640 children in Brazil were given Meningococcinum to prevent meningococcal meningitis. The protection rate was 97 %.

… While there is some debate about the mechanism of homeoprophylaxis, it clearly works.

Homeopaths also use constitutional treatment as an effective alternative to vaccination.

Aside from prevention, childhood diseases like measles can be treated easily and safely with homeopathy, which also helps prevent the sequelae.

Having said all this, there are still many people who don’t know about homeopathy or have any practical access to homeopathic treatment.

The first vaccine was developed by Edward Jenner (1796) who used cowpox to prevent smallpox. Pasteur developed a post- bite inoculation for rabies in 1885. While these first vaccines were rather simple, today’s vaccines contain many excipients that are highly toxic and can cause more harm than the diseases they are intended to prevent. These ingredients include Mercury, Aluminum, Formaldehyde, Phenol, MSG, Monkey kidney tissue, Chick embryonic fibroblasts etc. ….

The production of vaccines is a multi billion dollar business, where the bottom line of profits often conflicts with the desire to do good.

Consider the issue of Thimerosal, the mercury added to preserve shelf life. In the U.S., government hearings determined that it was harmful and forbade it to be added to any future vaccines (after years of doing damage).

However they permitted vaccine manufacturers to continue selling their stockpiled Thimerosal laden vaccines, a supply which some estimate will last over a decade.

From Some history of the treatment of epidemics with Homeopathy by  Julian Winston:

From its earliest days, homeopathy has been able to treat epidemic diseases with a substantial rate of success, when compared to conventional treatments.  It was these successes that placed the practice of homeopathy so firmly in the consciousness of people world-wide.

There is a story told about Joseph Pulte, one of the earliest homeopaths in Cincinnati.  When he began his practice, many people were so angered by a homeopath being in town that they pelted the house with eggs.  He was becoming discouraged enough to think of leaving.  His wife said, “Joseph, do you believe in the truth of homeopathy?” He replied in the affirmative.  “Then,” she said, “you will stay in Cincinnati.”

Shortly after, when the Cholera epidemic swept through, Pulte was able to boast of not having lost a single patient– and he was accepted into the community.  In the Epidemic of 1849, people crowded to his door and stood in the street because the waiting room was full.

In 1900, Thomas Lindsley Bradford, MD, wrote a book called “The Logic of Figures” in which he collected the statistics he could find that would compare the conventional therapeutics with homeopathic ones. Many of the figures cited below are derived from Bradford’s work.

One of the earliest tests of the homeopathic system was in the treatment of Typhus Fever (spread by lice) in an 1813 epidemic which followed the devastation of Napoleon’s army marching through Germany to attack Russia, followed by their retreat.  When the epidemic came through Leipzig as the army pulled back from the east, Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, was able to treat 180 cases of Typhus– losing but two.  This, at a time when the conventional treatments were having a mortality rate of over 30%.

In 1830 as the cholera epidemic was reported coming from the east, Hahnemann was able to identify the stages of the illness, and predict what remedies would be needed for which stages.

When Cholera finally struck Europe in 1831 the mortality rate (under conventional treatment) was between 40% (Imperial Council of Russia) to 80% (Osler’s Practice of Medicine).  Out of five people who contracted Cholera, two to four of them died under regular treatment.

Dr. Quin, in London, reported the mortality in the ten homeopathic hospitals in 1831-32 as 9%; Dr. Roth, physician to the king of Bavaria, reported that under homeopathic care the mortality was 7%; Admiral Mordoinow of the Imperial Russian Council reported 10% mortality under homeopathy; and Dr. Wild, Allopathic editor of Dublin Quarterly Journal, reported in Austria, the Allopathic mortality was 66% and the homeopathic mortality was 33% “and on account of this extraordinary result, the law interdicting the practice of Homeopathy in Austria was repealed”.

Homeopathy continued to be effective in the treatment of Epidemic Cholera.  In 1854 a Cholera Epidemic struck London.  This was a historically important epidemic in that it was the first time the medical community was able to trace the outbreak to a source (a public water pump), and when the pump was closed, the epidemic soon ceased.

The House of Commons asked for a report about the various methods of treating the epidemic.  When the report was issued, the homeopathic figures were not included.  The House of Lords asked for an explanation, and it was admitted that if the homeopathic figures were to be included in the report, it would “skew the results”. The suppressed report revealed that under allopathic care the mortality was 59.2% while under homeopathic care the mortality was only 9%.

It is hard today to comprehend what kind of scourge such an epidemic was.  As was seen in the later Flu Epidemic of 1918, one could be healthy in the morning and be dead by evening– it moved that rapidly. Many books were written about the Homeopathic treatment of Cholera during these times, among them: Cholera and its Homeopathic treatment, F.  Humphreys (1849); Homeopathic Treatment of Cholera, B.F.  Joslin (1854); Homeopathic Domestic Treatment of Cholera, Biegler (1858); Epidemic Cholera, B.  F.  Joslin (1885); Asiatic Cholera, Jabez Dake (1886).

The success of homeopathic treatment continued with the later cholera epidemics.  In the Hamburg epidemic of 1892, allopathic mortality was 42%, homeopathic mortality was 15.5% During the 1850s, there were several epidemics of Yellow Fever in the southern states.

