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Part 1: What is Homeopathy?
RICHARD HAKE: This is Richard Hake and welcome to
our Webcast. More and more people across the world are turning to
alternative medicine to treat what ails them. Many of these procedures
and approaches have been criticized by the conventional medical community.
But in recent years, more and more doctors have been practicing
what is known as homeopathy. Homeopathy is a 2000-year old practice
that involves the idea that what causes the disease may also cure it.
Joining me for our Webcast are two doctors who practice homeopathy.
We will discuss the history and theory of this practice.
Sitting next to me is Dr. Ronald Dushkin, who is in private
practice here in New York City. He specializes in this treatment
for children and adults. And joining us by phone is Dr. Harold Ofgang,
who practices and teaches homeopathic medicine in Danbury, Connecticut.
Thank you for joining us, Dr. Ofgang.
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Thank you for having us.
RICHARD HAKE: Dr. Dushkin, let's start with you
and by talking about the history of homeopathy. It came about sometime
in the 1700's with a German scientist who actually was trying to find an
alternative to the not so gentle approach of leeching and blooding -- bleeding?
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: Right, right. Dr. Segley
Hanniman (?) is the founder of homeopathy in the late 1700's. He was a
German doctor who became very dissatisfied with the actual treatments that
were being used at the time, as you mentioned, bloodletting, toxic metals,
heavy cathartics.
So he did something very courageous. He decided
to stop practicing medicine, because he found that it was too dangerous
for his patients. Instead, to support his family, he began translating
medical texts from one language to the other. He was a very learned
man. He was a chemist, and he spoke many different languages.
In the course of translating one particular text from
English to German, he described why a particular bark worked in the treatment
of malaria. Hanniman's thought this treatment was preposterous, and couldn't
possibly be true.
So he did something very unusual. He decided to
take some of the bark himself. And shortly afterwards, he came down
with the symptoms of malaria. It began a whole chronicle of series
of events that made him look at something more holistic.
RICHARD HAKE: Now, he's actually pretty famous for
this bark experiment and also he is credited, I believe, for treating,
or experimenting on humans for the first time.
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: He's given credit in medical
history as being the first person to actually do systemic drug research
on people, not rats or other laboratory animals. And Hanniman Medical
School in Philadelphia is named after him. It used to be a homeopathic
hospital and medical school.
RICHARD HAKE: Dr. Ofgang, let's turn to you now.
This technique, this approach to medicine has been around for quite some
time. Why didn't it catch on so well and why is it still criticized?
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Well, interestingly enough, even
when Samuel (?) Hanniman first more or less discovered it -- he feels he
discovered it rather than invented it -- it didn't immediately catch on
either because basically scientists, conventional physicians and so on
tend to be very, very conservative. I don't want to say closed minded.
Anything new takes quite a long time to catch on and I
believe that homeopathy, though it's been around for several hundred years
- there's a statue of Samuel Hanniman in Washington, D.C. in a little park
that honors him – it was Hanniman who brought medicine out of the dark
ages.
Even though homeopathy existed for, as I said, hundreds
of years -- I believe in the 1930's, approximately 30 percent of medical
schools in America were homeopathic medical schools and hospitals -- it
is still something that is not well understood by conventional or allopathic
physicians, and it is also something that is perhaps a little bit difficult
to understand for a lot of scientists. This is because you're dealing with
very, very small dilutions and you're using medicines that are totally
nontoxic. They are very, very effective, and very safe. And it's
just very different from conventional medicine. The whole theory
is very different.
So I think that the reason it didn't catch on, even when
Dr. Hanniman first started it, was because of the different nature and
the fact that conventional science and conventional medicine is very, very
slow to change.
RICHARD HAKE: Dr. Dushkin, Dr. Ofgang touched on
something that I think homeopathy is known for. It's taking a substance
and diluting it in water. Can you go into that a bit?
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: Yeah, it's a little more than
just that. Because if you just took something and diluted it in water,
you'd end up with nothing. So homeopathy goes significantly beyond
that. And I think as Dr. Ofgang was mentioning, it's a way of thinking
about a human being and about the healing process that goes way beyond
conventional medicine.
It's understanding Hanniman's basic belief that there
was something which he called a vital force. In Chinese medicine
it would be called chi, in yoga it would be called prana, in religion,
it might be called spirit, but everything in nature has this vital force.
So when diluting a substance, Hanniman would also do what
he called secussion (?) or in modern day we call shaking. He would
shake the dilution a certain number of times and then repeat the dilution.
So it's not just diluting it, it's shaking and diluting. And the
theory is that in that shaking, the actual vital force, the healing vibration
of that substance gets transmitted into the next series of dilutions.
