Alternative and complementary therapies

Anna Briffa`s two excellent articles in the Weekender (April 20, 27) highlighted the very real need for alternative and complementary therapies to be recognised and given a warrant. Ms Briffa is perfectly correct when she says that, while herbs may sound harmless, they too can cause problems if taken in sufficient quantities or are prescribed incorrectly.

This is of course why all practitioners should have the necessary qualifications in order to practise.

I would, however, like to correct a couple of errors in the article concerning homeopathy.

The first is that herbal or homeopathic remedies can be harmful when taken in combination with other medication. So far as homeopathic remedies are concerned, there is definitely no danger in prescribing them alongside other drugs. They are, for example, very commonly prescribed for asthmatic patients alongside their usual steroids and inhalers, without any adverse effects whatsoever. In fact, it is often the other way round because it is the homeopathic remedy whose effect is most likely to be diminished by the strong effects of other drugs.

The other is what seems to be a widespread misconception that homeopathy is a herbal medicine. Ms Briffa states "though herbal or homeopathic remedies appear to have a less traumatic impact on the body, they are by no means totally harmless". This implies that homeopathy is synonymous with herbal, which it most certainly is not.

Homeopathic remedies are undoubtedly derived in many, though not all cases, from plants and herbs but the secret of homeopathy lies in the way it is prepared. The hundreds of dilutions a remedy/herb undergoes ensures that it cannot harm the patient as would the crude state of the remedy/herb, and yet it retains both the power to affect and to heal.

These dilutions are why the medical world has up till now dismissed homeopathic cures as merely placebo because they argue that there is nothing left of the remedy to affect the patient. Yet only last November a team of chemists based in South Korea stumbled on a chance discovery that dissolved molecules actually cluster together as the solution is diluted. When the solution is diluted further, the clusters clump together to form even larger clusters.

To the amazement of the chemists, the finding has been double-checked and confirmed with electron microscopy. It goes against the conventional wisdom and years of teaching that molecules disperse further apart the more a solution is diluted.

The New Scientist reported: "The finding may provide a mechanism for how homeopathic medicines work, something that has defied scientific explanation till now. Diluting a remedy may increase the size of the particles to the point when they become biologically active."

While my metier is homeopathy I have no wish to imply that other forms of alternative and complementary therapies are without their value. Nutrition, for instance, is of great importance in maintaining good health and nutritionists can be enormously helpful to any sort of medical or alternative practitioner, while other therapies like naturopathy, hydrotherapy, iontophoresis, acupuncture, osteopathy etc. are also well proven forms of healing.

Dr Cachia`s point of doing away with `a pill for every ill` syndrome suggests that he is not unaware of the need of weaning people away from the all too frequent use of prescription drugs. He just needs to travel a little further down the road and, as Bryan Corlett succinctly put it, "study the evidence".