In all walks of life, we have complete nutters who claim utter nonsense – in homeopathy probably more than in other areas. I knew that for quite some time, of course, but what I discovered on ‘the world’s leading homeopathy portal’ was still somewhat of a revelation to me: the overt promotion of homeopathy as an alternative cancer cure!
Hard to believe? See for yourself!
What follows (in italics) are excerpts from a long and detailed interview with a homeopathic physician published on this website.
Q: What does a typical treatment day look like for the patient?
A: Treatment starts with a comprehensive anamnesis that lasts several hours and includes the entire history of the patient till the occurrence of the tumor. This is followed by the analysis and evaluation of symptoms to find the basic homeopathic remedy [2] and the presently indicated remedy of the patient. We search for remedies for possible miasmatic blockages and also tumor specific remedies. We keep an eye on all iatrogenic damages caused by chemotherapy or radiation and try to have remedies at hand. When these complex considerations are finished an individual treatment concept is worked out. We prepare a list of parameters together with the patient that includes all currently present and disturbing symptoms such as pain, sleep disturbances, appearance and extent of the tumor, psychic problems like anxiety and grief etc. We also include laboratory values such as tumor markers, the erythrocyte sedimentation rate and blood pressure as important control parameters.
After applying the homeopathic remedy, usually in Q-potency, we analyze the patient’s symptoms daily to check their reaction to the remedy. It is very important to assess the patient’s reaction to the Q-potency as the development of symptoms shows us how to proceed with their treatment. The big advantage in the hospital is that we can observe our patients daily and investigate their reaction to the Q potency…
Q: I wish more homeopathic hospitals would be built here in Europe and worldwide! Where do you see the main problems for the establishment of homeopathic hospitals and which difficulties did you have to overcome?
A: A broader acceptance of homeopathy is necessary. Many health insurances still refuse to pay the costs, even though homeopathy is much cheaper than conventional cancer treatment with its chemotherapy or radiation.
I think outpatient clinics should be built first, where cancer patients can be treated without the necessary investment in hospitals. Orthodox medicine and the pharma industry should be open for cooperation with homeopathic physicians…
When homeopathic treatment is successful in rebuilding the immune system and reestablishing the basic regulation of the organism then tumors can disappear again. I’ve treated more than 1000 cancer patients homeopathically and we could even cure or considerably ameliorate the quality of life for several years in some, advanced and metastasizing cases.
Q: Do you include chemotherapy and radiation in your treatment?
A: Orthodox medicine considers the tumor to be a mass of abnormal cells which has to be combated. But it is important to know that the immune system has been disturbed long before the tumor appeared. We try to activate the immune system and to initiate an immune modulation by means of homeopathy. If this is successful tumors can disappear again. I have a very critical view of chemotherapy and radiation as the benefit is often very small and they diminish the chance of a real cure. Radiation can be useful in cases where metastases have invaded the spinal column and there is danger of fracture or there are already some broken vertebral bodies.
Chemotherapy may be useful in children suffering from leukemia, in Hodgkins-Lymphoma, testicular cancer and some forms of ovarian tumors. But these types of cancer only constitute 6% of all tumors. In all other types of cancer the benefit is more doubtful. We apply chemotherapy to gain some time in patients acutely affected by very rapidly growing tumors. But how can chemotherapy or radiation cure a patient ? It is only the immune system that can recognize the damaged DNA of the tumor cell and combat the tumor. However, the more chemotherapy the patient gets the more their immune system is weakened.
A: Yes, even in incurable cases homeopathy can help palliate without detrimental side effects.Even if our primary goal is to cure and prevent cancer, many patients are far beyond this stage. You describe some successfully treated patients with long time follow up in your book. Do any particular cases stand out in your memory?
JW: There are many cases I recall. These are the moments when you are sitting together with the patient to do the case anamnesis, hearing their history and feeling their despair when they were given up “officially” by orthodox medicine.
Now, tell me again that homeopathy is not dangerous – its remedies might be relatively harmless, but its practitioners certainly aren’t.
40 Responses to ‘The world’s leading homeopathy portal’ promotes homeopathic cure for cancer
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Whats is your problem? Hpathy is not “leading world portal”, not peer reviewed.
it calls itself ‘THE WORLD’S LEADING HOMEOPATHY PORTAL’!!! I just quoted them.
and what’s YOUR problem?
An ordinary patient does not know about peer review, and does not care even if knows.
Is it possible that homeopaths like this one (and even many other brands of alt-med aficionados) are suffering from some variety of pseudologia fantastica, also called mythomania, compulsive lying or pathological lying??
