The UK homeopathy sector have issued a joint statement. The reason for this action is a series of allegedly negative press stories about homeopathy. Here is the full statement:
Homeopathy registers including the Society of Homeopaths, Faculty of Homeopathy and Alliance of Registered Homeopaths in conjunction with other homeopathy partners have come together to provide clarification for patients seeking advice and homeopathy treatment.
The joint homeopathy sector statement
“Recent media reports have incorrectly linked homeopathy to the anti-vaccination movement. A registered homeopath provides care according to the guidelines outlined in the Code of Practice of their registering body. This code ensures that the homeopath operates professionally, safely, and within their bounds of competence. Homeopathic medicines are prescribed on an individual basis to match a patient’s specific symptoms. Questions about vaccination from the public to a registered homeopath should be deferred to those medically trained to answer them, such as GPs.”
Emily Buttrum Chief Executive of the Society of Homeopaths commented that she was positive the joint statement would bring the homeopathic community together and protect the future of homeopathy and in turn patient choice. The joint statement reflects the Society’s clear guidance on professional standards.
The Society’s position statements may be viewed here
The Homeopathy sector statement may be viewed here
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When homeopaths try to issue a serious ‘statement’, hilarity is rarely very far. Let me suggest what, in my view, the main reasons for hilarity are in the recent outburst:
- Homeopaths and homeopathic organisations are hubs of anti-vaccination propaganda. To deny this means being in denial.
- The anti-vaccination stance of UK lay homeopaths has repeatedly been demonstrated (we have shown this already in 2002).
- The recent media reports were not incorrect.
- These reports were necessary steps to protect the public from charlatans.
- Homeopaths provide care according to guidelines, unless they violate them.
- Violations have happened repeatedly.
- The homeopathic organisations have a long history of failing to adequately address this problem.
- Arguably, homeopaths do not operate within any bounds of competence; if they did, they would not prescribe ineffective treatments.
- Homeopathic remedies are individualised, except in ‘clinical homeopathy’ where they are not.
- Questions about vaccination should be referred to GPs; except they are often not, as the recent evidence has shown.
I am glad to hear that Mrs Buttrum believes that a bunch of pranks, porkies and outright falsehoods will bring homeopaths together. In fact, I am optimistic they will, not lease because, for more than 200 years, homeopathy is being held together by little more than that.
41 Responses to When the UK homeopathy sector issues a joint statement, hilarity is never far
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Strange that Linda Wicks, Chair of the Society of Homeopaths, was reported in the Daily Mail as promoting various bizarre anti-vaccination petitions on Facebook then. Strange how many homeopaths seem to be involved with the anti-vaccination Arnica Group. And so on.
Whilst the UK homeopathy associations may say that they have no formal links to the anti-vaccination movement, some of their members (including certain trustees, directors, etc) definitely are members of anti-vaccination groups. Many of them share and promote anti-vaccination misinformation online from extreme anti-vaccination organisations even if they are not members of them. One thing that has been seen is the sharing of crowdfunding efforts for the VAXXED II film, which is basically putting money into Andrew Wakefield’s pocket.
In the past, the Society of Homeopaths certainly did produce anti-vaccination leaflets and only stopped because of instruction from the then Department of Health. A lot of the old guard from that time are still around. The Faculty of Homoeopathy used to be publicly anti-vaccination but changed its tune to avoid conflict with other doctors.
I don’t believe for a minute that this joint statement represents a consensus position. It’s very likely written by the British Homeopathic Association. There maybe some lip service paid to the statement – for example Helios seems to have removed certai anti-vaccination books from sale – but the likelihood of any of the associations doing much about members giving bad and dangerous advice about vaccination is extremely low. Any association that attempts to is going to lose members. Both the SoH and FoH have financial difficulties due to falling membership numbers.
