Homeopathy for Comprehensive Cancer Care

Homeopathy for Comprehensive Cancer Care
By Jack P. Bleeker

Homeopathic medicine is becoming increasingly prevalent in treatment plans for patients diagnosed with cancer.  Already utilized heavily across Europe, this form of integrative oncolgy continues to gain popularity throughout the United States.  The all natural therapy focuses on treating the person, not the illness, and has been very successful alleviating symptoms associated with many forms of cancer, including aggressive malignancies like mesothelioma.

Homeopathic practitioners spend a great deal of time getting to know their patient and the symptoms they are experiencing.  They then use this information to prepare a “simillium” or appropriate plant, mineral, or chemical substance heavily diluted with water as a remedy.  An important principle of homeopathy is the “law of infinitesimals,” which states that the more a solution is diluted, the more powerful it becomes.  Prescribing these remedies helps to boost the immune system and for cancer patients can reduce pain caused by traditional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation.

Though very few supporters believe homeopathy itself is a mesothelioma cure, many have seen tremendous success using these remedies as a complement to traditional medicine.  It can also be linked to improved mental state, sleeping patterns, and appetite.

Often, the symptoms of the cancer pale in comparison to those brought on by traditional treatments, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. The most effective in managing symptoms associated with a prolonged  mesothelioma prognosis has been mistletoe therapy.  In this process the herb Iscador is extracted from mistletoe and given to the patient through tablet or injection form.  Available only through prescription, Iscador has been proven to slow growth of cancerous cells with limited side effects to the patient.Fatigue, restlessness, and other side effects of these traditional treatments can all be managed through complementary therapies, including the use of homeopathic medicine.

Homeopathy used in comprehensive oncology can improve quality of life and provide relief to patients.  This alternative medicine is also believed to prevent re-occurrence of cancer as it alters the biochemical make up of the individual.  While further research continues to be done on the efficacy of homeopathic treatment for cancer patients, it has indeed become a valuable option in complementary medicine.

References

American Cancer Society
National Cancer Institute

Information courtesy of Mesothelioma.com
6/23/10

Pharma, Research, and the FDA: A Special Interview with Dr. Beatrice Golomb MD, PhD

A Special Interview with Dr. Beatrice Golomb MD, PhD

By Dr. Mercola

DG: Beatrice Golomb MD, PhD

DM: Dr. Joseph Mercola, DO

INTRODUCTION: Welcome everyone. I‟m really honored to have with us today a world class expert in helping you and all others understand some of the interactions that drug companies have on the scientific method. Dr. Golomb agreed to join us today and share some of the information she has uncovered over the last number of years.

Dr. Golomb, thank you for joining and I‟m wondering if you could tell our listeners what your training is. How did you get interested in this field?

DG: I‟m an MD and a PhD. I‟m an Associate Professor of Medicine and an Associate Professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California at San Diego. I have been interested in this issue prior to the work as I was doing research on statin cholesterol-lowering drugs, in which I was initially perplexed between the disparities that I saw between the published evidence, review papers, guidelines and follow-on papers after trials were published.

I was perplexed about how these data could draw people to certain conclusions that they appear to be coming to. I would ask my colleagues how could they have read this paper and have come to this conclusion.

Over time as I began examining the evidence relating to conflict of interest and published results, I began to see that there were forces at play that both lead to disparities between the evidence that was published relative to the “truth” of the evidence that was procured. There are also disparities between the secondary representations of that evidence and the evidence that was published.

There is actually widespread evidence even within the medical literature which shows that these forces can lead to qualitative differences in the conclusions relative to the fact.

For example, FDA analysts now have access to clinical trials whether or not they are published because of clinical trial registries that some journals now require. They require that a child be registered in one of these registries and its conclusion be allowed to get published in a major journal. 2

Now, that doesn‟t actually require that those results then be published but at least now there is an opportunity for the FDA to get access to the existence of those studies and sometimes to have access to the evidence from the studies.

So, the FDA conducted an analysis of antidepressant drug trials and found that out of 38 trials for which the evidence appeared favorable, 37 had been published, whereas out of 36 trials for which the evidence were unfavorable toward antidepressant drugs, 22 weren‟t published at all and 11 were published in a way that misleadingly conveyed the outcome as though it were favorable.

Therefore, research that goes to the published evidence would result to over 90% of publications which were favorable relative to the truth, or at least 50% as determined by the FDA analysts.

So, essentially, the difference between unanimity and a coin toss with readers of the literature is that they appear to see that the results were consistently favorable relative to actual trials. They show that they were about as likely not to show favorable outcomes just to show favorable outcomes.

So that‟s an example of how the evidence we see can be dramatically different from the evidence that was procured and there are actually a number of mechanisms that lead the procured evidence to already have disparities that generally favor treatment benefits relative to truth.

Those rely in part on factors like how subjects were selected for participation in clinical trials, which often end up leading to people who are non-representatively unlikely to experience adverse effects and sometimes more likely to reap benefits. Often, for very noble reasons like protection of subject against harms, etcetera in clinical trials, and cost efficiency by selecting those subjects that show the biggest benefit etcetera, the result is that the findings of the clinical trials are not representative of the more general population to whom the treatment will then be given.

DM: Before we go on to another example, I just like to frame this into perspective. When I graduated from medical school in 1982, one of my motivations for going to school was to actually learn about health and wellness and not necessarily to treat disease.

But during the course of my training and like you, I‟m a family physician and I did my residency and family practice, yet I don‟t have a PhD as you did have additional research, but my perspective was really altered and shifted to the point where I began to think in simplistic terms. I was really brainwashed, manipulated and really convinced in almost every type of educational interaction and intervention that I received, I was convinced that the drug model was the primary method to treat almost every single illness. If there was an illness, there was usually a prescription that would follow.

Through some long, hard efforts and time, I was gradually convinced. I mean, you mentioned antidepressants – I had put thousands of people on antidepressants 3

because I was so convinced about the data that they had presented. But through time, effort, energy, and independent study, I came to realize that this was not correct.

And why I‟m really so excited about your research and what you‟re uncovering because many of our critics claim that we are abandoning the scientific method and I think nothing can be further from the truth. I just have enormous respect for the scientific method and I think when it is done properly, it can clearly provide us with an amazing discovery of the truth and help us; it can really guide and direct our treatment protocols.

But the problem and what many people, the vast majority of the public from my perspective, and I am interested to hear your thoughts on it too is that these critics fail to appreciate that much of this research has been really influenced with tremendous conflict of interest that you carefully detailed. I‟m wondering how you came to that process. It was through the statin drugs. Do you have any epiphanies or what catapulted that whole process for you?

DG: Well, I think the specific thing (inaudible 7:02). There was a trial called the Prosper trial, which is the first randomized trial of statin use in elderly patients. It took patients who were not just elderly which already gives them high of heart disease but they had in addition to either have heart disease which is a group that in general shows greater benefit with these drugs or have additional high risk factors for developing heart disease.

So, she looked at their rate of death from heart disease, it actually matched the rate of deaths from heart disease of the second highest risk study that had been done with statins in middle age. And in that study in middle aged men, statins actually lead to life prolongation at least in the clinical trial samples that was selected for study.

But in the Prosper trial, all (inaudible 7:44) mortality was absolutely neutral. No hint of a trend towards benefit. And all (inaudible 7:48) morbidity was similarly completely neutral. No hints of a trend toward benefit. Stroke risk was neutral and there was a 25% increase in new cancer that was statistically significant in the statin group compared to the control group.

But if you read the abstracts of the paper, the abstract for this drug company funded trial stated that this trial extends to the elderly the treatment strategy used in middle age. I was stunned by that. I thought well, okay, so the trial that drug companies funded and that may explain how they choose to interpret the findings so favorably but surely the follow on literature will recognize this and draw strikingly different conclusions.

But instead I saw articles with titles like, Elderly under Treated and Drug Extends Treatment to Elderly. I kept thinking, do these people actually read this article. And then (inaudible 8:42) as I became aware of the literature on ghost writings…

DM: I‟m really curious as to…sorry to keep on pestering for this, but you know, the vast majority of physicians are reading the same literature you read and they‟re not 4

motivated to pursue this at a deeper level. I‟m wondering what variable, factor or epiphany motivated you to study this so carefully and to draw out these details that so many physicians for whatever reason choose to ignore.

DG: The problem is I really can‟t read the mind of other physicians but the challenge to me is not that I am concerned about this but that everybody else has not been summarily concerned about this.

DM: Well, you recognize that‟s the case. We are talking 99.9% of physicians who do not make the same criticisms or do the careful analysis that you‟ve done. Maybe it‟s not 99.9…

DG: Not only that…

DM: It‟s a huge majority and perhaps as high as 99%.

DG: I would certainly imagine that it is as high as that. I think they often haven‟t been…perhaps they haven‟t encountered an issue that they have looked at deeply enough to recognize these disparities or perhaps there are other factors. But I will say that it really wasn‟t just statins either.

A number of projects were around in which again, I seem to see these systematic disparities generally in favor of treatment in representations of the evidence and in

guidelines relative to the published evidence. But it wasn‟t really even just the statin issue.

DM: Well, you have an MD and a PhD but prior to…some of our listeners might begin to appreciate some of the motivation behind this is that, weren‟t you the scientific director for the Department of Veterinary Affairs and Research and Advisory Committee on the Gulf

War Veteran‟s illnesses?

So, you‟ve had formal training on this area that may predispose you to be more sensitive to the specifics that many other physicians are just not attuned to.

DG: Well, I would perhaps phrase it the other way. I think part of the reason I got interested in the Gulf War area was that I was already concerned at that point about the way the inferences were drawn about that condition. I was approached by the head of the RAND health program to ask if I wanted to be involved in the set of reports related to Gulf War illness and I had seen the conclusions of the Institute of Medicine and the Presidential Advisory committee reports relevant to Gulf War illness at that time.

This time was the 1990‟s and those reports essentially rephrase what they said, to make clearer the way the inferences were drawn. Inferences were basically absences of proof of a connection between organic factors and illness, which is interpreted as proof of absence of a connection between organic factors and illness and since no one had 5

looked and therefore, no one had proved that the exposures they had received were related to their illness.

These then concluded that there couldn‟t be a relationship. But you couldn‟t conclude that there was no relationship because there was no evidence. Nobody had looked or even asked if it was biologically possible and therefore, it merited more inquiry.

So I jumped at the chance to participate not because I had any conclusion either direction about whether Gulf War veterans were ill or whether it was related to exposures that they had experienced but because I felt that an honest inquiry hadn‟t really taken place and I wanted to make sure that one was. And when closer inquiry didn‟t take place, it was clear that some of the exposures that Gulf War veterans had strong biological plausibility as precipitants for their illness and I outlined in one of my reports a research plan that would help to evaluate whether or not, there was a cause of relationship.

And now, a number of those studies have been done including my suggestion that we look at the genetic variants of the enzymes that detoxify some of the chemicals they were exposed to on grounds that if these chemicals were causally linked to illness in people who have sluggish variants of these detoxifying chemicals should more likely be ill and sure enough, they are. People who had higher levels of exposure to these chemicals would more likely be ill and sure enough, they are.

In animal studies exposing animals to these chemicals, I suggested that we should look at long-term effects, which might differ not only in amount but in direction from short term effects and sure enough those long term studies have shown that if you look long after exposure, you‟ll identify new abnormalities that weren‟t present immediately after exposure. So, in that case, I think it wasn‟t just the fact that I was involved that conditioned me to be concerned about the evidence but it was also the concern about evidence that conditioned me to be involved.

DM: Well, thank you for that clarification. I believe the largest drug companies earn about 500 billion, that‟s half a trillion dollars annually and that‟s certainly quite a bit of revenue that one can use for a variety of reasons. From your investigation, how much percentage of studies that are currently being published in the medical-clinical area is actually being funded by the drug companies either directly or indirectly?

DG: I‟ve never looked at that question and it would very much depend on how you ask the question. Certainly in the case of statin (inaudible 14:09) are the areas that I‟m probably most closely familiar with, all of the large randomized control trials are drug-company funded. All of them.

