As a continuation to my last post about the precautionary tale of simply accepting mainstream authority as holders of the scientific gospels, I will explain further how money backed science and medicine came to dominate our lives today. Many years ago, when I worked as a biochemical technician with a science and engineering educational background, I was naturally a great believer in science as the ultimate authority. But even so, I always had this feeling that alternate options existed and I was never satisfied with how mainstream ‘science’ was so willing to discount alternate perspectives as ‘junk science.’ I had read enough case histories and bio-science claims from alternate perspectives that showed something else was going on that was not being reported by mainstream science and medicine. Indeed, mainstream narrative seemed to go out of its way to debunk and ridicule voices that didn’t speak the ‘truth’ as they perceived it. (Talk about believe systems being threatened.) To put it down to the simplest denominator, anything that makes money and allows the corporate systems to dominate gets attention.
Anything that helps people that bypasses big money gets deliberately drowned out and ignored! Now, do not let me wrong here. I think that there is a place for Allopathic and Homeopathic systems to work together for the benefit of each patient needing medical intervention. Yet, as I have mentioned throughout this blog, anything that makes money gets priority, and add to that the intrusion of polluted food systems that keep us in a state of ill-health instead of whole health, is something we need to seriously review. In the previous post I talked about Pasteur and Beauchamp and how their views clashed. The chemical-pharmaceutical system could see ways to profit off of Pasteur’s ideas, but not off of Beauchamp’s ideas. Guess who got the attention and who got sidelined?
In the late 1700s, mainstream medicine was a barbaric enterprise. Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) is credited with developing the more reasonable approach of homeopathy – (Naturopathic medicine is a distinct primary health care profession, emphasizing prevention, treatment, and optimal health through the use of therapeutic methods and substances that encourage individuals’ inherent self-healing process). The practice of naturopathic medicine includes modern and traditional, scientific, and empirical methods.). Hahnemann was not some country bumpkin. He could read and write in at least seven languages and produced the most up to date medical and scientific texts of his day. He was also an avid experimenter and a respected chemist, and also produced the standard reference texts for apothecaries and pharmacists, and was well respected for being a true skeptic willing to question dogmatic truths and to seek alternative explanations for biomedical problems.
Homeopathy practitioners, who offered this functional and systematic approach to treating sick people, were publicly condemned by mainstream allopathic practitioners despite that fact that orthodox medicine frequently caused more harm than good. It should be noted that at this time, getting a medical doctorate was more about hanging around the right medical people and reading medical textbooks than being a thorough educational experience – it is not unusual to hear about traditional medical colleges of that time granting M.D. degrees after only 16 weeks of intensive apprenticeship coupled with a few lectures. However, it was not the case completely that orthodox medicine was bad. For example, in 1798, Edward Jenner, discovered the value of giving small doses of cowpox to people in an effort to immunize them against smallpox. Since vaccinations fit the mainstreams ideology, it was readily accepted, while Hahnemann’s work, that also showed effectiveness, was not. “Homeopathy posed a serious threat to entrenched medicine” both philosophically and financially, despite the fact that homeopath doctors were trained within the same prestigious medical colleges alongside allopath doctors. The major philosophical division is essentially that homeopaths tried to treat the cause of a disease by helping the body fight it, while allopaths treated the symptoms without necessarily curing the cause.
Despite active antagonism by mainstream medicine, Homeopathy was at its height throughout the 1800s, popular with the many, especially the rich and the aristocratic circles, because of it greater success rates in curing disease in that century. “Statistics indicate that the death rates in homeopathic hospitals from epidemics were often one-half to as little as one-eighth those in orthodox medical hospitals… Besides offering effective treatment for infectious diseases, homeopaths provided care for a wide range of acute and chronic disease. The observation that patients under homeopathic care lived longer led some life insurance companies to offer a 10% discount to homeopathic patients” Dana Ullman
During the whole 19th century, homeopathy’s popularity in the western world was clear, yet any modern accounts about it relegate it to the realms of quackery with little detailed emphasis of how it functioned. Its downfall began with the highly biased ‘Flexner Report of 1910’ commissioned by the American Medical Association (the leading orthodox medical group), that established medical guidelines meant to support orthodox medical schools and practice, and condemn homeopathic ones. Curiously, orthodox medicine readily adopted homeopathic medicines, merely prescribing them differently (to mask symptoms).
“Another factor in the decline of homeopathy was its poor economic viability. Good homeopathic practice required individualization of the patient which demanded more time than most orthodox physicians gave to their patients. Since economics governs the way medicine is practiced more than is commonly recognized, the fact that physicians in the 20th century could make more money practicing orthodox medicine is a significant factor that led to homeopathy’s decline.” Dana Ullman
Since the 1970s homeopathy has been experiencing renewed interest. The homeopathic medical system today includes dentists, podiatrists, veterinarians, physician assistants, nurses, naturopaths, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and psychologists. The main point of this post is not that you choose just allopathic medicine or homeopathic medicine but you understand how authoritarian structures in our society have long suppressed alternate options, and especially when so when money is involved. A new system of ethics is needed (as is the case of all our societal systems if we expect to move to living sustainably) that puts people at the center of what is needed and not corporate greed. And for all of us to be more discerning in what we accept and reject without having made the effort to find out for ourselves, instead of relying on technocrats who claim to have the only truths, while outright rejecting alternate ones that have validity.
TBC…
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