Sure, refer vaccination questions to ignorant GPs. No one can question vaccinations. [All] vaccinations are safe and effective [for everybody all the time] because the authorities say they are, without any legitimate testing to prove it. There was an interview on Fresh Air with an author who investigated the horrible conditions under which medicines are produced in China without any proper supervision by the FDA. The same conditions apply for vaccines.
“Ignorant GPs” = “Well-schooled GPs who are happy to dispel the myth of ‘vaccine-damaged’ children.”
There you go, Roger. Fixed it for you.
One size fits all medicine is not acceptable for any other condition or individual, except for sacrosanct vaccinations. Pro-vaxxers worship at the alter of vaccinations without really addressing the serious concerns that have been brought up.
Each and every concern has been addressed, Roger. Ad nauseum. That the scientifically ignorant antivax brigade cannot deal with the cognitive dissonance as their position is completely undermined and hence put their fingers in their ears and go “LALALA” is their problem.
Stories like this are so common:
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/11/26/valid-contraindications-to-vaccine.aspx?cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20191126Z1&et_cid=DM398032&et_rid=757769956
And the pro-vaxxers routinely write them off as being purely coincidental, until it happens to their own children.
Ooh! Mercola! Such an august and respected publication! What next, Roger? Natural News?
Curious isn’t it how the concept of coincidence not equaling causation never seems to sink in. And that these cases of vaccine damage fail to show up in clinical trials.
As you were, Roger.
The correlation not equaling causation is in the area of vaccination resullts. Pro-vaxxers cant show that vaccines have caused the reduction in the incidence of the disease they are meant to prevent for most vaccines. Better air water food and lifestyle are the real causes.
Then all the incidence of vaccine damage is well hidden since a true placebo (saline solution) is not used in the limited short term vaccine trials. Instead they use other vaccines which have the same problem as the vaccine supposedly being tested in the trial. Garbage in, garbage out.
Oh dear, Roger. Trope after trope. Strange isn’t it how the plunge in disease incidence happens after the introduction of each individual vaccine. A remarkable coincidence that sanitation, air quality must have improved at exactly the same time all those times.
And the “saline placebo” nonsense. Even better, how about vaxxed versus unvaxed? That would REALLY show the MMR jab triggering autism, wouldn’t it?
Oh. It’s been done. And it didn’t. https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2727726/measles-mumps-rubella-vaccination-autism-nationwide-cohort-study
What a shame when harsh reality intrudes on your fantasies.
Read the book Dissolving Illusions. The incidence of the disease dropped dramatically, like 90% Before the vaccines were introduced in most cases. Sorry to shatter your illusions.
I read an analysis of this Denmark study. They seriously cooked the statistics on this study, as always.
You can read about it here: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/?s=MMr
The bigger issue in all of this is that a discussion like this is not allowed in the wider media. It is being shut down in most venues. Individuals cant make up their own minds about vaccines. Vax lovers, apologists and profiteers feel that they have to make the decision for everyone.
https://postpolioproblemadediscapacidad.blogspot.com/2017/04/let-evidence-speak-did-vaccines-save-us.html
Roger
If studies cook data, they get called on it and the studies retracted. It happens to dubious antivax twaddle all the time, starting with Wakefield’s fraudulent twaddle. What you read was not a rational criticism but a load of special pleading by antivax loons who wouldn’t recognise decent science if it bit them on the arse.
And which disease are you referring to? I’m talking about EVERY ONE for which vaccination has been introduced.
@Roger
You don’t seem to understand what Lenny’s driving at. Please try harder. If better air, water food and lifestyle are the real causes of reduction in incidence of (infectious) diseases then there must be unique combinations of better air, food and water for each individual disease, since the timings when the incidence fell for each separate disease ranged over more than 50 years. And the timings do correlate with the introduction of vaccines, as you can see from this chart.