DM: All of them not just the majority. Your review and this is your area of expertise, and you‟ve carefully looked at this and your conclusion is that all of them are funded by the drug companies. Is that correct? 6

DG: That‟s correct.

DM: Wow, that‟s quite a statement.

DG: Yeah, all of the large randomized control trials are drug-company funded right.

DM: That is just profound.

DG: Right. It‟s very expensive to do those studies. The only other source of funding for reasonable sized studies is the NIH and we approached the NIH actually to conduct a study and see whether coenzyme Q10 might mitigate muscle side effects of statins. We were told by NIH officers that they wouldn‟t even consider a lot of requests to do the study unless we ask the drug company to supply the statin that was used in the study.

And so I contacted the NIH and I said, “I‟m really trying to have a career free of drug company conflict of interest, would it be such a problem to have one study that doesn‟t have a drug company involved in it?” And they said somewhat reasonably that their interest is in leveraging their funding and therefore, “no they would not consider an application as we asked the drug company to supply the drug,” which of course already set some level of conflict of interest.

The problem is there are finite funds available for research and the NIH, which is the only other source of sizeable funds, generally not quite as sizeable as they are required for the really large drug studies, it also has an interest in leveraging its resources and providing funding to a larger number of trials ,which then motivate further conflict of interest issues associated with (inaudible 16:02) participation.

DM: Let me just interject here for those listeners who aren‟t familiar with the NIH, that‟s an acronym for the National Institutes of Health and is really the government-sponsored and funded health agency and as you mentioned, next to the drug companies, NIH is the largest single source of funding for these studies and when one independent objective, truth-oriented researcher seeks to go and do these conflict of interest retrials, you‟re obviously going to need funds to do that.

When you go to the only other option really that‟s available, the NIH, the people from NIH are refusing to do it because they want to “leverage their ties with the drug companies,” which is just extraordinary.

DG: Well, they want to leverage their money and one of the ways to do that has the unfortunate side effect of producing ties to industry. And so I will say that there maybe others but I am the only researcher of drugs that I am aware of who actually has tried or has so far not had drug company conflicts of interest.

DM: I‟m particularly curious too about the coenzyme Q10 issue that you mentioned, is it true that in Europe, which is clearly a whole different scenario, it doesn‟t necessarily have the same guidelines or conflicts of interest that we have in this country? I would 7

be interested in your comments on that. Have they done trials or is it professionally a standard of care to actually recommend coenzyme Q10 when they‟re administered in the statin drug? That was my understanding that it‟s almost a malpractice not to co-administer them when they‟re giving a statin drug in Europe.

DG: I‟m not actually familiar of any standard of that kind. I have heard that and I would actually need to look this up to verify it but I‟ve heard that in Canada, the labeling on statins mentions that statins lower coenzyme Q10 and I know certainly that in Japan coenzyme Q10 is approved for treatment of heart failure but I‟m not actually aware one way or another of whether there are those propensities in Europe. I certainly haven‟t heard of that.

DM: From your experience, are the funding challenges somewhat similar for objective researchers like yourself in Europe, do they still have the same challenge when they‟re seeking government funding to do a trial – that there is this connection to the drug companies – or is it more objective?

DG: That‟s very interesting and I „m actually going to answer your question a little bit indirectly. It‟s my perception that this is changing in the untoward direction but some years ago, I was involved in a panel reviewing a set of responses to a contact put out by the NIH.

The NIH was interested in people who perform studies to evaluate whether more intensive drug treatment for diabetics was the superior standard of care, where more intensive drug treatment was for both blood sugar levels and blood pressure as well as blood cholesterol. And what I found fascinating is a number of people then proposed to science to do this study and submitted them to the NIH and this review group was evaluating those studies.

And what was fascinating to me was with perhaps 30 reviewers in the room, there were three of us who viewed this as a two-sided question meaning that more intensive therapy might either be better or it might be worse and it was me and the two reviewers who were not from the United States.

One was from Canada and one was from Sweden. Out of the 40 or so applications that came in, there was one that treated it as a two-sided hypothesis, meaning it didn‟t presume that more intensive treatment would be better and that was the one application that was not from the United States, it came from Canada, but my colleagues in Europe are telling me that the drug company involvements are actually becoming more extensive now outside of the United States and that they‟re beginning to experience some of the (inaudible 20:01) challenges that we have here.

DM: Well, thank you for explaining that. Now, I‟m wondering if you can go into some of the other details that you‟ve uncovered with respect to the actual publication process, which many of our listeners are not familiar with. You‟ve mentioned clearly the initial part of the process, which is the funding for the actual trial but once one actually 8

collected the data, then there is a whole other set of variables with respect to submitting them to peer-reviewed journals and so. If you can go into that, you will uncover some amazing details there.

DG: Right, so we‟ve already alluded to as you pointed out that there are funding disparities and that less favorable studies, which drug company funded are less likely to be submitted for publication. Then, there are actually issues at the level of the journal and it would be nice to think of medical journals as these bastions of truth and light and that they have no bias but in fact, they‟re businesses and they make their money through many cases, from drug company advertisement and also from sales of the glossy reprints of the drug and favorable articles to industry.

Interestingly, several former editors-in-chief of major medical journals such as Richard Smith of the BMJ (British Medical Journal), Richard Horton of the Lancet, and also a couple of former editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, have actually each written books and opined heavily on the favorable impact of drug company influence on medical publishing, where there are strong conflicts by the journal to publish favorable articles for the drug company in order to reap those hundred thousand dollars or so in reprint sales for the favorable articles and also to keep the drug companies happy so that they continue to get drug company advertising.

DM: But before we gloss over that, it‟s an important point because many of our listeners may not know that there is an occupation, which is called and many people have heard of the detail man or woman whose actual sole responsibility is to go and educate “physicians” about these new drugs and in the process of doing that, one of their tools is to provide this reprint of a favorable study and that is not something that they go to their home office and photocopy because that would be copyright infringement.

What they need to do is they actually have to pay for that reprint from the journal and that‟s exactly what you‟re referring to. These reprints, in many cases, cost six figure amounts, and generate a hundred thousand dollars extra additional revenue over and above the advertisements that are being paid by the drug company. The drugs company then gives this which to the journal for publishing the study. It‟s another perk for them.

DG: That‟s correct and as Richard Smith, the former editor-in-chief of BMJ, cites that the publisher can either publish the shoddy quality drugs favorable (inaudible 22:53) and reap the one hundred thousand dollars in revenue in order to meet their end of the year profit goals or they can even fire the editor who declined to publish it and has set up striking conflict of interest.

Also, as a New York Times article noted, several editors of major medical journals who were willing to give information if granted anonymity pointed out that journals not long ago counted their profits and in the tens of thousand of dollars now make profits in the 9

range of millions of dollars. So, the amounts of money that are at stake are not small and the evidence, that in fact this has had an impact, comes from several sources.

One was the Annals of Internal Medicine. Some years ago, it published an article on the impact of drug company advertising on physician behavior and also how accurate drug company advertising was to physicians. And the article was not flattering to drug company advertising. Somebody taxed the impact on the Annals‟ revenues with regards to publishing that article. He/She tracked what the trajectory of revenues was before the article was published and after the article was printed.

You can look at that and of course make some comparison to how other journals are doing. The researcher estimated that they lost 1 to 1.5 million dollars in advertising revenue over the ensuing several years as an apparent consequence of having published that unflattering article. As I was told by someone who was cautioning me against going into the issue of looking at drug risks and benefits, every one of the major medical journals sat up and took notice.

And there is direct evidence now as well of drug companies rejecting unfavorable articles, which are articles unfavorable to industry based on factors other than article quality. An example of this was…

DM: Before we go there, let me just finish up this one area, an important question to help put things in perspective. How many clinically significant medical journals are there? There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, so what‟s the total basic universe that…I mean, just the proximate…

DG: It totally depends on how you define clinical significance.

DM: Well, from your perspective. I mean, that‟s obviously subjective but from your perspective, would you say there are thousands, ten thousand? What‟s the range?

DG: Again, I don‟t know what you mean by clinical significance. I‟m not really sure how to even begin to address that question. Certainly, there are, at a minimum, hundreds of medical journals that, you know, if you count the different sub domains of medicine, general medicine, infectious disease, cancer…

DM: So, let‟s say there are a thousand top journals. Let‟s say there is a thousand just for the basis of discussion. You outlined some very significant criticisms of this whole process. So, of these thousand top journals, what percentage in your experience would you say are really affected significantly by them? Would you say that it is the majority? would you say it is 90%? Do you have any idea from your impression and experience in this field?

DG: I try whenever possible to avoid drawing inferences beyond evidence and what I will say is that for the published ones that have high “impact” factors, meaning that people look at them a lot and cite them a lot, certainly most of the top, well-read medical 10

journals, perhaps with the exception of some of the recent online journals, involved drug company advertising.

DM: Thank you for allowing me to ask that question. So you can continue with some of the other challenges that you‟ve uncovered that really contributed to this perversion of the truth and promoted in a non-conflict of interest way. So tell us what you‟ve learned.

DG: So, I‟m going to sort of finish up on this one a little bit to give an example of why we know that sometimes unfavorable articles are rejected and there is a substance that people may have heard of, it‟s called erythropoietin that‟s used for example by athletes to increase the number of red blood cells that carry oxygen but it is also used in end-stage renal disease.

Erythropoietin is a strongly marketed drug and somebody wrote an article to a reputable kidney journal pointing out the evidence for “mortality” benefit with this drug in end-stage kidney disease and therefore the guidelines that recommended their use were based on flat analyses.

And in this particular case, all three of the peer reviewers favor the publication of the article and the editor was actually either honest or stupid enough to put in writing to the author that whereas he and all three of the reviewers favor the publication of the article, he was overruled by the marketing department for the journal. And this was put in writing.

This author then forwarded this to Richard Smith, the former editor-in-chief of the BMJ who has become an activist in this area. We have no idea whether this happens frequently. Certainly, I think most editors would not put that in writing and the more likely scenario would be that the author would receive a letter saying this is not of interest to our journal. But we know at least that there exists some cases in which that happens and we really have no idea how widespread that is.

Another issue that has come to light particularly when there has been litigation against companies for factors like, for example, pushing off label indications in Neurontin. With the Vioxx litigation, what has come out in the discovery process during this is that drug companies often go straight to “scientific” articles.

That is to say they write a review article or a primary article and submit to a scientific journal but what they do is either they write it or they hire what are called MECCs (Medical Education and Communication Companies) which are for- profit companies that essentially are purely funded by pharma to do these kinds of activities.

They‟ will either write an article themselves or have MECC write an article that favorably spins their drug and they will then find an academic who is willing to be the listed as an author of that article. So that there will be no apparent connection between the drug company and the MECC in many cases related to this article. 11

And they will then essentially flood the literature with favorable (inaudible 29:25) on ghost- written articles putting their drug in a favorable light. To me, this helps explain these findings on why the secondary articles after the Prosper trial were so favorable and so inconsistent with the actual findings and the study. Now that I understand this ghost writing process, that makes far more sense to me.

And another issue that has been uncovered is the issue of duplicate publication. So, it is considered unethical to republish the same clinical trial multiple times. It‟s just considered an ethical breach. In fact, one set of authors looked at a particular drug called Ondansetron that‟s used as an anti-nausea, anti-vomiting agent.

They did an extremely careful review of the literature and it was very difficult. They identified that a high fraction or substantial fraction of the clinical trials related to that drug were published not just once but several times over in a way that hid the fact that it was the same study being republished to changes in the author list and changes in the methodological details.

The studies that were more favorable to the drug were more likely to be published. And so that if one data what‟s called a meta-analysis or aggregate analysis of the effect of different multiple clinical trials, this process of plural publication and by the way, the same study was published as many as five times which led to a considerable over estimate of the efficacy of the drug and the authors noted that no other reviewers in this field had actually detected that it was the same studies being republished by sometimes as many as five times.

