When orthodox medicine has nothing more to offer...

Elizabeth Thompson discusses the role of homeopathic treatment for female cancer patients

At the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital (GHH) we are seeing an increasing number of people referred with a diagnosis of cancer. This reflects an increased interest in how complementary approaches to cancer care can support people at different stages of the cancer diagnosis. In the past four and a half years of working at the GHH, I have learned that the people coming to the hospital want different things from complementary medicine.

Some people come when conventional treatments can no longer offer them anything to save their lives. This is a frightening time for them and although the homeopathic approach may not offer a cure at this late stage of their illness, it can often offer hope of a different kind. Sometimes it helps people to outlive the prognosis given to them by months or even years. Sometimes it helps them need less in the way of conventional medicine including pain killers and offers them continuing support despite progressive disease.

As a doctor working in both conventional and complementary cancer care I have learned the importance of integrating these two perspectives. Ideally the doctor practising homeopathy would work as an integral part of a much wider team which would include family members, nurses, general practitioners, oncologists, surgeons, palliative physicians and other complementary therapists. It is disappointing sometimes to see that other healthcare professionals can be unsupportive of a person’s desire to use complementary therapies and for some people the knowledge that the team is not working together can cause doubt and insecurity.

Some patients come at the beginning of their diagnosis wanting to support their bodies with gentler approaches and help themselves recover from some difficult and powerful treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. As well as using homeopathic medicines, the GHH also has experience in using Mistletoe which is given by injection and has been shown to stimulate the group of white cells whose numbers can be depleted during chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Other patients come when they have finished most of their treatments but may still not be feeling well despite being given the all clear by their doctors.

In the past few months a team of us at the GHH have been carrying out a research study with women who have survived breast cancer but are having difficult menopausal symptoms. These women can not use Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) and many of them are on a drug called Tamoxifen which can make symptoms such as hot flushes a lot worse.

In a pilot study we looked at 45 women all of whom had difficult menopausal symptoms, such as hot flushes, mood disturbance, fatigue and joint pains. All of the women had had a diagnosis of breast cancer. The medical profession is realising that these symptoms can really affect quality of life but conventional approaches are limited. In particular HRT is not advised (because the hormones in HRT may stimulate breast cancer cells). About three quarters of the women in the study said they had found the homeopathic approach useful for their symptoms and satisfaction with the approach was high. In terms of persuading colleagues within medicine that the homeopathic approach is worth recommending, we can reassure them through research that people gain a benefit which makes a difference to them.

Following on from this pilot study, further research at the GHH, funded by the Trust’s Homeopathic Research Committee, is looking at 80 women all of whom have hot flushes and have had a diagnosis of, and conventional treatment for, breast cancer within the last five years. Half of the women will have a consultation plus a placebo (dummy) medicine and half will have a consultation plus a homeopathic remedy to treat the hot flushes. We know that people can get well again under the influence of a placebo and we are expecting quite a lot of the women on placebo to improve.

Knowing how many women get well with placebo helps us to know how many people we need to see if we wanted to show a difference between placebo medicines and homeopathic medicines and this could be a lot of women. We are grateful to all the women who are taking part and still need another 40 women to join the study.     

Research of this sort is very important in helping us to clarify the roles of different complementary medicines in cancer care. The journey of dealing with a serious disease and the consequences of treatment can be a difficult one. I believe that complementary therapies can rise up to meet the person along this road and help restore wellbeing and confidence in their own bodies.  

One wonderful aspect of the homeopathic approach is that it can be a very important opportunity to help someone re-evaluate their life and their health.

Sometimes hurts in the past have never been healed and sitting with someone as they describe difficult experiences can be itself therapeutic. Combining this therapeutic listening time with substances from nature that gently stimulate the body’s own healing potential can be an approach that through patient demand and research we can demonstrate is really worth offering to many more people.

Case Study
A 62 year-old woman was referred to outpatients with a diagnosis of hot flushes. She had undergone a left mastectomy for breast cancer in November 1998. She had always had a fear that she might get cancer as her mum had died of it.

She went on to describe the flushes: “They really drain me and take every bit of energy from me. They start in the tummy and come up and then I feel the heat in my face. I also feel depressed and I think a lot about dying. I fear death and I fear getting older. I have lost confidence and I don’t like to go into town. I feel everybody is walking into me. I don’t go out in the dark and I worry about how I am going to get to my work when it’s dark in the morning.”

I asked if anything in her life besides the diagnosis might make her fear death. She then told me that as a young girl she had developed diphtheria and other people on her ward had died. In her past medical history she had had problems with her thyroid gland.

She goes back to the flushes. “They waken me at night and I remember my dreams. I dream of a cemetery – it’s horrific with skeletons running towards me.” She has this dream recurrently.

I remember a remedy which has this connection with skeletons and I go to my computer which confirms that there is a remedy called Crotalus cascavella which might be helpful. This is a snake remedy and homeopaths have used a similar snake remedy called Lachesis to help with menopausal symptoms.

We are beginning to recognise the connections between different remedies in the same family and although Crotalus cascavella is not as well known as Lachesis I decide to prescribe Crotalus cascavella, the Brazilian Rattlesnake. Preparing the venom of the snake homeopathically makes it very safe to administer.

Within days of taking the remedy, this woman felt her flushes subsiding. She also began to gain more confidence and was able to report that she no longer felt so frightened in the dark and had managed to go back to work. A year later she is feeling very well and in some respects better than she did before her diagnosis of cancer.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson MRCP MFHom trained in home­opathy with the Homeopathic Physicians Teaching Group in 1992 and began working at the GHH in 1995 seeing patients with cancer in a research clinic. She and her husband, also a Member of the Faculty of Homeopathy, have three young children who thrive on love and homeopathy when necessary!