Now take a look at Figure 1 on this web page. You’re quite right that better sanitation (mainly breaking the “faecal-oral route” of infection transmission by physically separating water supplies from sewage) contributed to a massive reduction in death rates from infection long before the first vaccine (Salk polio) or the first antibiotic (penicillin) was introduced. But my first link is surely clear enough evidence that vaccines do have a positive effect: it’s not easy to dismiss causality with timing data like these, unless you’re so fanatically wedded to vaccine negativity you can’t recognize clear facts when you see them.
Ok, Frank, then please, you too try harder to follow my thinking. You can go to Dr Humpries site and see a much more granular graph of historical mortality from various illnesses indicating when the vaccines were introduced. Scroll down to near the bottom to see the graph or better yet, read the article.
http://drsuzanne.net/dr-suzanne-humphries-vaccines-vaccination/
And you can read about it in much more detail in her book Dissolving Illusions.
This doesnt cover the issues such as that the Measles immunization is not lifelong, like contracting it confers. And doesnt cover the dramatic growth of childhood chronic illness (some of it bizarre, like peanut allergies) that can probably be at least partially attributed to vaccination
Roger
That graph is a standard bit of antivax smoke and mirrors. It is a long-derided piece of nonsense which gets waved about triumphantly by loons like Humphries who think we haven’t seen it before. It shows mortality, not incidence. Mortality rates were indeed dropping due to improvements in medical care. But mortality isn’t everything. What about all the people who contracted, say, measles and didn’t die but were left with life-long neurological damage? Look at the chart which Frank links to which demonstrates the full picture and shows Humphries to be either a fool, a liar or both.
Mortality rates are much more accurate than incidence rates. Incidence rates amount to the CDC pulling numbers out of their ass. Like they do for Incidence Rates of influenza. Most of the so-called cases of influenza are actually some other virus that mimics influenza’s effects. The influenza vaccine would have had no preventative effect. But the CDC touts large numbers of cases of influenza that they cant document with testing, to scare everyone into getting a worthless vaccine. The effectiveness of the influenza vaccine has been dismal many years. Talk about unsubstantiated. I guess we just have differing opinions on who to trust: a govt organization bribed by vaccine manufacturers, that is selling billions of dollars worth of vaccines or an independent researcher.
For relatively healthy individuals living a relatively healthy lifestyle these diseases are mild and have no lasting effects. Our public health agencies would promote healthy outcomes more effectively by advocating for general public health measures rather than advocating for vaccines. Since WWII our diets have disintegrated under the onslaught of manufactured food with huge amounts of added sugar and junk. Adding poorly manufactured vaccines into the mix is putting a match to the gasoline.
Why else would we have such a high numbers of kids with peanut allergies now, when it used to be unheard of? You dont think injecting peanut oil and adjuvants into children when their immune system is not fully developed might have something to do with it? The adjuvant is supposed to trigger reactivity to the disease particles; why wouldnt it cause reactivity to the peanut oil too?
@Roger,
Fine, you don’t get it. You prefer to trust the opinion of someone like Suzanne Humphries (who’s made it to the pages of the Encyclopedia of American Loons) over straightforward presentations of official data from CDC.
The “much more granular graph of historical mortality from various illnesses” (you don’t even seem to acknowledge that the “various illnesses” we’re discussing are all infectious diseases) is from exactly the same data source as the second link in my comment. The reduction in infectious disease mortality resulting from improvements in sanitation (and other public health measures) essentially reaches baseline on the graph by the end of WWII. The “era” of vaccination is the period since the mid 1940s (yes, I know there were a few earlier vaccines), so you need to ask what’s happened to death rates from infection since that date. Which means the data we share and agree on from 1900 to 1945 are irrelevant to the discussion.
Expand the scale of number of deaths, as is done in my first link (the death rates are now plotted on the x-axis) and the vaccine impact is bleedingly obvious except to the pathologically blind.
Great! Now you’re saying people should suffer a potentially fatal disease to get lifelong cover instead of getting cover for the period when they’re most likely to come in contact with an infected group.