So, that‟s another way in which there is a sort of further perpetuation of the disparity between published evidence and the truth. And then, once you have all this published body of evidence and the unfavorable trials are less likely to be submitted and published and favorable trials being more likely to be submitted and published in duplicate, have favorably spend review articles published upon them…

DM: Before you go over it, I mean you established one statement but I think that‟s a huge one and I think it will bypass most of our listeners‟ appreciation. These favorable reviews, can you go through the process?

Let‟s say this heavily funded study that was influenced by the drug company and then additionally influenced by the editor to publish this for their marketing department. The next step is that these favorable reviews are published by experts. Can you describe that process a little bit?

I think it‟s a bit similar to the ghost writing process but it‟s also quite different.

DG: It is different, right. So we have information on this process, wherein during a certain period of time, a specific subclass of drug could actually work for a time. The most widely prescribed drugs, a subclass of what are called calcium channel blockers (and I won‟t go into what the subclass is), but they were widely used as blood pressure 12

lowering drugs and then somebody did some analysis that suggested that they may increase the risk of bad (inaudible 32:38) events.

And there was a period during which this was a subject of intense debate in the medical literature and an analysis was done on whether published statements about calcium channel blockers were more likely to be favorable, neutral or unfavorable as a function of whether the authors of those statements had drug company conflict of interest. It was either a calcium channel blocker manufacturer or with drug companies overall.

There were two striking findings: one was that in general, there were very high levels of conflict of interest, so even among those who published unfavorable statements, I think it was in the order of 40% (inaudible 33:21) drug company conflict but then it was on the order of 60% for people who publish usual statements and in the high 90‟s for people who published favorable statements when in fact, in about a hundred percent of the studies with favorable statements, the authors had conflict of interest with some drug company.

So, one way that one could interpret these findings during this period and state the evidence of making favorable statements about those drugs was with the drug company conflict of interest. These conflicts of interest are so very widespread. (inaudible 33:58) provide these enormous pushes toward favorable spinning of information related to drugs in the medical literature.

DM: Don‟t the major journals have specific policies regarding conflict of interest and require the submitting author to declare their conflicts? How does that work? How do they get around this and are able to still publish these findings?

DG: Let me say first that that‟s a moving target and it‟s not always a case but many of the major medical journals have these policies particularly for editorials. But unfortunately, it was sort of discovered that it was virtually impossible to find or that was the claim of people who make choices out of editorials who didn‟t have drug company conflicts. Somebody actually did an analysis of editorials in one of these journals and I don‟t have the exact figures at my fingertips.

He/She did one analysis about the top medical journals and found out that these journals actually have such a policy. It was actually found that despite this policy, the majority of the editorials written actually involved people who did have drug company conflict of interest.

Of course, there is also the issue that even when there are these policies for disclosure, what a colleague of mine told me is that initially, for example, if I give a talk with the American Heart Association, they just have a disclosure slide at the beginning and that initially, people actually took that seriously and gave their disclosures.

Then the speakers discovered that people sometimes looked more askance at their findings. People became perhaps a little bit less careful about doing those disclosures. 13

And I did a debate some years ago at the American Heart Association, the original title of which was supposed to be, “Should statins be put on the water supply?” And I was told that originally they thought they would find nobody to take the no position, which tells you how sort of strongly spun that area is.

But the night before the debate, I was at a dinner in which there were a number of people including the person I was going to debate the next day with. He apparently forgot that I was sitting across from him at the dinner table and told the person next to him that if I were really to disclose all my conflicts of interest, it would take four slides to which that prominent researcher said, “if there is anyone I‟m not on the take from, come on over.” So, that also gives you a sense of how convoluted the attitude is toward these conflicts of interest in medical research.

Actually, there was a case recently, a year or so ago, in which somebody wrote an article on one of the major medical journals that purported to find the benefit of a psychiatric drug treatment over a non-drug therapy for psychiatric condition. And the author read a letter to the editor saying, “Gee, even the data in the study didn‟t really appear to support that conclusion” and that letter to the editor was published.

But then this individual, Jonathan Leo, did a quick Google search and found that the authors of that article actually had conflicts of interest with the company and that made the drug they were touting in conflict with what they hadn‟t disclosed. And so then, Jonathan Leo attempted to contact the editors of the journal with this information and they sort of said they would follow up and over the next several months, he tried contacting them to find out what had come of this and didn‟t seem to be getting any replies.

So he wrote a letter to BMJ Online describing this and actually instead of the authors of the journal reaping the negative consequences of this, they were played out on him. I guess the deputy editor called him and essentially according to him, the editor told him that unless he retracted this letter to BMJ, not that there was anything factually incorrect on it, he would be sorry.

His students would be sorry. He would be barred from life for the major medical journal, which I will not name. And the editor-in-chief called his dean in an apparent effort to put pressure on him to withdraw the letter. These issues are complicated and it‟s quite clear that these conflicts of interest are not always disclosed.

DM: What you described really sounds like a devastating collapse of the whole system. It just really doesn‟t work and it has been modified, morphed, and changed into really nothing more in many cases, perhaps if not most, a marketing arm of the drug companies.

DG: I think that‟s a serious concern – that there is a large number of unequal partnerships with industry, partnerships by academics, partnerships by journals, and partnerships by patient advocacy groups that often functionally end up rendering each 14

marketing arm of industry or at least certainly swaying them toward that direction relative to where they would have been had not been these unequal partnerships where money is received from industry. And it really does often lead to the question, “how do we ascertain the truth from the evidence that‟s out there” and all these body of evidence makes it very clear that that‟s extremely difficult to do.

DM: I‟m personally curious how you were able to insulate yourself from this conflict of interest. I mean its obviously some strong personal motivation that you had. So what motivated you and then how were you on a logistical level able to do that because it takes funding to get these studies published? I mean, did you do it philanthropically out of your own funds or were you able to find an organization to fund your trials, studies and research?

DG: I would say some of both. My income definitely goes toward my research and we did actually have one sizeable NIH randomized (inaudible 39:50) that was funded without a drug company, sizeable but not on the scale of multiple thousands but it did have a thousand individuals. I got a small award from Robert Wood Johnson General Physician Faculty Scholar award that none of which went to my own income but rather to support a project that I thought was important although it was intended to go to me.

We now have a small study, funded by the Department of Defense, which looks at coenzyme Q10 in Gulf War veterans. So we‟ve had funding from a few different sources over time and are desperately looking for other ways to get funding. We‟ve also had small donations from some subjects who had adverse effects from statins who we felt have been helped by our work and that‟s been really nice. The amounts of money are quite small.

DM: The details you have been able to uncover are quite fascinating. Have you come to any conclusions, ideas, and suggestions, if there is any hope about this whole system? Is it recoverable? Is it modifiable? I mean, we‟ve got these policies in place but are really in name only. Clearly, from the examples you‟ve given, these policies are just really ignored and more than ignored, they‟re also violently not implemented. So, can the system change or is it permanently broken?

How to Resolve Drug Company Influence in the Medical Field

DG: I think there are a number of things that could be done that would mitigate the problems and since there are already these clinical trial registries, why not add something else to that? So right now, federally funded studies in principle, meaning large enough NIH-funded studies for example, are supposed to be willing to make their data public access or publicly available after some time that the study is completed.

Why not demand as part of entering your trial internal registry, that you make those data publicly available at a certain time? Now, you know, this doesn‟t completely protect against willful manipulation of data but if people are not willfully manipulating the evidence, then at least those data will become available whether or not the drug 15

companies choose to publish them themselves. So that‟s one thing I think that should happen.

DM: And the reason for this is that as a committed clinician, academic clinician who is seeking to identify the truth, for people like you who are in this position, it is virtually impossible to do that because when you read the scientific paper, many of our listeners have never done that because it‟s a different language for them. It‟s basically impossible to analyze it because they don‟t include the data sets. Is that the reason you‟re suggesting this?

DG: That‟s right and there is extremely strong evidence that they‟re doing some form of selecting the favorable outcomes or something like it. We have very good evidence for this from head to head trials of different classes of drugs. There is one article that was very cleverly entitled, “Why Olanzapine Beats Risperidone, Risperidone Beats Quetiapine, and Quetiapine Beats Olanzapine:

An Analysis of Head-to-Head Trials of Second Generation Antipsychotics.” Basically, the article noted that these drugs are basically in the same class and have approximately the same likelihood of benefit. Whoever funded the study had its drug come out on top or about 90% of the time. And there was this similar analysis of head to head trials of statin drugs in which the odds for the results being favorable toward whichever company funded the study where 20 to 1 and the odds for the conclusions being favorable were 35 to 1.

So this makes it extremely clear that if you have two drugs that are approximately equal you can make either one look better either by selecting your outcomes or by whatever other processes and this poses an extremely frightening question, “if you can create odds so high favoring a drug over one that it is inherently not superior to, what implications do that have if that other drug is called placebo?”

DM: Yes, indeed. You‟ve done a masterful job in uncovering the process that is typically used to promote these drugs. However, I‟m wondering that the beginning of the process starts when physicians are educated in medical school. That‟s when they start the brainwashing from my experience.

I‟m wondering if you found or what have you uncovered in that perspective?

How are the medical students typically initiated in this process and oriented to this perspective?

DG: There are several issues involved. One is that most of the physicians who are doing the training are all conditioned by the existing literature and the existing “expertise” which is influenced by all the factors that we‟ve just mentioned.

So, they legitimately believe the benefits of these drugs often to a degree that‟s not even supported by the published randomized trial evidence because it will be supported 16

by the follow-on review papers, commentary expertise and guidelines. But I will say that medical students have actually been on the vanguard of trying to make change and the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) actually developed a policy of trying to rate the impact of conflict of interest in the classroom.

My understanding is that this was motivated initially by a Harvard medical student who had listened actually to their lecture on statins and somebody in the classroom had raised his hand and asked the question about statin adverse effects. It was answered in such a derisive and dismissive way that this other student looked up the lecturer online and discovered that he had all these conflicts of interest with the statin industry.

That ended up prompting the student group to try to take action and you actually had to look more into the details of what that action is but my understanding is that initially Harvard received an (inaudible 45:47) but it was later upgraded. I can‟t recall to B or an A. I don‟t really know of the processes that were put in place, how much they do to remedy that situation but at least it‟s taking a step in the right direction.

And I will say that I certainly had the impression that the lecturers on statins who were there had to be extremely, strongly biased because my husband and I had dinner with a colleague of my husband. His daughter was at Harvard Medical School at the time and he shared with us that the day they had their lecture on statins, his daughter called him up and said, “Dad, make sure the day I turn 30, you call me up and remind me to start statins.”

The randomized trial evidence does not support benefit to the patient, that the outcomes balance the benefits and risks like mortality or (inaudible 46:29) morbidity in any group of women, including those with heart disease. It will take a fairly strongly slanted lecturer for her to have come to this conclusion.

So, I think those issues do begin in medical school. I will say that for both medical school and also graduate school, there really is very limited training on how to evaluate evidence. There is very limited training in epidemiology methods, forms of bias confounding, selection of facts and also logical fallacies, which are frankly rife in medical articles.

DM: This is somewhat surprising that you were able to, I guess, garner your expertise because as you mentioned this is really not traditionally thought. You have to acquire in some other fields because they‟re not going to teach you this in almost every medical school.

To me, this seems one of the most foundational skills to learn because I remember from my medical education, they said that 95% of what you‟re going to learn in school is going to be outdated by the time you‟re practicing. So you really do need a skill set to help you evaluate all these new research and yet they aren‟t giving you the tools and training on how to evaluate the data sets. 17

DG: I absolutely share that conviction with you. In fact, it‟s my opinion that it should start in grade school. Like English and Math, it should be one of the key things that is taught and it should be taught and upgraded essentially throughout one‟s education much less for people who have a career in science or in medicine. I completely agree with you on that.

DM: Another aspect of the medical education is once physicians graduate and actually start practicing, they are exposed to influences outside of the journals and to subsidies given by drug companies for their education such as symposiums and lectures. see (inaudible 48:23) They‟re getting these seminars.

