Adjunctive Homeopathy in an Intensive Care Unit
Although we normally try to get articles quickly, we are sometimes thwarted and they can be delayed in arriving. I have only just got my hands on a study abstract that was published by a research team from Graz in Austria last October. The investigators from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Homeopathy examined the use of homeopathy in a group of severely ill people in an Intensive Care Unit.
This was a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to see whether homeopathy would be able to influence the outcome of critically ill people with severe sepsis. Seventy people entered the study, and 35 received homeopathic treatment and 35 received placebo, in addition to their regular treatment. The main outcome measure was survival. At day 30 there was no difference between the survival rates of the people receiving homeopathy and placebo. But at day 180, the survival rate in the homeopathy group was 75.8% compared to 50% in the placebo group.
One study does not make a revolution, and it is still early days for this kind of experimental work. Yet two things stand out from this small investigation:
1. The homeopathy was being used as an adjunct to conventional medical care. I sometimes get worried when practitioners of unorthodox medicine say that they would ONLY use herbs or homeopathy. The best approach has to be to combine conventional treatments with those unorthodox ones that can be shown to be helpful.
2. Trained homeopathic physicians did the prescribing. This is important: some studies have foundered because the studies tried to test just one remedy. Yet homeopaths individualize each treatment. So two people may have the same infection, but because they have different personalities and constitutional make-ups, they will receive different treatments.
Technorati tags:
Technorati Tags: homeopathy, complementary medicine, integrated medicine
Dr. Richard G. Petty, MD is a world-renowned authority on the brain, and his revolutionary work on human energy systems has been acclaimed around the globe.
He is also an accredited specialist in internal and metabolic medicine, endocrinology, psychiatry, acupuncture and homeopathy. He has been an innovator and leader of the human potential movement for over thirty years and is also an active researcher, teacher, writer, professional speaker and broadcaster. He is the author of five books, including the groundbreaking and best selling CD series Healing, Meaning and Purpose. He has taught in over 45 countries and 48 states in the last ten years, but spends as much time as possible on his horse farm in Georgia.
