Homeopathic Medicine

A friend of mine recently posted to his facebook: "Can someone explain to me how people still believe in Homeopathy? I mean, if Homeopathy is right, everything we know about chemistry isn't."

An interesting point. I was about to get all up in arms about how homeopathic medicine is fantastic, but fortunately another commenter did that for me, then went to wikipedia and looked up homeopathy, only to discover that it is: "a form of alternative medicine in which practitioners treat patients using highly diluted preparations that are believed to cause healthy people to exhibit symptoms that are similar to those exhibited by the patient. The collective weight of scientific evidence has found homeopathy to be no more effective than a placebo."

Huh. Well. I've been using the word "homeopathic" wrong, for one thing. Learned something new today.

Homeopathic medicine isn't the same as natural medicine or alternative medicine or homeopathic medicine, which "emphasizes the interrelationship between structure and function of the body and recognizes the body's ability to heal itself; it is the role of the osteopathic practitioner to facilitate that process." I'm a big fan of some jumble of those kinds of medicine. I medicate stress with a bike ride. I medicate headaches with L-Argenine and stretching. I medicate migraines pretty much the same, but with a nice dose of ibuprofen as well because migraines are Serious Business and I've yet to find another cure that fixes them for me (and even at that, I don't think I have severe migraines, and when I knock them back with ibuprofen, I'm still out for the count for several hours after).

But let's not discount homeopathy completely.

Homeopathic medicine is essentially a placebo, medicine that's not doing a damn thing outside making you think something is healing you. Take, for example, the illness I used to get before going to a certain professor's lectures when I was in graduate school. I'd wake the morning of lecture feeling achy and lethargic. It'd get worse as the day progressed. Then I'd go to class (a four-hour night class that lasted from 6pm to 10pm, and here you should know that I'm a morning person, 9pm is totally my bedtime) and come home with my head stuffed up, my eyes watering, my stomach aching, and my throat raw. The following morning? No symptoms at all.

It wasn't until my second quarter of these classes and their strange accompanying symptoms that I realized it was all in my head. Well. Not all. The aches and lethargy that preceded the class was psychological. Dreading the class, not wanting to go, remembering how tired I always was the following day after staying out so late. Then the congestion and itching eyes and sore throat? Allergy to the professor's cologne, in which I'm pretty sure he marinated before each lecture. All mixed together, it made for one very miserable twenty-four hours (not to mention a lot of laundry, since my clothes all reeked of his cologne after spending four hours locked up with it).

Fortunately, I'm "that hippy" who doesn't take meds for stuff unless I really, really need it. I use massage and stretching to get rid of menstrual cramps each month. I drink barley juice and orange juice to ward off allergies and colds. I swallow a spoonful of honey for coughs and sore throats when the barley juice fails me. So I never medicated against that class, and once I realized that I was causing at least half of my own misery, I started treating it with a nice brisk walk first thing in the morning to shake off the "oh god I have THAT class tonight" lethargy. I started taking my crocheting with me to class, giving myself something to look forward to doing while listening to the professor repeat the same damn thing he'd said in every other class I'd taken with him. And yes, I took sickie food with me to class because it comforted me to have the foods I associated with feeling better - triscuits and cheese, 7up, etc.

That took care of the psychological side. For the physical side, the allergy to his cologne, I took water and throat lozenges for my poor aching throat, a mug of hot tea when the weather turned cold, and when he'd give us a break, I'd go into the bathroom and wash my eyes with a wet cloth. After class, I'd take a shower, wash the cologne off my skin and out of my hair. I'd still have a sore throat when class let out - there's no saving that, short of coming to class with a gas mask on - but I felt much, much better leading up to class, reducing my suffering from 24 hours down to the 4 hours I spent in the class itself.

So, taking sickie food with me and going for a walk - are those homeopathic? I'd say so. I didn't actually need the salt to settle my stomach, but the association settled my soul (if you will). The walk cleared my mind and made me feel healthier, both in the literal I-feel-better sense and the psychological I-feel-less-like-a-lazy-bum sense. Same thing with the ... I don't know, do we call it osteopathic medicine if a doctor wasn't involved? I don't think so. We'll call it "natural" medicine, then, of drinking water and herbal tea, sucking on an herbal lozenge, etc., to help with the allergic reaction I had to the cologne. Combine the two and you've got a woman who's feeling better without taking ibuprofen/aspirin/acetaminophen for the aches or ColdEeze (or whatever) for the allergy.

Oh, and it gave me fantastic body knowledge so that I was better equipped to deal with the intense physical and psychological stress of the job I took a year later. Healing you can't put a price-tag on, that.

That's not to say that "real" medicine is bad. Good lord, no. Just that we overmedicate things without looking into their real causes. And by "we," I mean we-the-patients as well as we-the-doctors, because it's a two-way street, there. You've both got to care if you're going to get anything done. You wouldn't want a doctor to tell you that your headaches are all in your head (haha) and you can get rid of them with meditation if you have a tumor and actually need surgery/chemo/radiation/whatever. Just like you wouldn't want a doctor to do shoulder surgery on you if all that's ailing your shoulder is your posture when you're on the internet surfing 4chan at 2am. There needs to be communication between the doctor and the patient, a dialogue that builds trust. I've not been to the gynecologist in over five years because one of my gynos told me I had leukemia, just so he could run a pregnancy test on me (which I had refused to let him run, before, because I was a virgin and knew I wasn't pregnant) and another told me I had breast cancer, trying to trick me into taking some birth control thing she was pushing onto all of her patients. Scared the daylights out of me both times, and for what? No reason at all.

In case anyone's curious? The leukemia-pregnancy thing turned out to be a mix of headcold and allergies. Who gets allergies in the fall? C'mon! Allergies are like, spring and summer, right? (Wrong - I'm allergic to mold. So mix a mild headcold with allergies, go to the doctor about it, find out you have fake leukemia because your doctor thinks you're the Virgin Mary or some shit.) And the breast cancer thing? No cancer. Just boobs that hurt all the time. I've cured that by bicycling enough to lose some weight (yes, thin women can need to lose weight too, and it's not an insult, not like saying I'm fat, it's just a fact that I had fat that was making my breasts hurt and I needed to exercise and lose some of it). I also wear sports bras when they hurt more than usual, and after a few days, the pain's gone.

No medicine needed, homeopathic or otherwise.