They‟re attending seminars that are directly funded and all the freebies of course – the lunches, the sponsorships, and the speaking fees – to the point where I believe it‟s something like 18 billion dollars, and around 10, 20, or 30,000 dollars per physician every year in the United States.

DG: And my understanding is that that number has actually gone up since that was published. That is a very serious issue. The most striking example: I will say that if I go to a meeting by the American Heart Association (AMA), for example, there is certainly a lot of evidence of industry conflict when I arrive, pay my registration and (inaudible 49:07) get my bag, which has on it giant letters of “Crestor” on it.

This was a couple of years ago. I still have that bag. It will have pens with drug company material and there will be the big rooms with all the drug company freebies and so forth. Those are smaller in scale and scope than they were some years ago. So, there has actually been, as I say, a moving target. There has been some transition in a favorable direction.

And then typically, the drug companies will put on satellite symposia where they‟ll have a fancy dinner and fancy entertainment, which you can attend for free in turn for hearing the very obviously spun representation of the evidence. But one year, actually at the American Psychiatric Association, the drug companies did something worse. So, in principle, at the main meetings, usually the drug company conflicts are indirect.

The reviewers who choose the articles have drug company conflicts that may influence them to that process but there is no direct drug company involvement usually. But it was actually uncovered by an investigative reporter, who found that at the 2002 American Psychiatric Association meeting, drug companies were actually allowed to choose which topics would be presented, which actually helped shape the presentation., for $50,000 a session.

When the head of the American Psychiatric Association was approached by the reporter on this, he said, “Well, if we didn‟t have drug company subsidies for this meeting, physicians would have to pay $500 or $600 to come instead of spending a couple of hundred dollars only. If they would pay more, then a lot of them wouldn‟t be able to 18

come.” Of course, if they‟re spending all these money, the drug companies expect to have some say in what‟s put on the seminar.

The counter to that is that if physicians knew that what they were going to do was not sort of a partisan balance representation of evidence but functionally drug company advertising, they wouldn‟t be willing to pay any amount of money to go. So yes, there have been extremely overt examples of drug company influence uncovered but usually they‟re somewhat more indirect.

DM: It seems like most physicians are aware of these either directly or indirectly but they choose to ignore the potential influence that these has on them.

DG: I think people often feel that they are impervious to the influence and that they themselves can not be affected by it. I think some of the more sort of self honest ones are probably aware that since it is influencing the information that comes to them, it influences their behavior. There was also an analysis by clinical guideline generating committees, which found that most of the committees had members that had drug company conflicts.

It noted that they had, on average, 80% of the members who had such conflicts, and 10.5 industry conflicts on average, and that when they pulled the members of these guideline generating committees, about 20% of them felt that other committee members were influenced by their conflict while a significantly smaller percentage believe that they themselves were influenced by their conflict.

DM: That‟s another massively crucial tool that is being used because as you mentioned these expert committees, in many cases, are providing the recommendations for professional societies or even national recommendations from the government such as vaccines . Therefore, many of these committees are basically loaded with experts who have massive conflicts of interest. So, it can‟t possibly generate an unbiased objective recommendation.

DG: You know I think that‟s exactly right and on my list of “solutions,” which are recommendations to try to at least mitigate this problem, one of the recommendations is that guideline generating committees should be constituted purely of people whose expertise is in epidemiology methods. People whose expertise is in balanced, unbiased analysis of evidence and people who have direct involvement with industry and actually use these drugs should be excluded from participation.

There is a British Columbia Office of Technology assessment review of clinical practice guidelines that found that the more “clinical experts,” who use these drugs and interact with industry are on guideline generating panels, the more the recommendations of these guideline generating committees departed from the evidence.

DM: Well, I applaud that recommendation and I would like to offer my assistance and certainly commit to implementing that because it would seem to me that that‟s a very 19

powerful strategic way to change this whole process and that the sad reality is that the bulk of the majority, if not over 99% of individuals who live in our society, believe that is what is currently in place.

They are absolutely unaware of this massive conflict of interest but in fact if it was substituted like you are recommending then, I think we could solve a lot of these problems. I would definitely like to offer any assistance and help in any way I can to get that process shifted over because I think it‟s an important shift.

DG: Right.

DM: So, now there are other physicians like yourself who have integrity and honesty and are really seeking to distance themselves from this conflict of interest. I can think of a few but you certainly know others. Can you identify a process that is typically implemented when these physicians stick up because they‟re typically targeted by the drug companies since they could stand to lose significant revenues from this. So what happens to these physicians?

DG: That‟s a very interesting question and there is evidence for both the current and the stick process for trying to influence physicians who speak up in unfavorable directions. We have actually from the “Merck neutralize memos” the discovery process for Vioxx.

There is evidence that Merck, which actually had in writing their internal memos, use the words “how do you neutralize problem physicians” to have unfavorable stated opinions about their drugs or favored a competitor‟s drug and some of the sort of more benign current mechanisms involved when giving them speakerships and offering them grants and so forth in order to essentially try to buy them off. This which shows that at least the drug companies already believe that giving grants and so forth influences physician belief and behavior.

But there is also evidence for less favorable approaches. So, for example, there is a person who later actually became head of the American Diabetes Association. He had presented evidence some years ago suggesting that a diabetes drug, Avandia, much later came out as potentially causing problems like heart failure.

He presented the data back in the late 1990s suggesting that this drug and a related drug class might cause such problems. Then, he received calls from executives in drug companies essentially implying to him that he could be personally liable for billions of dollars in lost market capitalization for the drug as a consequence of his fearless remarks, and they also called his dean and tried to put pressure on his dean to put pressure on him.

Now, obviously, this is an empty threat. If the market and stock for a drug goes down and if the person who made those remarks were responsible for the money, that would mean that anybody who said favorable remarks, which subsequently led to an increase 20

in market, should gain the positive side which obviously doesn‟t happen. But still that would be a very frightening phone call to receive.

Another investigator from France who saw my name tag at a Heart Association meeting approached me and asked if I had been the author of an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine on low cholesterol and violence. And he said, “Do you still have funding?” He had been the lead author on…you know, I‟ll protect his privacy and won‟t say what the study was, but he authored a study that had shown a large-scale epidemiological study.

The study showed that low cholesterol is linked to increase suicide risk and he had an unrestricted career development award yanked from him as a consequence of having published that. I will (inaudible 57:22) communication, she is studying one of the classic adverse effects of these drugs and it received very small grants from her own university to do laboratory tests associated with this and somebody else from her university who has strong drug company conflicts actually put pressure on the university to yank that from her.

There was a researcher who gave a talk, a researcher from a European country that I won‟t specify because I haven‟t been given permission by him to share this story but who had presented some information that was unflattering to this class of drugs. I actually approached him after his talk and asked if he had received any (inaudible 58:02) from this.

And he said that he had received a call from a vice president of one of the major drug companies telling him that if he persisted in presenting this kind of information, they would sue him, that their lawyers were bigger and better than his lawyers and that if he persisted, and that even if he won the case, it would destroy him financially.

And he did something far more savvy than I would have had the brains to do, he said, “I‟ve been taping your call and we‟re passing the threat out to my lawyer at the end of the call” because that‟s legal in the country he‟s in and I didn‟t ask if he actually did that or if he was just smart enough to say it because I don‟t want to know. But it was either way a very smart thing for him to do.

I actually was taken aside by a researcher who had shown untoward effects of lowering cholesterol in an animal model. He took me aside after the talk he gave when I was at UCLA because he thought that I should know that they had…the chair of his department had gotten a call from a vice president of one of the major drug companies telling him it would be, and this was represented by him to me, “dangerous for them to continue to pursue this line of research.”

So, there are these examples of apparent pushback by industry. Right, they have a lot of money on the line and perhaps it‟s unreasonable to suppose that you can go to have a publicly traded company where, on the one hand, there is a perceived obligation to stockholders and simultaneously expect them to have patients‟ best interests at heart. The two are sort of fundamentally incompatible. 21

DM: That is the basic crux of the problem. I mean, these are corporations whose sole commitment is really not towards public health but towards the bottom line of that corporation. Science evolves and develops and we learn more and more but what many people don‟t appreciate is the amazing science and it truly is a science of marketing and they have been able to really carefully identify the way to modify, mold and impress upon a vast large percentage of it, if not the vast majority of professional community, how to change and modify their positions on their supported topics.

DG: Right and you could argue to the degree that their stockholders are their obligation, that if you or I were put in charge of those companies and it was our job to improve the bottom line. we too would be putting into place all of these multiple strategies toward improving market share for our drug.

DM: That‟s true but I‟m not sure all of them would do that because there does seem to be some really significant ethical breaches in many of the scenarios you described.

DG: I think there are very serious problems associated with them and again, the expectation is that you can somehow manage the duality of interests with the one being the stockholder and the profit line, which keeps the company alive and vibrant, and the other being the best interest of the patient. Perhaps, the assumption that these two are compatible needs to be reexamined.

DM: I ultimately think that the public needs to know that and many of the details that you‟ve highlighted in this conversation really are commonly known. The end consumer on this is the public.

They are the ones who essentially are going to be the consumers of the drugs in question. Obviously, the physicians are the facilitators of that but ultimately, if there is a significant consumer resistance because they are educated, they understand that yes there are certain times when these drugs are going to be beneficial but is far less than the drug companies who have you believe in.

There are all these other variables that contribute to misinforming the consumers and if these people can understand that and make an informed decision, then they can vote with their economic pocket book and choose to refuse that drug.

DG: Right.

DM: So I think that‟s the key and that‟s really what our commitment is – to educate consumers primarily about these specifics and I really thank you for all you have uncovered and have done to help elaborate on the real challenges that we have in the system.

DG: You‟re welcome.

DM: We definitely would like to facilitate and help, as I said earlier, the transition to these impartial and objective advisory committees. I think that they really should have their expertise grounded in more of the epidemiological and neutral objective science than conflict of interest.

Thank you for all you have done and the best of luck to you in your continued research.

DG: Thank you very much for your time and interest.

Pharma, Research, and the FDA (PDF Downloadable)

U.S. DISTRICT COURT GIVES FDA A SORELY NEEDED DRUBBING

Happiness wards off heart disease

Happiness wards off heart disease

© BBC MMX

Being happy and staying positive may help ward off heart disease, a study suggests.  US researchers monitored the health of 1,700 people over 10 years, finding the most anxious and depressed were at the highest risk of the disease.  They could not categorically prove happiness was protective, but said people should try to enjoy themselves.  But experts suggested the findings may be of limited use as an individual’s approach to life was often ingrained.  At the start of the study, which was published in the European Heart Journal, participants were assessed for emotions ranging from hostility and anxiousness to joy, enthusiasm and contentment.  They were given a rating on a five-point scale to score their level of positive emotions.  By the end of the analysis, some 145 had developed heart disease – fewer than one in 10.  But for each rise in the happiness scale there was a 22% lower risk of developing heart disease.

“ Essentially spending a few minutes each day truly relaxed and enjoying yourself is certainly good for your mental health and may improve your physical health as well ”

Dr. Karina Davidson

The team believes happier people may have better sleeping patterns, be less liable to suffer stress and be more able to move on from upsetting experiences – all of which can reduce physical strain on the body.  Lead researcher Dr Karina Davidson admitted more research was needed into the link, but said she would still recommend that people try to develop a more positive outlook.  She said all too often people just waited for their “two weeks of vacation to have fun” when instead they should seek enjoyment each day.  “If you enjoy reading novels, but never get around to it, commit to getting 15 minutes or so of reading in.  If walking or listening to music improves you mood, get those activities in your schedule.  “Essentially spending a few minutes each day truly relaxed and enjoying yourself is certainly good for your mental health and may improve your physical health as well.”

It is not the first study to suggest there is a link between happiness and health.  But Ellen Mason, of the British Heart Foundation, suggested such an association may be of limited value anyway.  “We know that improving your mood isn’t always easy – so we don’t know if it’s possible to change our natural levels of positivity.”  Cardiologist Iain Simpson, of the British Cardiovascular Society, added: “Things like reducing cholesterol and diabetes are more important when it comes to reducing heart disease.  “But at the end of the day it heart disease is still the biggest killer in the UK so anything you can do to help should not be ignored.”

