Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria

Letter to the Editor

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Not in response to an attack. Pro-homeopathy piece…

Antibiotic resistant bacteria are increasing in number, perhaps signaling the end of an era in drug treatments.

The December 7, 2010 edition of Newsweek magazine paints a frightening picture regarding conventional medicine’s ability to fight bacterial infections.

"But infectious-disease specialists like Brad Spellberg of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine have been reading up on those days because of a growing fear they are not all in the past. Wealthy countries take for granted the triumph of science over bacteria, but increasingly doctors are coming up against infections that can be quelled only by the most powerful antibiotics known to medicine—or by none of them. "It’s already happening," says Spellberg, to the tune of roughly 100,000 deaths a year from antibiotic-resistant infections in the United States alone. "But it’s going to become much more common." Imagine a world in which antibiotics resemble chemotherapy drugs—producing toxic side effects and unpredictable outcomes instead of the guaranteed cures we have come to expect—and you can understand what keeps Spellberg awake at night."

While it is true that medicine’s anti-biotic defenses are growing weaker, there is another option, one that has been used effectively for over 200 years. Homeopathy.

Homeopathy is a system of medicine used by tens of millions of people around the world that is based on a law of nature first discovered by Hippocrates and others.　 That law states that substances capable of producing symptoms of disease can cure those symptoms in a sick person.　 In the US, the medicines used in homeopathy are produced in pharmacies under strict FDA guidelines. They are non-toxic, gentle, inexpensive – and effective.

There are hundreds of high quality, peer reviewed pre-clinical and clinical studies published in journals like Pediatrics, Rheumatology, Lancet, CHEST, and others showing that homeopathy works for patients with a range of ailments. What’s more, reliable medical records from the 19^th and 20^th centuries recorded during deadly bacterial and viral epidemics of influenza, pneumonia, cholera, diphtheria, yellow fever, dengue fever, scarlet fever, typhoid, malaria and other infectious diseases repeatedly show that homeopathy is an effective system for treating patients with virulent infectious conditions. Epidemiological evidence from those epidemics reveal mortality rates in patients treated with homeopathy that were a small fraction of those seen in untreated as well as conventionally treated patients.

As Newsweek states in the conclusion of the article:

"The future will almost certainly be different. Antibiotics will cost more and do less. They will also be less readily available than we are accustomed to. No more fast cures, free giveaways, or "just in case" prescriptions.

Given these facts – shouldn’t homeopathy be an option for patients and physicians?

For a more extensive list of basic science, pre-clinical and clinical research papers showing the effect of homeopathy, a good resource in the United States is the National Center for Homeopathy’s website (www.nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org and look under "Articles" and then "Research").