This one is going on in a self-upheaving, sciency sounding way about miasms and medically sounding pseudo-knowledge. He draws several anecdotes out of his hat with one cure more fantastical than the other. Most of these certainly can have a grain of truth embedded in them but well polluted by a mixture of fantasy and false memory.
Here is a graphic example of how anecdotes of fantastical cures can be based on purely imaginary diagnoses. (The lady in this film never had cancer. There is no way breast cancer behaves like she describes it. Her symptoms are purely illusory, a result of vivid imagination, a nervous exhaustion in a life crisis, and lack of real knowledge about the nature of cancers).
I have come across quite a number of similarly afflicted persons who usually reacted with delusional obsession of this sort to a critical life event (e.g. loss of a loved one) by becoming pathologically convinced they have a malignant diagnosis even if nothing can be found. They usually go from one doctor to another to get the diagnosis they fear and refuse to consider psychiatric help. They often come to feel rejected by the medical establishment, becoming martyrs and an easy prey for snake oil salesmen or altmed practitioners with delusions of professorial grandeur like the one portrayed in this well edited interview.
Quacks invariably make fundamental attribution errors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Sadly, many clients end up suffering the terrible consequences of their quack(s) making the most heinous of fundamental attribution errors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
Yes, Pete, that is unfortunately very sad. How many exactly do end up suffering the terrible consequences of their quacks? Do you have a number?
I know in allopathic / medical care the number of clients that end up suffering the terrible consequences of their quacks as has been determined on this “blog” is somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 who are killed each year in the U.S. making the medical industry one of the top leading killers of Americans. In the U.K. it is around 150,000 killed each year by the medical allopathic industry. BTW these are all from preventable errors, not from side effects of the medical/allopathic intervention. That likely adds a few hundred thousand more.
Then there are those unfortunate clients of the medical trades that are injured and hospitalized that likely contributes a few more million, although the number is likely higher since many go unreported or are not attributed to the allopathic intervention when in fact it was caused by that
Too bad. I hope what goes around comes around.
@SkepdocProf
The last time you brought this nonsense up – less than a week ago – I challenged you on it.
You didn’t respond then. Are you going to this time?
I would not hold my breath!
Alan Henness wrote:
“please detail the numbers of lives saved by conventional medicine, the number of people living longer and with a higher quality of life because of conventional medicine, the number of babies who survive birth because of conventional medicine and the number of those who are suffering less and in less pain because of conventional medicine.”
Sorry, Alan, I am not going to do your homework for you.
Here is what Scientific American and the Journal of Patient Safety has to say:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-many-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-us-hospitals/
Here is what Forbes has to say about this and the tidy profit for the hospitals and allopaths that their own errors generate:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2013/09/23/stunning-news-on-preventable-deaths-in-hospitals/
There are many others. The numbers are always much higher because many deaths from this sort of catastrophe goes largely unreported.
Why are you unwilling to do a simple Google search? Is it because you can’t handle the truth?
it seems to me that it is you who cannot handle the truth very well!
@SkepdocProf
Yes, you keep repeating yourself, and you’ve already been told it’s a tu quoque fallacy and even then, why it is nonsense. You seem to want to ignore al that, but that’s your prerogative and it’s to your detriment.
So, please stop trying to divert attention from the issue at hand, which is the lack of evidence for any specific benefit from homeopathy – for cancer or anything else. Do you have that good evidence or not?
Alright, Alan, you win. No I don’t have any good evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy. Primarily because I don’t do homeopathy, I am not a homeopathic doctor and I have never looked for evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy. If there are any homeopaths lurking here, perhaps they can chime in. I am not here to argue for or against homeopathy. I am happy to leave it to the homeopathic profession and the pharmacists all over Europe who recommend it to their clients.
So there! You are right as usual! You win!
And yes, you win also that there are no deaths by preventable errors by the medical trades. No one dies, everyone is cured, they are all very happy and satisfied customers. And besides, even if some unfortunate clients should be killed by the allopaths, it is really OK because it is with good intent and for the cause and it is real science so it doesn’t count anyway and besides the medical industry monitors itself and lets everyone know that they are trying real hard and will be better next time.
Yes, I believe you that all of the deaths are from the non-drug, natural, non-toxic methods that are not real science.
How’d I do?
I think you did well…as nonsensical as ever!
Edzard said:
Indeed. SpepdicProf/SkepdocProf seems to have been inoculated against rational thinking. I suspect he is a lost cause.