© BBC MMX

Published: 2010/02/18 00:05:24 GMT

A Tipping Point For Homeopathy? Part II

 A Tipping Point For Homeopathy? Part II

A Tipping Point For Homeopathy? -Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.

A landmark paper on homeopathy and cancer has appeared in the February 2010 issue of the International Journal of Oncology. Scientists at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (MDA), led by Moshe Frenkel, MD, have confirmed the ability of four homeopathic remedies to induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) in breast cancer cell lines in the laboratory. The scientists in question were from the Integrative Medicine Program, the Department of Molecular Pathology, and the Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology of MDA. Their two Indian collaborators were from the Banerji Homeopathic Research Foundation, Kolkata, India, where these same remedies are employed clinically with apparent success. The four ultra-dilute remedies in question were Carcinosin, Phytolacca, Conium and Thuja. “The remedies exerted preferential cytotoxic effects against the two breast cancer cell lines, causing cell cycle delay/arrest and apoptosis” the authors wrote. It was particularly interesting that the cell-killing effects of two of the remedies investigated in this study, Carcinosin and Phytolacca, appeared similar to the activity of paclitaxel (Taxol), the most commonly used chemotherapeutic drug for breast cancer, when it was tested in the same two adenocarcinoma cell lines investigated in this study. Phytolacca is better known as pokeweed root, which grows as a towering weed in the US and elsewhere. Conium maculatum is poison hemlock, while Thuja occidentalis comes from the Eastern Arborvitae tree. Carcinosin is the only non-botanical in the group. It is made from a highly diluted extract of breast cancer tissue. These are typically used at the Banerjis’ clinic in India to treat breast cancer. The use of poisonous plants to treat cancer, while unusual, is not necessarily controversial. Madagascar periwinkle, for instance, yields the familiar vinca alkaloids–vincristine and vinblastine. The aforementioned paclitaxel (Taxol) is derived from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree. Even the use of a cancer tissue extract might be explained in immunological terms. No, what makes these remedies highly unusual is the degree to which they have been diluted. These are given in the Frenkel article as follows: Carcinosin, 30C; Conium maculatum, 3C; Phytolacca decandra, 200C and Thuja occidentalis, 30C. The “C” Number What exactly does this “C” number mean? It is indication of the dilution of the active ingredient in an inert medium such as water. Thus, a “3C” dilution means that there is one molecule of an herb like Conicum maculatum in one million molecules of inert medium. It is theoretically possible that a medicine could consist of just one part of a chemical in a million molecules of inert liquid. For instance, we know that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set a limit of 2 ppm for polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs) in fish (two parts of PCBs per million parts of fish tissue, per Maxim, 1984). But as the “C” number rises, so does the dilution. Samuel Hahnemann, MD, the 19th century inventor of homeopathy, used 30C dilutions for many diseases. This means that there is 1 molecule in “10 to the minus sixty” molecules of inert solvent. On average, this means you would have to give two billion doses of a 30C remedy per second to 6 billion people for 4 billion years in order to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient! TO BE CONCLUDED, WITH REFERENCES, NEXT WEEK. –Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D. http://www.cancerdecisions.com/

Double-Helix Water

Double-Helix Water

David L. Gann and Shui-yin Lo, PhD © 2009

D_ANDY Publishing | LAS VEGAS

Introduction by: C. Norman Shealy, MD, PhD

President, Holos Institutes of Health, Inc., Professor Emeritus of Energy Medicine, Holos University Graduate Seminary Founding President, American Holistic Medical Association

Your current daily U.S. lifestyle, hand in hand with the colossal giant known as modern medicine, is killing you.

Quite a dramatic statement coming from someone who spent his entire life practicing medicine, wouldn’t you agree? But I should know; I have seen and lived the change within my profession for more than fifty years, through treating over forty thousand patients, and I can say with all honesty the above is a factual statement.

For years I needed to be careful of what I said. Oh, I have been considered somewhat of a rebel within the medical community, especially in my long investigative research into Alternative Medicine; but because of my background as a neurosurgeon and the results that I have been known for, I was able to speak . . . well, most of my mind. There was still a line that one did not cross—certain words that were not to be uttered; cure, for instance, was not part of polite vocabulary at medical conventions. Yet I loved my profession and have always felt a deep kindred belonging to an alliance of the best minds and, on the whole, the most dedicated individuals alive.

I knew as a young child that I would become a physician and quest to cure all ills, and I must say that I still have that same enthusiasm. But along the way I discovered, as in any group—be it engineers, scientists or whoever—that there is a political side to survival. Some things are better left unsaid.

Today, thankfully, I am retired. I have a very comfortable lifestyle. I live with a wonderful wife of nearly fifty years on our beautiful 256-acre horse ranch and no one owns me. I don’t have to write; I’m not looking for my rent, not yearning for more accolades: bottom line, I can’t be bought; but I can and will speak my mind—all of it. The medical politics of survival no longer apply to me.

But, digressing, it has not always been this easy to speak. Any good scientist (as I consider any good physician) at some point in his or her career begins to “feel” this element of hypocrisy. What do I mean by that? One should not fear discovery or fear researching an area because it is considered outside the current accepted “comfort zone” of knowledge. I am not going to start complaining, as my purpose is not to point a finger of fault but to demonstrate that if we can see this mechanism of hypocrisy for what it truly is, maybe we can get past it.

For, in truth, it is a form of simple economics: whoever has the most dollars controls the evolution of a subject. Now, herein lies the problem, especially in the arena of science, where health and medicine rightly belong. Scientists are not so concerned with economics and should be, by their very nature, lousy marketers, as they are not captivated by the discovery process from the viewpoint of how this will appeal to the mass market. But there are those who are, and they have learned that he who controls science controls the cash register.

So let’s look at who has controlled this evolution of my subject, medicine. I was sixteen when I entered Duke University shortly after World War II as an undergraduate in 1949. During that generation, the family doctor was the pivotal point within the community for medical knowledge and, usually, was not that wealthy. He lived better than most but the machine that built today’s empire was really not in full swing. A family doc was well respected and his (the vast majority were men) word was synonymous with truth and compassion. He was unquestioned in his actions—one did what the doctor said, period. It was a humanistic venture seeded with great minds seeking answers to help their fellow citizens.  So what happened? It still should be a humanistic venture but something has changed. I believe that medicine has been pulled away from its original goal.

If you read Robert O. Becker, MD, in his book The Body Electric (1985), he succinctly characterizes this shift in our profession, one that led the medical profession away from the objective of the patient’s wellbeing to one of “balancing chemistry” (the current pharmaceutical industry’s buzzword).

As a young medical student at the end of the war working in New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Becker describes how lobar pneumonia (an infection that involves only a single lobe, or section, of a lung) was a prominent U.S.killer, crossing all social boundaries, killing rich or poor, old and young. Becker tells how, within a few days of a patient contracting the bacteria, a definitive prediction of the outcome of the disease would occur: “The fever rose to 104 or 105 degrees Fahrenheit and delirium set in. At that point we had two signs to go by: If the skin remained hot and dry, the victim would die; sweating meant the patient would pull through.”

At the time, he correctly concluded that the outcome of the struggle between the bacteria and the victim was determined solely by the patient’s own resistance—50 percent died and the half that walked out of the hospital did so because of a working immune system. Prior to this point in time, medicine was searching for this holy grail: a true understanding of one’s own natural defenses.

The surgeon can cut, remove, or rearrange the tissues, and sew up the wound, but only the patient can do the healing. Surgeons must always be humble before this miracle. We must treat the tissues with sure, deft gentleness, and above all we must do no harm, for we are nothing more than nature’s assistants.

—Dr. John Mulholland, from The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker, MD

In 1961 I was fortunate to be selected as a Research Fellow in Neurosurgery under the Nobel Laureate Sir John Eccles. As a young physician such an appointment tends to give one a bit of an air of confidence, and now, nearly fifty years after that event, I can admit that the appointment added a slight swagger to my gait. But the noble ingredient of this great profession of medicine is that the realities of life-threatening illness can soon humble one, and you would have to be a fairly insensitive soul not to be awed by the struggle faced by your patients. And insensitive would not be the correct adjective to describe one as a healer if these experiences did not appeal to one’s intellect to ask the correct question: What triggers the immune response? And why did some individuals’ innate immune systems fail? What are the secrets to the workings of that mechanism and how could medicine use this to truly heal (and here is this rather distasteful word), cure, people?

That—a person’s own defenses—was the focal point in medicine’s search for understanding until Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, around 1930. But penicillin was not readily available to the general public until after WWII, when it quickly became known as “the miracle drug.” Not only could one survive pneumonia with the simple administering of a white powder, but the patient could face a host of other bacterial infections with complete immunity. However, its effect on medicine in the 1950s was so much more than the mere conquest of many bacterial infections.

With its vast deployment, penicillin created a complete shift in viewpoint toward treatment, not merely of bacterial infections, but in how one viewed a patient. It brought about the new awareness that a “magic bullet” existed. No longer did the  physician need to stand in awe of the body’s own defenses—“Just give me more bullets.” So it was penicillin that was the double-edged sword of the twentieth century. It unquestionably changed the course of history and is properly held, along with its discoverer, as a crowning moment in modern medicine.

But now, follow this change in medicine further, as we are going to go from science to marketing. It was science that made the discovery of the antibiotic penicillin possible, but it was not the use and effectiveness of the antibiotic penicillin that caught the eye of numerous  ledgling

pharmaceutical companies after World War II; it was the potential to manufacture, sell and distribute “this new modern science” that truly spelled miracle in the form of financial success. Here is where economics begins to take over the evolution of a subject. From the roots of the penicillin discovery, a marketing machine was built and the pursuit of a chemical approach to the treatment of all acute and chronic diseases alike was born. Today, not only does the pharmaceutical industry dominate healthcare within the U.S., it has turned into a worldwide machine. It has funneled billions in profit back into advertising to create a U.S. public mind-set that says: Health issues are only manageable by taking drugs.

This is not true. A vast number of chronic degenerative conditions do not respond to drugs, since, in most cases, the underlying condition is not addressed. Consequently, only stronger prescription drugs, many severely addictive, will mask or lessen the pain. Most health issues—up to 85 percent—are best addressed without drugs and surgery.

Now, I would love to blame these international conglomerates for all our problems, but, in truth, we as doctors have allowed an industry that produces billions of dollars of chemicals for the general public each year to take over our profession. So we can all put down our pitchforks and lanterns, at least for now, and look at what is at the bottom of this.

How did we get into this situation? Actually, it is too simple. We allowed Marketing and Science to sleep in the same bed. Only this incestuous relationship could ever describe such a union.

It should be obvious that the purpose of science (especially in medical research science) is to find cures, whereas the purpose of marketing is to create a want and a need for a product. If an industry is publicly traded and has stockholders demanding increased profits and market share, isn’t there a conflict? One interest says, “Find a cure that makes no need for the product,” and the other says, “Find a way to sell more product.” This is not new news. Look at the petroleum industry. Is it any wonder we have no clean, safe energies? Gee. It comes down to dollars. People work for these industries and after a while a person really gets accustomed to his or her paycheck. In 2007 the federal government announced that the health industry would balloon to $4.1 trillion a year by 2017. It’s growing out of control.

With that kind of an income stream, for the most part—at least from a capitalistic point of view—one could say, “What’s the problem? How do I get some of those dollars? Put me on that gravy train.” But here is the problem—and it’s a serious one—your children and grandchildren

will die at a much younger age and their lives will be unhealthy ones filled with medical trauma and stress unless we confront the madness that has become modern medicine.

You want evidence? It is a published statistic that 56 people die in the U.S. each hour from iatrogenic causes (death caused inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment [pharmaceutical drug] or diagnostic procedure); that’s approximately 1,300 each day, 490,000 each year. Forget about cancer and heart disease. These are preventable deaths.

In illness, about 15 percent of the time, especially in the treatment of trauma and life-threatening situations, your life depends upon the near miracles of modern medicine.