 

Homeopathy as an Instrument of Precision

Human quality is an individual mixture of credulity and incredulity. If you tell a man that finished are two hundred and seventy billion stars he shall understand your what's what for it, but if you put up a procure "Fresh Paint" he is never satisfied until he proves it is fresh. I am buoyant that all of you here gathered, interested access homoeopathy, commit both believe what is to arise and put it to the test.

Modern medicine is proud, and justly so, of its instruments of precision; but a with many inventions, these often supplant the use of our natural faculties. An instrument, according to the dictionary, is furtherance, an agency a antecedent to an end, again comes from the Latin instruere meaning to prepare, from the same rise as concert.

A lesser meaning is that of tool, which is well an unfolding of the human hand. The old- fashioned physicians could aroma diphtheria or scarlet fever or typhoid upon entering the house, and even at once many of us know the odor of cancer besides of final end. But even those regular doctors whose senses are keenly acute and who combine vivid perceptions with the assiduous blessing of modern scientific technique, are at a curtains a large part of the instance and vibes that their work in therapeutics is vague and only partially welcome. Regular medicine and much of so- called homoeopathy gives drugs on the starting point of diagnosis or pathology or organs affected or at best, on what we trace usual symptoms approximative as vomiting, purging, etc. They are ignorant of he fine distinctions between the cases of similar classification. The secret precision is character individualization and not in trying to ground the parts in erect of the whole.

The Homoeopath who is worthy of the name knows that only by due to an artist can you arrive at exactitude. To apportion Bryonia whereas pneumonia, Rhus-tox for rheumatism, Sulphur being eczema or Nux due to indigestion, is not really homoeopathy. The more exact the similarity between the patient's symptoms and the single remedy given, the fuller and more salient the totality of the symptoms elicited, the more swift and proficient the cure whereas of the precision of the prescription.

Over also above all usual medical lore the homoeopathic specialist has alone and specific knowledge: of general symptoms pertaining to the forbearing himself as a whole; of aggravations and ameliorations whereas utile to each grieving (what we call modalities); of discharges, those most revealing vents of the inner fellow; of repercussing suppressions and their insidious sequelae. In chronic work he elicits the health trends from childhood and plain in the parents. From this welter of detail he arrives at a totality of the symptoms. This does not mean that he retains for final check every numero uno item, although in confused cases a careful compilation is needed owing to a familiarity. Then follows exception also emphasis, what we call the quiz of symptoms and the final preferable of the remedy may be based on a mere five or six striking points which characterize the person grease mismatched sphere, in somewhat the gate that a caricaturist, network half a dozen lines, shows up the inner and outer morale of his subject.

Many fine prescribers contend that their grasp of a similar restore is intuitive, but probably impact addition to a sixth sense, they are using a colossal unconscious store of wisdom besides information and experience. The editing of our plight taking is perhaps the most capital iota in homoeopathy: to be able to sense what is germaine, what is leading and what is poignant in a case.
Doctors need to study botany, zoology and mineralogy, learning to enter into a substance, take its life, pulse with its currents, read the signatures further correspondences and keep spread out the assessment of superannuated knowledge. The signs are there that who runs may read, but he must run, not half or stumble. As an illustration let us bear the octopus in the aquarium with its mere apathy, its swift rages moulding shadowy the whole ambience with its ink; its womb-like shape; its flabby, sucking tentacles. What a compelling entity is Sepia!
The true Homoeopath may not merely be intentional eclipse the by much bourgeois hundred or in consequence remedies, but longing insist on his knowledge systematically by daily flirt with of the material medica in multifold books further magazines. He must search engrossment remedy relationships and let his mind play on the free clump principle: How revealing to see through that Opium, Chelidonium and Sanguinaria are of the same family, or that Apis is the animal counterpart of Natrum muriaticum!

It must be remembered that whereabouts medicine depends upon mechanical aids, whose perfection is fallible in direct ratio to the fallibility of the interpreter of the data, precision is impossible. The transcendent consideration of rectness that I have ever encountered is useful homoeopathy in skilful besides eager hands.

As an example: debutante X., fifty-ish, with double pneumonia when best seen, lying rigidly still, rusty sputum, temperature of 104, individualistic herpes on the lips and below the nose, stitching responsiveness influence the chest on breathing, gargantuan cough, assailment seeing great quantities of nail down water. Bryonia 10 M., one dose and Sac. Lac. Temperature descended by lysis on the third day, but the kindly complained of a lumbo-sacral backache, which bothered her by much more than the pneumonia. No inherent symptoms were forthcoming. Aesculus and later Kali carb were upright guidance succession with temporary but not lasting backing. sometime she said how concealed it was that the backache was much more nippy after urinating (urine abrogating). On repertorizing in Kent only one remedy had this inbred symptom: Syphilinum. In looking for corroborative symptoms I noticed corneal scars and the patient uttered she had had keratitis and iritis some elderliness before. She had considered characteristics of the syphilitic miasm and the backache was troubling here most from dark to down. Syphilinum 1M, unique dose, produced a two-hour violent aggravation followed by swift also permanent relief.

Case II. Mrs. Y., also at the mid-century; history of mucous colitis and liver trouble; complained of spasmodic abdominal colic or gripes, < id="gwProxy" type="hidden">