@SkepdocProf
You are a shining example of: Quacks invariably make fundamental attribution errors. Thank you exemplifying my point in both this thread and here:
http://edzardernst.com/2014/06/how-the-amazing-duck-turned-into-a-holy-cow/#comment-59946
It is difficult to find out about people with “cured” from non-existent cancers by quacks, unless they die of some other disease “mistaken” for cancer (mistakes actually can be made only in case of attempt to diagnose disease). But those perfectly healthy adamantly deny evidence showing that they had never had any cancer (X-Rays, CAT, UV, MRI).
As to the allopaths – first all the patients killed are killed by negligence or incompetence of medics, not by the system itself, whether as CAMists usually are killing patients exactly because they apply their “knowledge” correctly.
Yes, chiropractor can wring patient’s neck by being overzealous, but neck manipulations does not help anyone anyway. And herbalist can make mistakes, however, apart from medical phytotherapy, which is evidence based and practiced by people who are at least aware of the fact that herbal preparations must be treated as drugs as well as of their limitations, herbalism itself is a mistake.
However e.g. homeopaths are killing exactly because they act like homeopaths are supposed to!
Just the sort of rubbish which ought to be held up to public ridicule. Unfortunately the people who fall for this are already vulnerable, and may well leave real treatment for this stuff without their doctors being any the wiser or able to help them.
It is interesting and a reflection on current society that homeopaths go for the cancer cure knowing presumably that nobody will be around in the long run to sue or ask for redress. How about homeopaths taking on something else – cataracts perhaps. A really trivial thing which they ought to be able to sort out in no time without resort to real surgery. Surely the thought that patients would be around to expect a real result can’t be putting them off?
interesting is also the lack of objection from the world of homeopathy: WHERE ARE THE RESPONSIBLE HOMEOPATHS WHO STOP THIS SORT OF THING?
It is usually claimed that only a few ‘rotten apples’ behave like this and the bulk of homeopaths are fine. I beg to differ: as long as there is no wide-spread objection from them, they are just as guilty of unethical/criminal behaviour as the ones who make the idiotic claims.
I still don’t understand why, with so many chiropractors around, we still have people who are deaf.
What?
LOL!
Wait! Spoke too soon. Chiropractors are still healing deafness.
I think that every responsible type of health-care practitioner, whether allopath or one who uses non-toxic, non-pharma approaches, has a professional responsibility to leave the cancer treatments to the oncologist cancer specialists who can’t cure cancer.
very infantile!
Please Ernst, stop your skeptik quackery. In the future an independent resarch in paper shown the relations with you and “ONG” (i.e. CSICOP, GWUP, CFI…) and industries. Wait, you are a former advisor comitte in Homeopathy journal…. your are a spy!!
Why do you think oncologists cannot cure cancers? Of course, there are still very tough ones, but even then you are guaranteed longer life, however out of the most popular, small-cell carcinoma is one of the worst, but it is also very difficult to get for non-smokers and people forced to tolerate smokers.
Of course, those who waste their time on homeopaths are very likely to die from e.g. that type of breast cancer that has excellent rate of cure, but if you first spend your time on drinking magic water then well, instead of removing tumor and doing radiation and/or chemo and living happily ever after, then…
Beware lack of evidence is because homeopathy doesn’t cure diseases in a fashion normally expected. There is basis change which is unheard of in the history of medicine.
Don’t argue that RCTs should be capable of detection either. Too many people including scientists, Allopaths even specialists among them are not endorsing the effects of homeopathy without reason. basis change is meaningless non existent phenomenon until it is measured or observed because we don’t have a precedent. ok a dose of belladonna intended to cure an afternoon sun headache doesn’t cure headache as such, but it changes the basis as “headache From loss of sleep ” (if sleep is lost). The patient doesn’t lose sleep and his occupation or habits don’t normally prevent him from getting enough sleep. Hence there’s no headache. this is an example of the basis change.
Now to be frank, even if homeopathy is not needed as a treatment system, it is invaluable for physics. these basis changes are consistent with what some physicist showed us as a tool for understanding the spectral behavior of some observables, a Hilbert space. Again evidence for this consistency is already there in homeopathy as relationship of remedies as mutual rotational states.
It is very conspicuous too.
if homeopaths aren’t capable of explaining the mechanism, as scientists the gentlemen skeptics are supposed to study it as to why there is apparent failure in ordinary RCTs yet homeopaths and the patients benefitted are absolutely confident of the good effects.
Basis changes are not detectable by ordinary RCTs because a Good number of them are under reported. Objectives are heavily dependant on subjective feedbacks because of the necessity of clinical correlations.
If demeanor is a giveaway, it is again not detectable by a stranger to the case as is done in double blind RCTs.