What you need to avoid like the plague is the marketing-science form of medicine.

However, up to 85 percent of illnesses are the result of unhealthy habits. My fifty years of medical practice have convinced me without a doubt that there is a better, simpler, cheaper and safer method of dealing with these types of illness, which 85 percent of my patients have responded to remarkably.

So, am I saying that the pharmaceutical industry is to blame for today’s failing healthcare system? No—no more than any other single factor in this equation of what is wrong with our healthcare system. Then the marketers are the evil ones, right? That doesn’t really fly either—no room filled with fat, old evil men in dark suits, sitting down at a bird’s-eye-maple conference table in uptown Manhattan, devising how to do you in. If only it were so easy, we could just grab those pitchforks again. Then what is the answer?

It is so simple. Knowledge, real knowledge—we need to know the truth! To ask the right question and research the right area without bias! Why in heaven’s name have we turned over our research to those who want to sell more drugs? What happened to real research? What happened to looking for the holy grail of medicine—the mechanics of the immune system?

And why on earth are we looking down a pharmaceutical aisle thinking one of those neatly packaged, superbly marketed petrochemical preparations is going to fix an organism that spent the last countless millions of years repairing its own ills without a single mistake? That’s right! If you are reading this, your DNA is the summation of every right response to an illness for at least a billion years. Your genetic line has won every fight with every other organism that ever existed. Plus, that exact record, that code (DNA), is just as alive in you today as it was during the days of the dinosaurs.

If I were to tell you that I got my blue eyes from my dad, you would nod in agreement and that would be that—we would both agree that simple genetics pass down certain traits, generation to generation. But could there exist even more basic relationships, not just from our recent ancestors, but from the first biological beginnings of life? Could there be some sort of code within the code—something prior to DNA that is an integral part of our immune response?

As physicians we may sit back smugly and pat ourselves on the back, looking at all the strides medicine has made over the last hundred or so years, and it is true that much has been discovered; but in comparison to the volume of information stored in a single strand of DNA, it would be like comparing one glass of water to all of the oceans on Earth. And if anyone were to protest such a statement, let me remind him or her that although it is true that modern medicine has been burning the midnight oil for several hundred years, dedicating itself to the noble mission of conquering disease, the human form and all its ancestors have been doing the same for over a billion years—totally successfully. That’s right—not ONE iatrogenic death; zero—and on top of that, the body has kept a perfect running record of each successful action. Compare that to the medical-chart-record mistakes found in any hospital on any single day!

You are sitting somewhere reading this introduction because your body and the body before it and the body before that, for millions and millions of years, healed itself. Your DNA is the exact record of your body fighting off every known infection, virus and predator in the history of Earth. It is as simple as that. Your body is the exact record of a perfect health score for more than a billion years!

I founded the American Holistic Medical Association back in the seventies because I felt, as did many others within my profession, that the Hippocratic oath of “Do no harm” was the cornerstone of healing. There are so many drugs being peddled by the pharmaceutical companies (I will use my coined word here)—peddled by the PharmacoMafia—that the American public does not need.

If medicine’s primary purpose is to heal, then pushing drugs that do more harm than good is not moving toward the original goal.

Now, the key is—and the essence of the holistic medical movement was and still is—to get the body back on its own code and remove the barriers that current society has accumulated around it and in it and on it so that it can function as it has for eons.

And what I have been doing for the last thirty years, at least, is to understand which natural substances the body needs for the code to function. Interestingly enough, most are simple; but they should be— they are what the body has used for millions of years to build its own defenses. Yet this is counter to the current public’s thinking: Modern is better; new, fantastic discoveries in medicine are happening every day; Dr. House is sure to save us all. (Dr. Gregory House is the central character of a popular FOX television medical drama series,

House, M.D.)  Where do these viewpoints come from? Modern media. Might there be some vested interest in getting you to have such a viewpoint?

In the last hundred years we have been chasing the bacteria and virus as the root or creators of illness, and we have been demanding that those pharmacy guys get their act together to find us some new magic bullets. But wait. . . . Wait a minute. Who was watching the store before that? Come to think of it, there were no pharmaceutical shops along Tyrannosaurus Avenue.

That’s right, we survived without the pills. And how did we survive? We survived  ecause of the stored information in our DNA. Nature likes to record our successes. The pharmaceutical industry has made it “normal” to be on drugs for the rest of your life. If you are sad, take this; if you are shy, take that. If you sneeze, you must have an allergy and you need this. Can’t sleep? . . .Don’t worry.

Read The Truth About the Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, MD. Marcia is the former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and is currently a member of the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine. It’s a good read and gives no quarter on this openly bizarre spectacle of the takeover of medical research by the pharmaceutical industry. There are simple healthful things that will handle the day-to-day stress of living. Sure, they take some willpower and some commitment, but unfortunately most people do not include them in their lives until they have a heart attack or a stroke. It is as plain as that. I hate to say it but it takes a club to the forehead for most of us to wake up to this fact. Then we change our lives for the better and we do get well. What I am preaching here is that medicine must be focused on the further understanding of the workings of the healing process. We need to get back to our roots. There is so much we can learn about our bodies if we look for real knowledge—not a great sales slogan.

Did you know that we share the same roots of DNA as those of a salamander? So why can’t we regenerate an entire limb? A salamander can. Can we? Shouldn’t we find out?

I wanted to write this introduction primarily to say that we must continue to seek knowledge in the right place. And I believe the following research is an excellent place to look—right from where we came: water. This is a huge missing link in our understanding of our past, and it is our most fundamental relationship to our beginnings.

Medicine, real science—not the sale of drugs for profit—needs to be pushed forward, and that is why this research should be supported. It is an important and detailed investigation of the most basic and abundant molecule in our bodies: water—H2O. I believe when we fully understand this molecule’s relationship to the body, it will be one of the most important discoveries since penicillin. And though, through the hands of the marketer, penicillin sort of derailed us from searching for the holy grail of healing, it is my hopeful prayer that this and other discoveries like it will soon lead us back to that quest.

The Curious Case of Charles Darwin and Homeopathy

Dana Ullman MPH

Abstract 
In 1849, Charles Darwin was so ill that he was unable to work one out of every 3 days, and after having various troubling symptoms for 2–12 years, he wrote to a friend that he was ‘going the way of all flesh’. He sought treatment from Dr James Manby Gully, a medical doctor who used water cure and homeopathic medicines. Despite being highly skeptical of these treatments, he experienced a dramatic improvement in his health, though some of his digestive and skin symptoms returned various times in his life. He grew to appreciate water cure, but remained skeptical of homeopathy, even though his own experiments on insectivore plants using what can be described as homeopathic doses of ammonia salts surprised and shocked him with their significant biological effect. Darwin even expressed concern that he should publish these results. Two of Darwin’s sons were as incredulous as he was, but their observations confirmed the results of his experiments. Darwin was also known to have read a book on evolution written by a homeopathic physician that Darwin described as similar to his own but ‘goes much deeper.’
Introduction

The year 2009 is an auspicious year to the memory of Charles Darwin. It is the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species (1859). And yet few people know that, according to Darwin’s own letters, it is uncertain that he would have lived long enough to have written this important scientific work in 1859 if he had not received treatment in 1849 from Dr James Manby Gully, a homeopathic physician who also used water cure, homeopathic medicines and other unorthodox treatments. This remarkable series of experiences changed the history of science.

When Darwin was just 16 years old, he spent a summer as an apprentice to his father, who was a medical doctor. Later, he attended Edinburgh University to study medicine. However, he was repulsed by the brutality of surgery and the primitive medical treatments of his day. He initially studied to be a naturalist, but his father insisted that he attend Cambridge University to become a clergyman (at that time, members of the clergy earned a better living than many other professions). After graduating from Cambridge in 1831, he began what became a 5-year journey on the HMS Beagle surveying the coast of South America. On board the ship, Darwin suffered from seasickness, and in October 1833, he caught fever in Argentina. In July 1834, while returning from the Andes down to the coast of Chile, he fell so ill that he spent a month in bed.

 The serious Illness and Near Death of Charles Darwin
Since 1837, Darwin was frequently incapacitated with episodes of stomach pains, vomiting, severe boils, heart palpitations, trembling and other symptoms. Today, some physicians have speculated that Darwin caught Chagas disease from insect bites in South America, while others have suggested that he suffered from Ménière’s disease, but the orthodox physicians of Darwin’s day had no idea what his problem was, and all of their treatments simply made him worse. [Recently, some scientists have speculated that Darwin suffered from systemic lactose intolerance (1), but this remains speculation and may at best represent only one aspect of a more complex disease syndrome.]

In 1847, Darwin’s illness worsened. Again he experienced frequent episodes of vomiting and weakness, but now he also experienced fainting spells and seeing spots in front of his eyes. In March, 1849, he was so sick that he thought he was dying. Darwin wrote to his good friend, J.D. Hooker, an English botanist, that he was ‘unable to do anything one day out of three & was altogether too dispirited to write to you or to do anything but what I was compelled. I thought I was rapidly going the way of all flesh’ (2).

It is indeed difficult to say that Charles Darwin would have been healthy enough to live another 10 years, let alone to work as diligently on the body of work that his seminal book required for its publication in 1859 unless some type of effective treatment significantly improved his health. Lucky for all of humanity, Charles Darwin sought out a different type of medical care and experienced a profound improvement in his health.

 Dr. James Manby Gully:  Homeopath and Hydrotherapist
It was Capt. Sullivan of the HMS Beagle who initially told Darwin about a different type of medical treatment provided by Dr James Manby Gully (1808–1883). One of Darwin’s cousins, William Darwin Fox, told him that two friends had benefited greatly from Gully’s care. Dr Gully, a medical graduate of the University of Edinburgh, was an unyielding opponent of the use of drugs of that era. Gully was particularly critical of polypharmacy, the common practice of using multiple drugs concurrent for a patient, a practice that continues today (3). Gully’s medical practice did not simply provide water cure and dietary advice; he also prescribed homeopathic medicines and recommended medical clairvoyant readings. In 1846, he had authored a popular book entitled Water Cure in Chronic Disease (3) that Darwin was known to have read.

Darwin chose to go to seek care from Dr Gully, and decided to take the entire family with him (wife Emma and their seven children) (4). Dr Gully and his health spa were situated in Malvern (just southwest of Birmingham), around 150 miles from the Darwin’s home.

Virtually every biography of Charles Darwin references his health problems and acknowledges that the one physician who provided the effective treatment to him was Dr James Manby Gully. However, most of these biographies make reference to Dr Gully as a ‘hydrotherapist’, and only few mention that he was a homeopathic physician.

After being at Dr Gully’s spa for just 9 days, Darwin lamented that Gully had prescribed homeopathic medicine to him: ‘I grieve to say that Dr Gully gives me homeopathic medicines three times a day, which I take obediently without an atom of faith.’ Darwin continued: ‘I like Dr Gully much – he is certainly an able man’ (5). The fact that Darwin saw Gully as being ‘able’ was still not enough to convince him that homeopathic medicines were effective.

The 1846 edition of Dr Gully’s book was during his earlier stage of experience in using homeopathic medicines. In this edition of his book, Gully notes his use of homeopathic medicines, though he doubts its efficacy in certain chronic diseases. He wrote in the first edition of his book, ‘although I might be induced to try to subdue a passing but troublesome symptom, I could not trust to remove the essential nature of a chronic malady by homeopathic means’ (p. 83) (3).

However, by 1848, Dr Gully became a formal member of the British Society of Homeopathy (6), and he maintained his membership through at least 1871 (7). In subsequent editions of his book, his favorable experiences with homeopathy led him to change his writings on the subject. In the 5th edition of this book (1856), for instance, he writes that distinct from the use of conventional medicines in the treatment of chronic constipation where drugs do not cure and lead to relapse, it is significantly different with homeopathic care: ‘In fact, cases abound in which homeopathic treatment alone has effectually and permanently cure habitual costiveness’ (p. 48). In reference to the treatment of headaches, the use of homeopathic medicines is ‘not only justifiable but desirable’ (p. 48).