This disease was eventually found to be transmitted by mosquito.  Osler says that the allopathic mortality from Yellow Fever is between 15-85%.  Holcome, a homeopath, reported in 1853 a mortality of 6.43% in Natchez, and Dr. Davis, another homeopath in Natchez, reported 5.73%.  In 1878 the mortality in New Orleans was 50% under allopathic care, and 5.6% (in 1,945 cases in the same epidemic) with homeopathic care.

The two best books on this topic were: Yellow Fever and its Homeopathic Treatment, Holcome, (1856) and The Efficacy of Crotalus Horridus in Yellow Fever, C.  Neidhard, (1860).

Another epidemic disease which was treatable with homeopathy was Diphtheria.  Since the advent of widespread vaccination, it is a disease not often seen in our modern world.  Diphtheria appeared periodically, and rarely had the same presentation.

It was, therefore, very important for the practitioner to individualize the treatment in each specific case or generalized epidemic.  A remedy which had been effective in treating it one year might not be the same remedy needed the next year.

In the records of three years of Diphtheria in Broome County, NY from 1862 to 1864, there was a report of an 83.6% mortality rate among the allopaths and a 16.4% mortality rate among the Homeopaths. (Bradford)

Perhaps the most recent use of homeopathy in a major epidemic was during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918.  The Journal of the American Institute for Homeopathy, May, 1921, had a long article about the use of homeopathy in the flu epidemic.

Dr. T A McCann, from Dayton, Ohio, reported that 24,000 cases of flu treated allopathically had a mortality rate of 28.2% while 26,000 cases of flu treated homeopathically had a mortality rate of 1.05%.

This last figure was supported by Dean W.A. Pearson of Philadelphia (Hahnemann College) who collected 26,795 cases of flu treated with homeopathy with the above result.

The most common remedy used was Gelsemium, with occasional cases needing Bryonia and Eupatorium reported. Dr.  Herbert A. Roberts from Derby, CT, said that 30 physicians in Connecticut responded to his request for data. They reported 6,602 cases with 55 deaths, which is less than 1%.

Dr. Roberts was working as a physician on a troop ship during WWI. He had 81 cases of flu on the way over to Europe. He reported, “All recovered and were landed. Every man received homeopathic treatment. One ship lost 31 on the way.”

Closer to our present time, there were the Polio epidemics in the mid-1950s.  Dr. Alonzo Shadman, a homeopath in the Boston area, emphasized that until *actual paralysis* was observed, it was hard to distinguish the prodromal symptoms of Polio from those of the common cold– and he treated many “summer colds” during the time.  Were they incipient polio? No one can tell.

Dr. Francisco Eizayaga or Argentina, tells of a polio epidemic in Buenos Aires in 1957, where the symptoms of the epidemic resembled those of the remedy Lathyrus sativa. The homeopathic doctors and pharmacies prescribed Lathyrus 30c as a prophylactic, and “thousands of doses” were distributed. “Nobody registered a case of contagion.” Eizayaga points out that in other epidemics of polio, Gelsemium was the indicated remedy– emphasizing, again, the need for individualization.

Homeopathy has been very effective in treating many of the epidemics during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Why the successes are not better known is a subject for conjecture. It could be that, like the physician quoted below, most would rather not see the ineffectiveness of the conventional therapeutics nor accept the efficacy of homeopathy.

From “Homeopathy In Influenza-A Chorus Of Fifty In Harmony” by W.  A. Dewey, MD (Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, May 1921):

“One physician in a Pittsburgh hospital asked a nurse if she knew anything better than what he was doing, because he was losing many cases.

“Yes, Doctor, stop aspirin and go down to a homeopathic pharmacy, and get homeopathic remedies”.

The Doctor replied: “But that is homeopathy.” “I know it, but the homeopathic doctors for whom I have nursed have not lost a single case.”–W.  F.  Edmundson, MD, Pittsburgh.

See Julian Winston’s own website here

This website is about the plants and fungi used in homeopathic remedies. A searchable database details hundreds of plants and fungi as well as lichens, brown and red algae.

The homeopathy database is a standard reference system for homeopathic practitioners, and other users of plant remedies. It reconciles the old homeopathic codes with the current botanical code.

The information is based on long established remedies in the Homeopathic Materiae Medicae that are now revised and updated and the online access means it can be maintained and updated easily in line with current concepts of botanical nomenclature.

What’s included

The remedies used in homeopathy are mostly derived from angiosperms (flowering plants), though some conifers and ferns as well as fungi, including lichens, brown and red algae are also used.

Other homeopathic remedies derive from animals and minerals, but these are not considered here.

History of naming species

Homeopathic remedies have accumulated gradually over the past 200 years. During this time, the plants and fungi in the various Homeopathic Materiae Medicae have received a variety of epithets, although these are mostly Latin names.

Often, the naming of these plant remedies has not followed any recognised botanical or medical code and, despite having some resemblance to the modern botanical system, nearly half of these names needed updating with respect to the current International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN; Greuter et al., 2000; McNeill et al., 2006).

In response to this problem, of outdated and often inaccurate nomenclature, a new checklist was prepared (Bharatan et al., 2002; Bharatan and Humphries, 2002).

This checklist together with the online searchable database can be updated in line with the revisions of the Botanical Code that take place every 6 years.