[my bold]
Those highlighted words constitute a totally unevidenced claim: purely an unsubstantiated opinion that squirms in its straw-clutching desperation. You seem to manage your life with unevidenced opinions, Roger. I shan’t bother trying to hold a sensible discussion with you again.
I am sure Dr Wakefield is making oodles of money from Vaxxed. They are driving a bus around the country doing showings. Right now they are in Nevada City CA population 3,000.
If someone thinks the anti-vaccine lobby is poorly, think again. There’s big money in there.
Ex-Dr. Andrew is not doing so bad personally, either..
There’s not a lot of money in it in the UK. Nor is it very well organised here.
What exactlly is the source of this big money that is supposedly going into the vaccine lobby? Certainly not corporate money. So that leaves what? Individuals chipping in the small amounts that they can afford. The few people that havent been brainwashed by the big pharma vaccine lobby.
@Bjorn
The “anti-vaccine lobby” …. is actually the “safe vaccine lobby”.
You know, they could take the shit outta the vaccines if they wanted to.
So you are advocating that instead of getting lifelong immunity from measles which is generally a mild disease for children, we should take vaccinations our entire life because as Wikipedia states “Complications are usually more severe in adults who catch the virus.” I think that is a rather asinine position.
“Generally a mild disease”
Explain that to the folk in Samoa, You and your ilk have the blood of children on your hands. You disgust me with your blinkered, dogmatic ignorance. Go away. Do not darken this blog again with your asinine bloviations.
Lenny
Perhaps SBM played a large part in the snafu in Somoa measels outbreak.
“Between 2017 and 2018, the country’s national immunisation rate dropped drastically from 74 per cent to 34 per cent.”
“The country’s immunisation programme was suspended temporarily in July 2018 following the deaths of two babies after they received their vaccines.
It was later found that the deaths were caused by medications that were wrongly administered, and two nurses were put on trial for manslaughter.
But many parents lost confidence in vaccinations after the incidents, leading to the decline in coverage.”
So those that were using SBM, and licensed to kill had everything to do with the Somoa vaccine rates falling off drastically.
My my my…. hmmm
Lenny, I realize you are an all knowing infallible member of the SS (so-called skeptics) who has an inside track to the mind of God, so you know better than anybody else on any subject, but still someday you should grow up and learn how to have a civil argument with people you disagree with.
Samoa has a GDP of about $6k per individual, not including what is siphoned off by exported corporate earnings. A better approach to reducing disease in that country would be to increase the general health and welfare of the population which would reduce their susceptibility to all disease instead of introducing toxic brew vaccinations of questionable safety for the disease of the moment. Of course that doesnt fit with the profit plan of big pharma and the paradigm of the SS.
“Of course that doesnt fit with the profit plan of big pharma and the paradigm of the SS.”
SO GLAD TO SEE THAT YOU KNOW HOW TO FORMULATE A ‘CIVIL ARGUMENT’!!!
Are you implying that my argument is un-civil?
The measles virus is no respecter of GDP, Roger.
The current Samoan outbreak is demonstrating the idiocy and downright evil of the antivax movement. How many dead children will it take before it finally occurs to you that you could, just conceivably, be wrong?
You don’t care, do you? You will continue to twist and wriggle, hoist straw men and indulge in whataboutery. Because maintaining the fallacious beliefs of the antivax movement appears to be more important than any number of childrens’ lives.
Lenny – ‘the current Samoan outbreak is demonstrating the idiocy and downright evil of the antivax movement ‘.
After the tragic deaths of the two babies ( due to an incorrect administration of the vaccine and something else )
didn’t the Samoan authority ban immunisation for a few months resulting in doubts by parents in that community and New Zealand re safety of vaccinations?
I haven’t really followed this thread so apologies if this has been said. I just picked up on your comment about antivax movement.
Lenny, you can cut the maudlin histrionics and hyperbole. Whether you believe it or not, we both have the best interests of the public at heart. We both want a healthy future. We just believe in different ways to reach it.
