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Alternative therapies under attack
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Homeopathy and alternative medical treatments are under attack by the news media again. Homeopathy has been unjustly blamed for the death of a child in Australia and the Native American beliefs of the Nemenhah Band. These attacks are incorrectly directed at the treatments sought rather than what the parents were seeking to achieve for their families. No parent wants to see their child suffer and no parent wants to feel like they are the one inflicting the amount of suffering induced by treatments like chemotherapy for cancer or the latest in immunotherapy for neuroblastomas.
It’s difficult to stand by and watch the way traditional medicine impacts a body and mind and our youngest family members it’s hard to tell sometimes who is being the hardest hit. There is no morphine drip for the parent sitting at the bedside of a child who just came through surgery. The news media has not painted these parents in a good light at all, they call them child abusers or worse, muderers. What they are are parents who are scared and uninformed on all their options and need someone to understand and help them not make them pariahs. What the news media also fails to mention are important things like facts about alternative medicine treatments; they choose to cast the light of 17th century Salem witch hunts on the practices like homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, et al.
Homeopathy has no history of death from iatrogenic causes (in layman’s terms death caused by medical mistakes). The parents in Australia who sought treatment for their daughter’s eczema and shunned the suppressive therapies favored by allopaths. The eczema was not improving and the parents did not seek treatment from an allopath to work in a complementary way with their favored homeopathic treatment, this is the real question, why didn’t the homeopath advise the parents down this route or why didn’t the parents at least seek the advice of another homeopath? Homeopathy did not cause this child’s septicemia and it is poor journalistic integrity to say outright in the headlines that “Homeopathy Kills.”
All families should be encouraged to seek the kind of treatment they want for their family but when illness carries the threat of becoming severe it should be the job of the medical community, comprising allopaths and alternative practitioners together, to work for the greater good and provide complementary care to see the families as a whole through the trying times of treating an illness. A homeopath can provide treatment for the ill member of the family and provide support for any adverse side effects that may arise, like the vomiting and pains associated with chemotherapy, but also provide a remedy that can help with the mental and emotional issues the family may experience. Homeopathy can provide help for the whole family where allopathy falls down failing to recongize the impacts of illness.
