|
Greetings poetry lovers! What does poetry
have to do with homeopathy? For your information, poetry is a very
good way of learning materia medica! For example, here's a poem
I wrote called "Mr. Sulphur". Ahem.
Sulphurs yell,
Sulphurs boast.
Sulphur's face is red as toast.
(Toast is so red!)
And now for someone whose writing is less
challenged: Homeopath and author, Alan Schmukler; Alan, welcome;
you are our first "Homeopath in
the Hot Seat!" Please relax while I tell you
about yourself: You graduated Summa Cum Laude from Temple University
in Philadelphia, you went on to become a Certified Inhalation Therapist
and for several years worked in the Emergency Room at Einstein Hospital
here in Philadelphia before discovering homeopathy. You're the former
editor of Homeopathy News and Views, you've taught courses in homeopathy,
written articles in newspapers, you had a Wednesday night lecture
series at Jefferson Medical College, and of course, you're in private
practice. This sounds like a very fascinating life.
Could you start by telling us a little bit
about what it's like to work in an emergency room, what has it taught
you about the medical profession that most of us might not know,
and do you ever look back and say, "That patient needed Aconite,
and that one needed Carbo Veg"?
The first six months that I worked the emergency room and ICU I
was really impressed! I thought "This is a very efficient operation!"
Every day and night came the auto accidents, heart attacks, burns,
suicides. Doctors and nurses rushing about in starched white uniforms,
we had high-tech machines, alarms going off, lives miraculously
saved. I helped resuscitate several people a week. They were dead
and we brought them back to life. It's the stuff of TV!
Over time I learned that many of those people we "saved"
never left the hospital!
They had kidney failure, got septic infections, got pneumonia, hemorrhaged
or arrested again. Many of the ones who did leave kept coming back,
a little worse each time. There was a lot of "saving",
but not much healing.
It turned out that modern medicine was good at bringing people back
from the brink, but didn't know what to do for them after that.
Four years later I left, realizing that, on the whole, this medical
system does more harm than good. I had seen the mistakes, the carelessness,
the indifference. Patients got the wrong medicine, too much, at
the wrong time, or none at all. Two drugs were given together that
shouldn't have been; or the right medicine killed them. There were
doctors and nurses touching open wounds with unwashed hands or contaminated
gloves. There were the botched lab tests that led to the wrong treatments.
There were the bad surgeons who everyone knew about except the patients.
There was massive miscommunication. A modern hospital is a Tower
of Babel and listening skills are primitive. A lot of wrong information
gets into the charts, (or right information that nobody reads.)
Patients are listened to least of all. There's the implicit assumption
that if you are sick and in a hospital bed, your opinion is worthless.
I once collapsed at my desk after taking the antibiotic Keflex.
My co-workers rushed me to an emergency room. I'm lyng there and
the doctor asks me, "Do you have any idea what caused this?"
I said, "Yes. It's a reaction to Keflex." "No, Keflex
doesn't do that," he said. A momement later another doctor
walks in, points to me and says, "What do we have here?"
The first doctor says, "We don't know." I'm admitted to
the hospital and a couple hours later a nurse hands me a pill to
take. "What's this?" I said. "It's your Keflex."
True story!
I watched an old man, a retired engineer, complain to his cardiologist
about leg pain.
"Nothing wrong with your leg!" barked the doctor. "But
could you look at it?" the old man implored. "It's okay,"
the doc says. "But I think there's a problem," the old
man says. Feeling his opinion challenged, the doctor said, "How
many medical schools have you graduated from?" The old man
was silent for a moment and then said, "None, but I built a
few."
Back then all I had were my subjective observations. But new research
confirms what I saw. A study which appeared in the The Journal of
the American Medical Association (4/15/98) showed that properly
prescribed drugs kill 106,000 Americans a year. That number is probably
low because so much goes unreported. But even at that figure, prescription
drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.
Another study concluded that an additional 98,000 people die every
year from medical errors. Other research showed that thousands more
die from hospital-acquired infections. If you add it all up, you
find that conventional medical treatment is the leading cause of
death here.
As I learned homeopathy, I had these little flashbacks to my hospital
days.
I would visualize a patient's face and I knew in retrospect what
remedy he or she needed. The heart patients in particular came to
mind . The ones who needed Carbo veg were pale and cold with bloating
and belching. They were always trying to sit up because Carbo veg
breathes better that way. The patients who needed Arsenicum were
very scared, wouldn't keep still and kept asking for water. The
Lactrodectus patients complained of extreme pain running down the
left arm. They would get morphine pretty quickly.
Post-operative patients often had to suffer because they were only
allowed pain medicaiton so many times a day. Hypericum, Arnica and
Staphysagria would have brought welcome relief.
I often wonder how many of the stroke patients would have recovered
with remedies like Arnica, Lachesis, Opium or Belladona. Instead
they lay in a vegetative state for weeks, months or longer.
Of course it goes without saying that Arnica 1M should have been
given to all the trauma victims. Thousands of lives would have been
saved and a lot of suffering avoided.
It's astonishing to realize that in the year 1900, there were 100
homeopathic hospitals in the U.S. Homeopathic physicians got to
train in those hospitals and go on grand rounds. They were highly
skilled and nothing was beyond their reach. They routinely treated
pneumonia, heart failure, sepsis, tuberculosis, gonorrhea.
|
Forums
Courses
Shop
Diseases
Articles
Journal
Directory