You believe that uncontrolled experimentation on the population with vaccines is the best approach. I dont.
There were 59,000 reported adverse reactions in the US to vaccines including 432 deaths in 2016. VAERS admits that only about 1% of the ARs get reported. How many more were in areas that had a population with worse living conditions to begin with? We dont know. No one is keeping track.
Accusing me of ” maudlin histrionics and hyperbole” and then describing vaccination as “uncontrolled experimentation on the population”? Oh, hello Mr Pot. Care to back up this assertion with a bit of evidence?
Now go away, read about VAERS properly, not just what it says in your little antivax echo-chamber, what it is and how it works.
I had my flu vaccine last week. It made my arm ache for a couple of days, but I didn’t report that particular adverse reaction. Do you think I should have done?
CDC’s unpublished Verstraeten study on Hep B showed dramatic increased risk of Autism (7.6x), Sleep disorders (5x), Speech disorders (2.1x) and neurodevelopmental disorders (1.8x).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DD9uH_LkbqJssArd9vsDiatjs0PsVhY7/view?fbclid=IwAR2DymGuD8nyZ3XiGdcvnutZX4ZGwpSOk_cIX_8zbkTOdnNPHA3S2cQnR6s
Yes, Dr Julian, I think you should report it, so that then when you develop Alzheimer or Parkinson’s we can do a retrospective study.
unpublished !!!
Would that I might live that long! Though myeloma is a well-known risk factor for Alzheimer’s so perhaps I will get it early.
Retropective studies are by their nature limited in what they can tell us and are more useful for generating hypothesis than testing them, however.
Roger,
That isn’t a very helpful link, as it is not possible to jump to the papers that are referenced in order to see what they really say. Most of the excerpts in any case seem to relate to correlations, not causation (e.g. underprivileged sectors of society have a lower take up of healthcare generally, affecting their vaccination rates and how likely they are to seek help for allergies).
Given that the study you refer to is unpublished, how can we know what data were collected by what method, and how they were analysed or indeed what the findings were at all?
Do you really think you will convince anybody by claiming that you have evidence if nobody else can view it?
And please note that propaganda is not the same as evidence.
You ‘think’ too much Roger. It is better to learn and know 😉
Frank, So everybody just turned on their lights in 1945 and started adopting healthier lifestyles, got clean water and air all at once and we can ignore the downward trend in these diseases for the entire previous period? I dont think there were significant improvements in infectious disease management during this earlier period, pre-antibiotics, so that wouldnt account for the downward trend either.
I dont reject all vaccines on principal but I do reject the mantra [All] vaccines are safe and effective [for everybody all the time] and the enforced mandate that everybody must have them without informed consent. Dr Thompson of the CDC was recorded admitting that Afro-American boys who received MMR had higher rates of autism, and that he and his colleagues at the CDC cooked the statistics to hide it. The CDC has well documented conflicts of interest when it comes to vaccines. Dr Offet received a large pay day for the vaccine his company created and is on the committee that decides what vaccines are recommended by the CDC. The CDC spends billions to buy the vaccines then resells them. They are the fox guarding the hen house. Vaccines should be tested by independent researchers, not the companies that create them. Manufacturers should have full liability for their vaccine products just like there is for every other drug. There has been no long-term study of the effects of high rates of vaccination of multiple vaccines (over 60 shots recommended now). Remember that the problems of DES werent even identified in the generation that received it, but in their daughters. Many vaccines are produced in China which has a horrible reputation for manufacturing many things including drugs. We are all guinea pigs in a huge experiment. When these and other issues are addressed and we have full disclosure on everything related to vaccines then I will be able to trust this system. I dont understand the attitude of people who are wary of most other aspects of govt but are willing to swallow the vaccine mantra whole.
Hi Dr Julian & Lenny,
You might like this:
NICU Nurse Michelle Rowton talks about vaccines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhHQ4Uc30tM&feature=youtu.be