So we're working with what's often called energy medicine
and it's this particular approach that goes beyond conventional Western
medicine. People say, well, this can't work and therefore it doesn't.
However there was an article in the Lancet medical journal a few years
ago. It was reviewing some of the research on homeopathy. It
was showing, in fact, quite clearly that it was effective.
And the author -- or the editor said we have two possibilities
here. We can say we don't understand, therefore it can't work, or
we can say it works but we don't know yet how it works, which is a much
more open attitude and which is prevalent in most of the world but in the
United States, people are still pretty resistant to it.
RICHARD HAKE: Dr. Ofgang, is there, I mean, scientific
proof that these techniques work?
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: There's a lots of scientific
proof. In fact I remember the article that you're referring to, and
in the article, they said further that they either have to accept that
homeopathy did work or in fact somehow come to the belief that all the
experimentation that modern medicine as we know it is based on is incorrect
and therefore none of the principles of modern medicine could be believed.
So in fact, the conclusion really of that article and
many others in recent times has been that homeopathy clearly and scientifically
has been proven to work and in fact, even though some of the experiments
have not been duplicated and, in fact, many would not stand up to scrutiny
by today's standards, there are so many studies over hundreds of years,
and they're all done on humans, no animal studies, all human trials, the
vast majority of the evidence suggests -- scientific evidence suggests
that homeopathy indeed has proved its worth.
And countless clinical trials have also shown that homeopathy
works. So you have both provings or testings on only human subjects
and hundreds of years of clinical trials, countless pages of notes and
observations, proving that homeopathy does indeed work.
RICHARD HAKE: And is it safe to experiment on humans
with this? I mean --
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: It's completely safe. One
of the beauties of homeopathic medicine, and in fact the main reason that
Hanniman started to practice homeopathy was because he felt that in those
days medicine was harmful. You can just imagine how harmful he would
feel medicine could potentially be today.
So, he decided to -- when he started working on homeopathy,
he started diluting the substances that he found to be curative but what
he found was that in order to get them to the point that they were not
only curative but did not produce an aggravation -- in other words, to
get them to the point that they were very safe, he found he was diluting
them to the point where they were not efficacious.
That's where the secussion came in, and thus through the
secussion and the dilution, he could make them dilute enough so that they
were completely safe, completely nontoxic and caused either no or very
minor aggravations and yet were amazingly efficacious. They produced
amazing cures without causing any side effects or being harmful in any
way.
RICHARD HAKE: And Dr. Dushkin, another big criticism
in the medical community of homeopathy is that --
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: One of many. [LAUGHS]
RICHARD HAKE: One of many, one of the big ones is
that since you're diluting the substance so much that many consider it
just to be a placebo.
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: Of course, if you look at it
a certain way, it's logical you would come to that conclusion. As
I said earlier, is that if you're just diluting it, that, in fact, is true.
But the principle of diluting and secussion brings into the energetic,
or -- Hanniman called the vital force of the original substance into the
liquid it's being diluted in. So we're working with a healing vibration,
a healing energy, rather than just a diluted substance.
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Also, if I might add, the first
time that I originally many years ago, about 20 years ago, heard the discussion
brought up about the possibility of placebo and from a [INAUDIBLE] called
Dr. Bill Grey (?) who helped bring homeopathy -- helped train a lot of
homeopathic physicians in America. He studied with George Desulcus
(?) who I also worked with for many years and -- through the [INAUDIBLE]
school of homeopathy.
But Dr. Grey was giving a lecture at a medical school
and someone asked him the exact same question, a student or a resident.
And his reply was that, of course, it wasn't placebo and they knew that
because they treated infants, they treated -- there are homeopathic veterinarians
and so on. So really it couldn't be placebo, and there were clinical
trials proving that it worked.
But he said even if it was placebo, wouldn't it be better
to start with a remedy that is nontoxic, causes no harmful side effects,
is very, very gentle and very effective and try that first, since we see
that it works. He asked the medical students why wouldn't you consider
trying something that is so efficacious, so nontoxic, first? And
there was no response.
So we know that it's not placebo, however, I would ask
the same question. Even if conventional medicine suspects that it
might be placebo, why not use that first?
RICHARD HAKE: You agree?
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: Well, absolutely. And
it's so clear that it's not placebo. I mean, when you see little
babies who don't have any idea about placebo and you see animals respond,
it's clearly not placebo.
RICHARD HAKE: Let's talk more about the theory --
I mean, you're dealing not only with the symptoms of a patient, but the
entire body, their whole being when dealing with homeopathy, right?