Finally, Gully continues by asserting, ‘Homeopathic practitioners have observed that patients under the water cure are more susceptible to the action of their remedies than other persons, and that therefore the results may be more accurately calculated. I have found this assertion to be substantially correct; and it confirms the vivifying influence of the water cure over the bodily functions’ (p. 48). Gully’s observation that the use of concurrent treatment of water cure and homeopathic medicine seems to echo the experiences of naturopathic physicians who have been known to use these treatments together along with nutritional advice since the 19th century.

And even though Darwin was extremely skeptical of water-cure and homeopathic medicine, just two days later (March 30, 1849) Darwin acknowledged, ‘I have already received so much benefit that I really hope my health will be much renovated’ (8). After 8 days a skin eruption broke out all over Darwin’s legs, and he was actually pleased to experience this problem because he had previously observed that his physical and mental health improved noticeably after having skin eruptions. He went a month without vomiting, a very rare experience for him, and even gained some weight. One day he surprised himself by being able to walk 7 miles. He wrote to a friend, ‘I am turning into a mere walking & eating machine’ (9).

After just a month of treatment, Charles had to admit that Gully’s treatments were not quackery after all. After 16 weeks, he felt like a new man, and by June he was able to go home to resume his important work. Darwin actually wrote that he was ‘of almost perfect health’ (p. 108) (8).

It is worthy to note that homeopaths have consistently observed that treatment with homeopathic medicines often leads to skin rashes, other externalizations of the disease process, or the re-experience of old symptoms prior to significant overall improvement in health. Homeopaths make reference to this healing process as ‘Hering’s law of cure’, named by Constantine Hering, MD, the father of American homeopathy, who first wrote about it.

Despite Darwin’s greatly improved health, he never publicly attributed any benefits directly to homeopathy. However, one must also realize that even though homeopathy achieved impressive popularity among British royalty, numerous literary greats, and many of the rich and powerful at that time, there was incredible animosity to it from orthodox physicians and scientists. Because Darwin was just beginning to propose his own new ideas about evolution, it would have been professional suicide to broadcast his positive experiences with homeopathy. Having to defend homeopathy would have damaged his credibility among his colleagues who were extremely antagonistic to this emerging medical specialty.

Serious antagonism to Dr John Forbes occurred when he expressed some positive remarks about homeopathy and its founder, Dr Samuel Hahnemann, in a book that he authored that was primarily critical of homeopathy. Even though Forbes was a distinguished Scottish physician, the editor of a leading conventional medical journal, and the Physician to Queen Victoria (1841–1861), Forbes was viciously attacked for his minor praise of homeopathy, and many British physicians withdrew their subscription to his previously popular journal, leading to the fatal demise of this previously successful journal (10).

Eighteen months after first going to Dr Gully, Darwin showed his own skepticism of homeopathy when he wrote in a letter:

You speak about Homeopathy, which is a subject which makes me more wrath, even than does Clairvoyance [in reference to clairvoyance, the woman who Gully used was thought to be able to look directly into a person's body]. Clairvoyance so transcends belief, that one’s ordinary faculties are put out of the question, but in homeopathy common sense and common observation come into play, and both these must go to the dogs, if the infinitesimal doses have any effect whatever. How true is a remark I saw the other day by Quetelet [a famous statistician of that time], in respect to evidence of curative processes, viz., that no one knows in disease what is the simple result of nothing being done, as a standard with which to compare homoeopathy, and all other such things. It is a sad flaw, I cannot but think, in my beloved Dr. Gully, that he believes in everything. When Miss — was very ill, he had a clairvoyant girl to report on internal changes, a mesmerist to put her to sleep, an homeopathist, viz. Dr. —, and himself as hydropathist! and the girl recovered (11).

Along with his skepticism in this letter, he also noted the case of a specific woman who had been cured by Dr Gully and his team. Darwin may have been very skeptical of homeopathy, but he had observed its results on his own health and in that of others, and he remained surprised and unconvinced.

Darwin occasionally experienced relapses of digestive and skin symptoms over the years, so he returned to Dr Gully’s clinic for more treatments, staying 2–8 weeks. Although Darwin complained during his first visit that he experienced ‘complete stagnation of the mind’, he did not have similar problems during later visits to Gully’s clinic and spa. In fact, he asserted that his mind was alert and that his scientific writing was progressing well (p. 113) (9).

He lived for 33 more years, and it is surprising and confusing that the story of Darwin’s successful experiences with hydrotherapy and homeopathy has not become an integral part of the history of science and medicine today. After significant improvement in his persistent nausea and vomiting, frequent fainting spells, spots before his eyes, incapacitating stomach pains, severe fatigue, widespread boils, nerve-wrecking tremors and heart palpitations, he was considerably more able to do his seminal scientific work.

One of Charles Darwin’s children, Annie, did not have good results with Dr Gully’s treatment. In 1849, the same year in which the Darwin family stayed at Dr Gully’s spa for 3 months, Annie contracted scarlet fever at the age of 8 years. There is no record of Dr Gully providing treatment for her at this time, but when she was 10, she became very ill. Dr Gully predicted that his treatment would lead to her recovery, but she died under his care. Although Darwin had experienced dramatically positive results from Gully’s combination of treatments, Darwin felt less comfortable having his children receive some of such unorthodox care. There is no record of what treatments she did or did not receive, but in any case, Charles and his entire family were devastated by the loss of Annie.

Some other people of significant notoriety who benefited from Dr Gully’s care include Charles Dickens (novelist and writer), Lord Alfred Tennyson (poet), Florence Nightingale (famed nurse), George Eliot (British novelist), Thomas Carlyle (Scottish essayist, satirist and historian), John Ruskin (art critic and social critic), Edward Bulwer-Lytton (British novelist, playwright, and politician), Thomas Babington Macaulay (first Baron Macaulay, poet and politician), and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (12). Furthermore, three prime ministers sought Dr Gully’s care, including William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli and George Hamilton-Gordon, as well as Queen Victoria herself. Hamilton-Gordon described Dr Gully as ‘the most gifted physician of the age’ (13).

Dr Gully was not the only homeopathic physician to provide clinical care to cultural elite of the 19th century. In fact, many of the leading politicians, clergy, literary greats, musical geniuses, royalty and wealthy classes were known patients and even advocates of homeopathy (10,14).

Although there is no evidence that Darwin knew that so many other well-known ‘cultural heroes’ sought the care of Dr Gully, Darwin was pleased to hear when other people he knew received treatment from Gully. When his second cousin, William Darwin Fox, the man who introduced Darwin to entomology and to Dr Gully, had seen the doctor, Darwin expected him to have benefited from water cure and to be much stronger (15). When one considers that Darwin had previously received much medical care without positive results, Darwin’s letter to Fox on December 7, 1855, confirmed a different experience with Dr Gully: ‘Dr Gully did me much good’ (his emphasis).

Some of Darwin’s biographers never mention the homeopathic treatment he received. Those biographers who mention his longtime health problems tend to emphasize the hydrotherapy that Dr Gully’s spa provided and that Charles Darwin followed up on this treatment by regularly self-treating himself with cold baths and self-percussion of his body. A recent acclaimed biography of Darwin suggested the benefits he received were from a placebo effect, despite the inability to experience a similar placebo effect from the many other physicians he saw and the various treatments he attempted. This biography asserted that, ‘he persuaded himself that the water-torture was working’ (p. 112) (9).

 Darwin’s Continued Water Cure and Homeopathic Treatment
There is a long history of antagonism to homeopathic medicine from orthodoxy, and also a history of antagonism to water cure (16). While homeopathy has persisted internationally as a minority school of medical thought and practice (17–19), water cure as a medical treatment for chronic ailments has become marginalized or is hardly utilized today except by a minority of naturopathic physicians.

Darwin and many of his biographers have highlighted water cure in part because they simply could not believe that homeopathic medicines could provide any benefit. However, one must wonder if hydrotherapy alone could have provided these significant health benefits, especially in the first week of treatment that Darwin experienced. What is additionally intriguing about this story of Darwin is that it confirms an ultimately essential observation of truly effective healing methods: that they can and will be effective whether or not the person believes they will work.

Hardened skeptics insist that homeopathic treatment could not have helped Darwin (or anyone) and suggest that hydrotherapy must have been the method of therapeutic benefit. And yet, few orthodox physicians of that day or today would even consider using hydrotherapy for people with complex disease processes.

Despite the wide respect that Dr Gully received from his many illustrious patients, he was disliked greatly by select orthodox physicians. Sir Charles Hastings, a physician who later helped to found the British Medical Association, was Gully’s most vitriolic antagonist. Dr Hastings was so opposed hydrotherapy that he frequently wrote articles about its ‘dangers’, while he utilized a wide range of orthodox medical treatments that everyone would soon call simply barbaric (16). The additional drama to the lives of Gully and Hastings is that their sons were also antagonists to each other. Gully’s son, William Court Gully, became speaker of the British House of Lords (1895–1905), while Hastings’ son, George Woodyatt Hastings, became a lawyer and politician. Like his father, George Hastings was actively antagonistic to unconventional medical treatments.

Darwin’s letters also expressed his thoughts about conventional medicine of his time. He said emphatically that he had ‘no faith whatever in ordinary Doctoring’. And yet, after 12 years of persistent nausea and vomiting, Darwin acknowledged in 1856 that Dr Gully’s treatment in 1849 was successful enough that ‘never (or almost never) the vomiting returns’ (p. 238) (15).

When Dr Gully retired from his full-time practice in Malvern in the late 1850s, he chose Dr James Smith Ayerst (1824/5–1884) as his replacement. Not surprisingly, Ayerst was also a homeopathic physician. He served as assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy, was physician to Great Malvern, Worcestershire, ran a hydropathic establishment at Old Well House, Malvern Wells in conjunction with that of Dr Gully, and later, practiced homeopathy and hygienics in Torquay, Devon (20).

Darwin’s wife Emma wrote to W. Darwin Fox: ‘We like Dr Ayerst, tho’ he has not the influence of Dr Gully. Dr G. it is hopeless to try to see tho’ I must say he has been to see Ch. [Charles] twice & he quite approves of his treatment’ (Vol. XI, p. 643) (15). Darwin visited other hydrotherapy spas as well. In 1857 and 1859, he visited Moor Park, run by Edward Wickstead Lane, MD, a physician and hydrotherapist (not a homeopath). And perhaps not by happenstance, Darwin’s famed book On the Origin of Species was at the printing press, while he was at Ilkley Wells, a spa operated by Edmund Smith, MD, another homeopathic physician (Vol. XI, p. 361) (15).

Darwin Experiments with Homeopathic Doses 
It is also fascinating to note that Darwin himself conducted several experiments evaluating the effects of small doses on an insect-eating plant (Drosera rotundifolia, commonly called sundew) that is commonly used in homeopathic medicine. He found that solutions of certain salts of ammonia stimulated the glands of the plant’s tentacles and caused the plant to turn inward. He made this solution more and more dilute, but the plant still was able to detect the presence of the salt. On July 7, 1874, he wrote to a well-known physiologist, Professor F. C. Donders of Utrecht, Netherlands, that he observed that 1/4 000 000 of a grain had a demonstrable effect upon the Drosera, and Darwin was shocked and dismayed to write, ‘the 1/20 000 000th of a grain of the crystallised salt does the same. Now, I am quite unhappy at the thought of having to publish such a statement’ (11).

Astonished by his observation, Darwin likened it to a dog that perceives the odor of an animal a quarter of a mile distant. He said: ‘Yet these particles must be infinitely smaller than the one twenty millionth of a grain of phosphate of ammonia’ (21). Darwin said about this spectacular phenomenon:

The reader will best realize this degree of dilution by remembering that 5,000 ounces would more than fill a thirty-one gallon cask [barrel]; and that to this large body of water one grain of the salt was added; only half a drachm, or thirty minims, of the solution being poured over a leaf. Yet this amount sufficed to cause the inflection of almost every tentacle, and often the blade of the leaf. … My results were for a long time incredible, even to myself, and I anxiously sought for every source of error. … The observations were repeated during several years. Two of my sons, who were as incredulous as myself, compared several lots of leaves simultaneously immersed in the weaker solutions and in water, and declared that there could be no doubt about the difference in their appearance. … In fact every time that we perceive an odor, we have evidence that infinitely smaller particles act on our nerves (p. 170) (21).

