What Homeopathic Medicine Offers to People with Lead Poisoning and Other Environmental Exposures
Pollution is turning the earth and earthlings prematurely gray.
What can you do about it with homeopathic medicines?
When Big Sean, a Grammy Award-n
What Homeopathic Medicine Offers to People with Lead Poisoning and Other Environmental Exposures
Pollution is turning the earth and earthlings prematurely gray.
What can you do about it with homeopathic medicines?
When Big Sean, a Grammy Award-nominated and BET award-winning hip-hop artist, appeared on the Daily Show in late January, 2017, he talked about his upbringing in Michigan. Big Sean told the audience that his mother was one of many exposed to lead in the drinking water. But in her case, he added, “holistic care and homeopathic remedies” enabled her “to reverse a lot of the effects of the lead poisoning.”
In environmental health issues, prevention is always best; but it is important to ask what can be done for people already exposed to toxic chemicals and heavy metals, for these exposures seem to be on the increase. Conventional medicine generally offers little for people suffering from such exposures other than palliative or suppressive treatment of their symptoms. On the other hand, animal and human studies are beginning to show that homeopathic medicines offer potentially valuable therapeutic benefits.
Because many Americans reading this article are not necessarily familiar with homeopathy, it may be helpful to know that a recent survey found that 95% of French pediatricians, dermatologists, and general practitioners prescribe homeopathic medicines. This data was derived from the French government’s record of doctors’ prescriptions, making it very accurate. When one realizes that the World Health Organization deems France to have the best health care in the world, it is time for other countries to explore what France does right and emulate these efforts.
To understand why homeopathic treatment makes sense in cases of exposure to heavy metals and other toxic substances, it makes sense first to discuss some basic principles of homeopathy.
The Logic of Homeopathy
The underlying premise of homeopathic medicine is that symptoms are not simply something “wrong” that needs fixing. Symptoms represent defensive and adaptive efforts of the body to deal with various disturbances, whether they be infectious disease, environmental poisons, or stress. Symptoms do not mean the body is simply surrendering to attack; they signify the body’s attempts to try to defend and heal itself. This perspective is important to understanding homeopathy as well as evolution.
In treating any problem, chronic or acute, a homeopath selects a given medicine based on its ability to cause, in experimental situations, symptoms similar to those the sick person experiences. By complementing and reinforcing the body’s inherent defenses, homeopathic medicines actually work with, not against, the body. Using ’the principle of similars” — which is that like can cure like — is the basis of homeopathic medicine, and according to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Emil A. von Behring, who developed the diphtheria and tetanus vaccines, it was homeopathy which inspired him. Employing the principle of similars in treating people exposed to environmental poisons makes sense because such treatment mimics and augments the body’s natural defenses. In addition to 200 years of clinical experience, there is now a body of scientific evidence to support use of homeopathic medicines to treat various environmental exposures. Study 1; Study 2; Study 3.
In 1994, a highly respected German physician and researcher, Klaus Linde MD, in collaboration with Wayne B. Jonas, MD (the former head of what is now called the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health within the National Institutes of Health), performed a review of research on the use of homeopathic medicines to treat exposures to environmental toxins. They published their results in the internationally respected journal Human and Experimental Toxicology.
Linde, Jonas, and colleagues reviewed over 100 studies evaluating the prophylactic and therapeutic effects of homeopathic doses of normally toxic substances. Besides evaluating the results of the various studies, the researchers assessed how well each study was designed and conducted. Of forty high-quality studies, 27 showed positive results from homeopathic treatment.
What was particularly intriguing about their findings was that those researchers who tested doses in the assumed sub-molecular range had not only the best designed studies but more frequently showed statistically significant results from these other nanodoses (“nanodoses” refers to the very small doses of medicines used in homeopathy. While it was assumed by scientists that no molecules remained from the repeated dilutions, a body of new research has now consistently confirmed that significant nanoparticles of the original medicine persist in homeopathic medicines, resembling the very low doses to which many of our hormones are known to respond).
New research has confirmed that nanodoses are able to pass through cellular membranes and penetrate the blood-brain barrier with greater ease than do larger toxic doses of substances. Study 1, Study 2, Study 3.
Specifically, several researchers administered (usually to rats and mice) crude doses of arsenic, bismuth, cadmium, mercury chloride, or lead. Their research showed that animals which were pretreated with homeopathic doses of these same substances and then given repeated homeopathic do