Healing with homeopathy: can these remedies work for you?

Vegetarian Times, June, 2004 by Alan Pell Crawford

To make your home on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, or U.P., as the region is called, takes fortitude--and a little help from your friends. Winter slogs on for 5 months, the annual snowfall is 180 inches and the winds can be fierce. In 1981, the first year that Marcia Goodrich, a 50-something native Californian, moved to the small town of Houghton, the temperature plunged to 40 below, and frost formed on the inner walls of her mobile home.

The population of the U.P. is about 300,000. Physicians are in short supply, which means you look for medical help where you can find it. Goodrich, now the media relations manager for Michigan Technological University, discovered that this means you turn to friends.

In February 2003, when Goodrich learned that she had to have two wisdom teeth removed, that the closest oral surgeon was 2 hours away, and that she would have to make the post-op drive home by herself, she asked her neighbor Patty Peterson for some advice.

Peterson, a native Yooper, as the residents of the U.P. call themselves, who had become Goodrich's "healer," has been a registered nurse for most of her adult life. But a few years ago, when she faced her own health problems, she began to use alternative therapies. These included homeopathy, a still-controversial healing art that attempts to treat disease with extremely diluted and minute doses of a remedy, usually herbal, that produces symptoms of the disease itself. Through the administration of these minute doses, the theory is, the immune system is strengthened sufficiently to heal itself.

"When I told Patty I was going to have a local anesthetic and drive home right after the extraction," Goodrich says, "she handed me a dropper that she said had a solution of arnica in it. I was to put some of it under my tongue on my way home."

Derived from the dried flower heads of a perennial that grows in the mountains of Europe, arnica (or mountain daisy) has been made into salves and ointments and applied to cuts, scrapes and bruises since the 16th century.

Mixed Reactions

Although most physicians reject homeopathy, they readily embrace a similar approach in their use of vaccines, which operate on similar "like cures like" principles.

Scientific evidence that homeopathy works is mixed, but this does not deter practitioners or their patients who insist that their own experiences and those of countless others is proof enough. Part of the difficulty, says Darin Ingels, a naturopath with New England Family Health Associates in Southport, Connecticut, is that homeopathic treatments are so highly individualized that their effectiveness cannot be established in clinical research settings that, by their very nature, seek to eliminate the influence of individuality.

The most recent research, conducted by the University of Exeter and the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital in England, was not encouraging. Reported by BMJ on February 8, 2003, the study found arnica no more effective than placebos in preventing pain and bruising after carpal tunnel surgery. But this finding, advocates say, proves nothing. "In some cases, it works in some people, and in some cases, it doesn't," Ingels says.

"But to say that something doesn't work because we don't know why it works seems awfully arrogant."

Personal Experience

Goodrich had no psychological predisposition that the herbal remedy would work. "I had never had an extraction, so I didn't know what to expect in terms of pain or swelling," she says. "The oral surgeon gave me a painkiller and a prescription for more, but it was the swelling, not the pain, that the arnica was supposed to take care of. Taking out wisdom teeth at my age can be a big deal, so I was prepared for the worst."

The surgery went well, although Goodrich admits to tensing up throughout the procedure. "So here I am on the highway home, an hour after surgery, my gums all packed with cotton," she recalls. "I don't even think I pulled over to the side of the road. I just managed to get the dropper out and put a drop or two under my tongue like Patty said, and kept driving. When I got back home, I took the painkiller [that the oral surgeon prescribed] and crashed on the couch for the next 6 hours."

When Goodrich got up the next morning, she expected to see a badly bruised chipmunk staring back at her in the bathroom mirror. "There was no swelling at all," she says. "You'd never have known I had even been to the dentist. I felt fine and was back at work that day." After that, she never needed the pain pills.

Critics who cannot explain such results often respond with ridicule. John Stossel, in an ABC News "Commentary" on January 30, 2004, for example, linked homeopathy with "paranormal or supernatural phenomenon," like astral projection or talking to dead people. "It's nonsense. Total nonsense. It's mythology," the Amazing Randi told Stossel, who reports that the magician-turned-professional-debunker is offering $1,000,000 to anyone who can prove that homeopathy works.

In fairness to skeptics, homeopathy's reliance on dosages that are highly diluted can be difficult to fathom. Many homeopathic medicines "are diluted to such a degree that not even a single molecule of the original solute is likely to be present," BMJ reports. "Many scientists suggest that the clinical effects of homeopathic medicine are solely due to the placebo effect. However, there have been rigorous, replicated, double-blind, randomized trials showing significant differences between homeopathic and placebo tablets." Skeptics claim "that there must be another explanation, such as methodological bias, for the results." Others "argue that homeopathic medicines must work by some as yet undefined biophysical mechanism."