Imagine a worker installing a solar panel on someone’s house has fallen and been badly injured. Now a front-page newspaper article appears condemning Solar Energy as terrifyingly dangerous. Then, to rub in the point a few days later, another article appears warning people not to “buy into the promise of solar energy.” Something exactly like this has just happened in regard to homeopathy. Hmm. Do you suppose a newspaper can have been duped by big Pharm?
Feb 21,2017, front-page news on the Boston Globe: Homeopathic remedies harmed hundreds of babies, families say, as FDA investigated for years. By Sheila Kaplan @bySheilaKaplan
About time someone did something about that terrifying medicine homeopathy, right? But get this, homeopathy is not only dangerous, it can’t possibly work! How nefarious is that?
Let’s hear it for fear and hysteria, shock, awe and handwringing! Oh, just in case you didn’t get the message, a few days later, another caution: “Don’t Buy into the Promise”
The Globe lacks a Science editor and so a team of four huddled together before resolving to put Sheila Kaplan’s article on the front page. I called up one of those deciders, editor Chris Chenlund to ask when the Globe had retired its famous Spotlight investigations as there were so many interesting gaps in Kaplan’s story. I followed that up with a letter to Chris Chenlund, excerpts from which are below. If you smell something rotten as I do, then let the Globe know too.
Hi Chris,
We talked on the phone about the front-page placement of a frightening, homeopathy-related article. Now in fairness and in the interest of education I am asking you to provide the public with basic and easily fact-checkable truths about homeopathy such as this:
- Homeopathy is a licensed medical specialty in Nevada, Arizona and Connecticut. Nevada in fact has its own Homeopathic Medical Board of Overseers (on a par with the conventional medicine board). Many other states allow the practice as a matter of health care freedom.
- Homeopathic products are so dilute the originating substance is no longer detectable by any laboratory test. Yet the remedies work (in a way that Nobel Prize winning virologists now can explain; se Luc de Montagnier’s work).
- In many civilized countries around the world homeopathic medical practice is restricted to only the most highly trained physicians. (How do you suppose this possible if homeopathy is unproven and unscientific?)
- There is a reason why highly diluted substances work medically that is rarely explained. It has to do with the fact that in classical practice a remedy is not randomly prescribed or purchased as in over-the-counter products (that though less effective are very safe). The Globe’s vaunted Spotlight antennae should have sprung to life given the impossibility of a true homeopathic causing a problem to an otherwise healthy child. The possibility that a shock and awe story has been concocted or that sabotage of some sort has occurred would have to be considered.
- A classical homeopathic remedy is prescribed only when the practitioner or physician has accurately determined a state of “likeness” mirroring the toxic effect of a substance. In the diagnostic matching game, a DILUTE version of the matching substance given to the client then and only then has the power to unlock a healing response. For this reason classically prescribed homeopathics possess the status of a DRUG when prescribed in accordance with the Law of Similars but not otherwise. That’s been official FDA doctrine since at least 1938.
- An important service attends letting the public in on these “secret” facts. Unwillingness puts the public at risk of hysteria with regard homeopathy as a whole, as when either as the result either of concocted shock and awe stories, or industrial sabotage a well-founded and safe medical practice and its products are smeared. Consider a parallel where a worker is injured, falling off a roof while installing a solar panel. Consequently, the mission and industry of renewal solar energy is attacked as dangerous.
- Here is a challenge to the Globe’s integrity that I frankly expect the newspaper will decline. Innocuous as my article suggestion is, higher ups controlled by Big Pharm interests will likely squelch the information. Please prove me wrong.
Best regards,
Jerry Kantor, Lic. Ac., CCH, Instructor Harvard Medical School