So Science, is at the mercy of some statisticians who are given a wrong model / or picture and asked to check whether something unknown is conforming to a paradigm set up by an incomparable system.
are you for real?
I was never more serious than now.
Save Science.
@ Venkatesh.
I am sorry to put it this way and I hope you understand that I am being honestly and respectfully straightforward here. But the things you write make me worried for you. It looks like you have an abnormal condition of the mind described as involving a “loss of contact with reality”?
For that matter, you are not the only alt-med supporting commenter here who writes similarly noncoherent and unrealistic gibberish but yours is one of those so detached from reality and full of nonsense that one is obliged to wonder.
Venkatesh, Your Hilbert space nonsense, which you posted on this blog on 5th October 2015, was shown to be incorrect by myself and others.
http://edzardernst.com/2014/12/homeopaty-proof-of-concept-or-proof-of-misconduct/#comment-70139
@Venkatesh
My apologies; I usually try to be friendly and patient when I write a comment, but you have had reasonably friendly responses from others. My own is that I can’t understand a darn thing you’re trying to say. I know what a Hilbert space is, but you open the possibility that some people might have a space between their ears they’re confusing with the real world.
I had a new look at the “World’s leading homeopathy portal” Hpathy-dot-com as people were posting comments on this thread about its promotion of homeopathy for cancer.
I noticed on the left sidebar to the interview with the idiot claiming to know how to cure cancer with shaken water, there was a string of links marked as advertisements seemingly intended for cancer patients in search for help. The titles were:
“Help For Cancer Patients”
”Depression In Cancer Patients”
“Patient Resources”
”Treatment For Tumor”
“Adnexal Tumor Symptoms”
”Immune System Treatments”
“Ovarian Cancer Symptoms”
“Rheumatoid Arthritis Diets”
And what do you find when you click on them? Random advertisements like: “Quick fitness tips”; “Hair conditioning tips”; “Cheap upgrades for homes”… and so on!
Here’s an example of what someone wanting to find results for “Depression in Cancer Patients” will find:
http://i.imgur.com/1sGZVDO.jpg
This is not only ugly and deceitful, this is plain evil against desperate patients with life threatening disease.
There is no issue with anyone’s honesty here. I haven’t just thought about a model of the plausible mechanism that is technically irrefutable overnight. it took me nearly four years before I’ve finally arrived at the correct model that successfully answers every point raised against homeopathy as well as being a consistent translation of the principles to the language understandable to science.
I think I’ve mentioned about the conservation of information that is working behind the memory of water. the credit for making the world safe for quantum mechanics and homeopathy goes to Leonard Susskind. rather than suspecting the memory of water ( I resent this substitute term in place of “conservation of information “) now it is impossibility of deletion of info of whatever has been added to the water.
Closed Timelike Curves are not merely a mathematical possibility. David Deutsch is the authority here. Homeopathy proves they are a reality at least so far as information is concerned. A physicist would love to learn how homeo cures are nothing but orthogonal rotation of vectors due to the similimum acting as addition of a *negative vector.
The Science behind homeopathy is impeccable.
Don’t do it for the sake of homeopathy, but uphold Science. again consider adapting RCTs in such a way as to remedy the defects pointed out by me and to evaluate the good effects independent of subjective improvements and expectations in line with allopathic cures. somehow uphold science.
it took you 4 years to come up with utter nonsense?
I can do that in 10 minutes!
then do that. anyway you can’t offer any logical grounds for refuting my scientific model.
I’ve known scientists arguing on the basis of scientific theories. if anyone makes a substantial objection they are too glad to answer them with a logically matching rebuttal assigning reasons that are also matching in their gravity.
Any deviation from this norm highly savors of prejudice. And haste in doing so is absolutely unwarranted, hence amazes the keenest reader. I am not at all in a hurry to prove the truth. but always ready to show what is inevitable.
Venkatesh, please point us to the peer-reviewed publication in which you explain and provide the evidence for your scientific model for homeopathy. Without this, we have only your word, which doesn’t get us very far. Do you ever feel you have been overlooked for a Nobel Prize? If we can view your science properly, we might be able to put in a word.
Frank, Without that peer-reviewed publication his comments are meaningless. He seems to be parroting a tiny amount what other homeopathists have published, and he has made it blindingly obvious that he doesn’t begin to understand what he’s talking about. It seems that his comments on this blog are remarkably similar to those of the commentator “Dr. Venkatesh” on hpathy-dot-com who linked to an article he claimed to have written: “Theoreticalphysics in Homeopathy” by Venkatesh K. N. 2015-01-01.
Theoreticalphysics isn’t a word, perhaps it was a Poe for “Theatrical Psychics in Homeopathy”.