What can you do about it with homeopathic medicines?

At first blush, it seems odd to talk about homeopathic medicines and any medicines to treat exposures to environmental poisons. It is of far greater importance to do all that is feasibly possible to prevent such exposures. Without dealing with the underlying problem, any treatment method is akin to bailing out water from an overflowing tub...without first turning off the faucet.

Although prevention is the best medicine to deal with environmental health issues, it is important to also ask what can be done to treat people who have already been exposed. While conventional medicine tends to offer little for such conditions other than palliative or suppressive treatment of the various symptoms that manifest, homeopathic medicine offers some potentially valuable and even potentially vital therapeutic benefits.

Before discussing any specifics about the treatment that a homeopath would provide, it is useful to be reminded of some basic principles of homeopathy in order to understand why homeopathic treatment makes sense.

The Logic of Homeopathy
The underlying premise of homeopathic medicine is that symptoms are not simply something "wrong" with the person, but that symptoms represent adaptive and defensive efforts of the body to deal with infectious disease, environmental poisons, and/or stress. Symptoms are not just the body surrendering to attack but are the body trying to defend and heal itself. Because homeopathic medicines are individually chosen based on their ability to cause in experimental situations the similar symptoms that the sick person is experiencing, these medicines actually work with, not against, the body's inherent defenses. Treating "like to cure like," called the principle of similars, is the basis of homeopathic medicine, and it is the pharmacological principle behind the old folklore of using the hair of the dog that bit you to heal you of rabies.

BR> to environmental poisons makes sense because such treatment mimics and augments the body's natural defenses. In addition to 200 years of clinical experience, there is also now a body of scientific evidence to support of use of homeopathic medicines to treat these conditions.

Homeopathic Research*
In 1994, German physician and researcher Klaus Linde in collaboration with Wayne B. Jonas, MD, head of the Office of Alternative Medicine within the National Institutes of Health, performed a meta-analysis of research on the use of homeopathic medicines to treat exposure to environmental toxins (a meta-analysis is a comprehensive and systematic review of a body of research on a specific topic). They published their results in the internationally respected journal, Human and Experimental Toxicology [13 (1994):481-92].

Linde, Jonas, and colleagues discovered over 100 studies evaluating the prophylactic and therapeutic effects of homeopathic doses of normally toxic substances. Besides evaluating the results of the various studies, the researchers evaluated how well each study was designed and conducted. As is common in such reviews, there are inevitably some high quality studies and some low quality studies.

The researchers found that there were 40 high quality studies, of which 27 showed positive results from homeopathic doses (there were 50% more positive results than negative results).