In Darwin’s book on his experiments with Drosera, he expressed complete amazement at the hypersensitivity of a plant to extremely small doses of certain chemicals: ‘Moreover, this extreme sensitiveness, exceeding that of the most delicate part of the human body, as well as the power of transmitting various impulses from one part of the leaf to another, have been acquired without the intervention of any nervous system’ (p. 272) (21).

Darwin also discovered that Drosera is not simply sensitive to every substance. He tested various alkaloids and other substances that act powerfully on humans and animals who have a nervous system but produced no effect on Drosera. He concluded that the ‘power of transmitting an influence to other parts of the leaf, causing movement, or modified secretion, or aggregation, does not depend on the presence of a diffused element, allied to nerve-tissue’ (p. 273) (21).

Darwin confirmed an important homeopathic observation that living systems are hypersensitive to only certain substances. Sadly and strangely, conventional scientists have attacked homeopaths for using extremely small doses of substances without any appreciation for the homeopaths’ credo that living systems—whether human, animal, or plant—will be hypersensitive to a limited number of substances (and the homeopathic method of individualizing treatment is a refined method to find this substance or substances).

The doses in which Darwin tested above are not as dilute as most other homeopathic medicines, some of which are so dilute that, in all probability, they may not have any remaining molecules of the original medicine in the solution. However, a large number of homeopaths and a larger number of the general public use what are called ‘low potencies’, which includes doses of medicines in the range in which Darwin was testing ammonia salts. Furthermore, Darwin noted the remarkable effects that his extremely small doses had on a plant that did not have a nervous system, thereby suggesting that human beings (and other animals) may be sensitive to even smaller doses of certain substances. However, there is no known record of Darwin testing even smaller doses on plants, let alone on humans.

Darwin was so enraptured by his experiments on Drosera that on November 24, 1860, just 1 year after the publication of his seminal book, he wrote ‘at this present moment I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world’ (22).

Darwin’s Admiration of Another Homeopath 
The archive of letters from Darwin includes one other interesting reference to homeopathy in which its significance is obvious but its meaning not perfectly clear. This was in an August 20, 1862, letter to Asa Gray, a professor of botany (of which the first part, shown below in brackets, was probably written by Francis Darwin, his son and assistant, who collated his father’s letters):

[The greater number of the letters of 1862 deals with the Orchid work, but the wave of conversion to Evolution was still spreading, and reviews and letters bearing on the subject still came in numbers. As an example of the odd letters he received may be mentioned one which arrived in January of this year] from a German homoeopathic doctor, an ardent admirer of the ‘Origin.’ Had himself published nearly the same sort of book, but goes much deeper. Explains the origin of plants and animals on the principles of homoeopathy or by the law of spirality. Book fell dead in Germany. Therefore would I translate it and publish it in England (p. 175) (11).

What is intriguing about Darwin’s statement is that he asserted that this writing by a homeopathic doctor is similar to his own but ‘goes much deeper’.

Robert Jütte, PhD, chief historian at the Robert Bosch Institute in Stuttgart, Germany, where Hahnemann’s casebooks reside and which may have the largest homeopathic library in the world, has determined that this German homeopath was probably Augustus Wilhelm Koch (1805–1886) (Jütte, R. Personal Communication, March 29–30, 2006). Koch was a conventionally trained physician, graduated from the University of Tubingen, Germany in 1831. He began to study and practice homeopathy within a couple of years, and at the invitation of some influential families in Stuttgart, he moved there and developed a successful homeopathic practice. In 1846, he wrote a 613-page book called Die Homöopathie, physiologisch, pathologisch und therapeutisch begründet: oder das Gesetz des Lebens im gesunden und kranken (The homeopathic, physiologically, pathologically and therapeutically foundations: or the law of the life in the healthy and ill).

Dr Jütte notes that in the introduction to this book (p. xv) Koch explains homeopathy scientifically by including it in a more general ‘Grundgesetz des organischen Lebens’, which could be translated as ‘law of spirality’. A whole chapter is devoted to the evolution of crystals, plants, and animals.

A year after Dr Koch published this book he moved to Philadelphia, though before leaving Europe, he was made an honorary member of the Homeopathic Institute of Paris. When in the USA, Koch was an active member of the American Institute of Homeopathy and Pennsylvania state and Philadelphia county homeopathic medical societies. He even served on the board of trustees of Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia (23). A close friend and colleague of America’s preeminent teacher of homeopathy, Dr Constantine Hering (1800–1880), Dr Koch was one of his pallbearers.

Although Koch lived in the USA and could speak and write in English, he probably still sought Darwin (or someone else) whose mother tongue was English in order to have the most accurate translation. Sadly, his master work was never published in English.

Despite Darwin’s personal experiences and significant successes as a homeopathic patient, he never publicly acknowledged the benefits he received. And despite his own experiments on plants using homeopathic doses, he never used the word ‘homeopathic’ in his public writings. Although these actions may seem surprising, Darwin’s decision to avoid reference to homeopathy was an important part of his own survival strategy.

Ultimately, even though Charles Darwin had a long-time skepticism of homeopathic medicine, his life and health seems to have been impacted by it, and he engaged in experimentation that verified the power of extremely small doses on plants. Furthermore, he was found to express appreciation for the contributions to science that select homeopathic physicians were known to provide.

2009 is the year in which we honor Charles Darwin’s 200th birth anniversary and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book, originally published on November 24, 1859. When commemorating the many vital contributions that Charles Darwin made to science, we should not ignore the therapeutic contributions that may have allowed Darwin to live beyond his own life expectations and that seemingly played an important role in improving his physical and mental health.

When physicians and scientists today consider how much resistance Darwin experienced to his new ideas and how much resistance still exists for them, perhaps the same physicians and scientists should also reflect on and learn from the far greater resistance that they themselves have given to homeopathic medicine, hydrotherapy, and other unconventional medical treatments. It is indeed ironic that so many physicians and scientists over the past 150 years have vehemently obstructed the acceptance, the growth and the development of the unconventional medical treatments that seem to have lengthened Darwin’s life. Until and unless physicians and scientists learn from history, they (we) will continue to make the same mistakes and simply delay the evolution of a truly healthy medical care system.

References 

1.Campbell AK, Matthews SB. Darwin’s illness revealed. Postgrad Med J ( 2005;) 81:: 248–51.[Abstract/Free Full Text]

2.Darwin correspondence project. (last accessed October 22, 2009). Letter 1236—Darwin, C. R. to Hooke, J. D., 28 Mar 1849. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-1236.html.

3.Gully JM. Water Cure in Chronic Disease ( 1846;) London: John Churchill. 46.

4.Keynes RD. His Daughter and Human Evolution ( 2002;) New York: Riverhead.

5.Darwin correspondence project. (last accessed October 22, 2009). Letter 1234—Darwin, C. R. to Darwin, S. E. [19 Mar 1849] http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-1234.html.

6.Atkin G. The British and Foreign Homœopathic Medical Directory and Record ( 1853;) London: Aylott. 45.

7.Homoeopathic Directory of Great Britain and Ireland and Annual Abstract of the Homoeopathic Literature ( 1871;) (last accessed October 22, 2009). 55:. London: Harry Turner. http://books.google.com/books/pdf/ homeopathic_medical_directory_of_great_b.pdf?id=H94NAAAAQAAJ&output=pdf&sig=ACfU3U2vjPFZP4LlTreQpE2HDSkra0mnXw& source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0.

8.Burkhardt F, ed. Charles Darwin’s Letters: A Selection (1825–1859) ( 1996;) 107:. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9.Quammen D. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution ( 2006;) New York: WW Norton. 112.

10.  Ullman D. The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy ( 2007;) Berkeley: North Atlantic. 114–15.

11.  Darwin F, ed. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin . New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1903. Letter of September 4, 1850, 341.

12.  Desmond A, Moore J. Darwin ( 1992;) New York: Warner. 363.

13.  Ruddick J. Death at the Priory: Sex, Love and Murder in Victorian England ( 2001;) New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 2.

14.  Feingold E. Book review: the homeopathic revolution: why famous people and cultural heroes choose homeopathy. eCAM ( 2008;) doi:10.1093/ecam/nen024.

15.  Burkhardt F, Smith S, eds. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin ( 1985;) VI:. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 346.

16.  Bradley J, Depree M. A shadow of orthodoxy? An epistemology of British hydropathy, 1840–1858. Medical History ( 2003;) 47:: 173–94.[Web of Science][Medline]

17.  Bellavite P, Conforti A, Piasere V, Ortolani R. Immunology and homeopathy. 1. historical background. eCAM ( 2005;) 2:: 441–52.[Medline]

18.  Bellavite P, Conforti A, Piasere V, Ortolani R. Immunology and homeopathy. 4. clinical studies – part 1. eCAM ( 2006;) 3:: 293–301.[Medline]

19.  Bellavite P, Conforti A, Piasere V, Ortolani R. Immunology and homeopathy. 4. clinical studies – part 2. eCAM ( 2006;) 3:: 397–409.[Medline]

20.  Darwin’s Correspondence Project. (last accessed October 22, 2009). http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/namedefs/namedef-200.html.

21.  Darwin C. Insectivorous Plants ( 1875;) 173:. New York: D. Appleton & Co. http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/insectivorous/insect_fm.htm.

22.  Darwin. Letter 2996 – Darwin, C. R. to Lyell, Charles, 24 Nov [1860].

23.  Rogers N. An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia ( 1998;) Piscataway: Rutgers University Press. 41.

Received March 11, 2009; accepted October 4, 2009

Online ISSN 1741-4288 – Print ISSN 1741-427X

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Treat Diseases Effectively Through Homeopathy, Yoga and Meditation

Modern lifestyle has left everyone with a chain of ailments that often remains fully uncured for an entire lifetime. It is common knowledge that allopathic medicines bring a host of side effects during the course of the treatment. In order to overcome the problems brought about by allopathic medicines, people are increasingly resorting to alternative treatment techniques such as homeopathy and yoga.

Homeopathy is one of the most common forms of alternative medicine in the world today. Like Yoga and meditation, it is a holistic approach to disease treatment. In treating an individual, homeopathy takes into consideration the patient’s mental, emotional and physical health standpoint. After studying the patients’ present and past bodily symptoms, the naturopath medicates him/her so as to rid the patient of his disease and heal the body completely.

Homeopathic medicines are potentised so as to release the latent curative property of the medicine and at the same time are administered in minimum doses so as to stimulate basic immune responses of the body to treat the disease. Though this takes longer time than allopathic medicine, the treatment is devoid of any side effects and results in the holistic rejuvenation of health. Moreover, it enhances the disease fighting ability of the body. In some cases, it has been instrumental in avoiding surgery.

In most cases, doctors combine other alternative modes of treatment such as yoga and meditation in order to hasten the recovery process of the patient. Yoga is an ancient healing technique that originated in India and has for centuries; it has been practiced by people to retain a healthy body and mind. It has also been used as an effective treatment technique by many. What originated in India is now very popular even in the West. It is now been incorporated in the daily exercise regime by many celebrities.

At the physical level, Yoga comprises of ‘asanas’ or Yogic postures, which when performed regularly immunes the body from a host of diseases. It also builds the stamina of the body. At the mental level, certain postures and techniques in yoga such as meditation enhances concentration, relieves stress and promotes healing. Yoga and meditation when practiced together helps a person attain mental and physical harmony. This is a great way to keep away from diseases.

Homeopathy, yoga and meditation, when combined together can hasten the healing process and treat any disease quickly. They can heal several diseases and keep the body immune from diseases. In today’s world, everyone is bound to find a way to cope with stress and produce immense energy. Nothing can be rival homeopathy; yoga and meditation in helping you achieve all of this.

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