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: Well, we're looking at the
whole person. That's one of the things that also makes homeopathy
unique, is that someone might come in, as most patients do, that come in
to see me and Dr. Ofgang and other homeopathic practitioners wanting a
particular symptom to go away. That's why people go see doctors.
And both of us being doctors, you know, we look at that
particular symptom but we look at it in a much broader perspective, and
our goal here is to look at the person in addition to just that particular
symptom. Who is this person in this office right now?
Because are very different. You know, some people
are morning people, some people are night people, some people are winter
people, some people are summer people. That's, you know, a very minor
obvious things. So the goal here is to look at who is this person
who has this particular symptom, so we end up treating that person, not
just that symptom.
When I practiced conventional medicine and the way I was
trained, people would walk in, tell your symptom, you'd run some tests.
And then every person who walked in got the exact same treatment because
they had a symptom, a diagnosis.
In homeopathy, five people can walk in with the same presenting
symptom and get five different homeopathic medicines because who they are
in their totality can be very individualized.
RICHARD HAKE: Dr. Ofgang, do you agree, I mean,
is that how you -- your approach to your patients?
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Absolutely. Homeopathy
is, in essence, not exactly treating a disease, it is essentially stimulating
the vital force, or nowadays we call it the defense mechanism, of the individual
patient.
For example, if some of the symptoms improve that someone
comes in with but they, the patient themselves, feels worse, their energy
declines, they become more depressed, then a classical homeopath would
not feel good about the treatment whereas an allopathic physician would
be happy to just see the rash go away. So --
RICHARD HAKE: And let me just interrupt for one
second. An allopathic physician is what we would consider conventional.
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Conventional, right, as opposed
to homeopathic physician. But essentially, homeopathic physician
wants to see not only -- of course we want the symptoms to improve and
most of the time they do, and they do very quickly and without any, as
I said before, any toxicity, any side effects in most cases.
But we want to see the whole person improve as well.
We want to -- we are, in effect, treating the whole person, and the way
homeopathy really works, the only way it can work, is through the dilution
and secussion the remedies themselves tend to stimulate the individual's
defense mechanisms in much the same way, though it's very, very different,
but it's analogous to a vaccine in a sense, where the vaccine is stimulating
the person's immune system.
The vaccine is much more harsh, it's much more -- it is
a material dose so it's attenuated or sometimes dead vaccine. But
basically with homeopathy the diluted and secussed remedies try to do a
similar thing with the vital force or the defense mechanism of the patient.
What it tries to do is strengthen that defense mechanism,
strengthen the vital force. And so when the symptoms are cured, when
the disease is cured, the patient, by the very nature of homeopathy, the
whole patient has to feel better. Their energy has to improve, their
mental emotional state also has to improve.
And so it's very gratifying over the years to see patients
come in with any number of illnesses, you know, psoriasis, asthma, arthritis,
what have you, and see not only the symptoms that they came in for to be
-- see them cured but also to see the patient improve in vitality, improve
in their mental and emotional outlook.
And that is another -- and that's one of the major differences
between homeopathic and allopathic medicines, is that homeopathy does indeed
expect and look at the whole person and expect the whole person to improve,
expect that the person's health to improve mentally, emotionally and physically.
RICHARD HAKE: And Dr. Dushkin, to wrap it up, what
do you see is the future for this practice? I mean, are more people
accepting it? What's going on with research as well?
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: Well, it's definitely growing,
but mentioning research, the National Institute of Health in 1992 formed
an office of alternative medicine in which they are actually funding research
and homeopathy's one of the areas in which they're actually funding research.
So it's definitely growing. As more and more people
become conscious in this country about wanting to use natural medicine.
Homeopathy is popular all over the world. In fact, in England there
are even homeopathic hospitals. So in this country, it's growing
tremendously.
And I just treated a patient recently who happens to be
a doctor and was so impressed by her own overall improvement she's now
beginning to study homeopathy. So it's definitely [INAUDIBLE], there's
no question about that.
RICHARD HAKE: And Dr. Ofgang, final thoughts?
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Well, I'll just -- there's a
number of people that use homeopathy that I can quote, but let me quote
Mahatma Gandhi who said that homeopathy cured a larger percentage of patients
than any other method or treatment, and it's beyond all doubt safer and
more economical and the most complete medical science.
RICHARD HAKE: Okay. Dr. Harold Ofgang practices
and teaches in Danbury, Connecticut. Thank you for joining us.
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Thank you.
RICHARD HAKE: And thank you, Dr. Ronald Dushkin,
who's in private practice in New York City. And thank you for joining
us as well. I'm Richard Hake.
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