On his website, Phillip Hughes – D. Hom (Med), M.A.R.H, describes himself as follows:
In the early 1990’s my life was turned upside-down by a prolapsed disk in my back, putting me in traction in a hospital for 6 weeks! The doctor’s prognosis was poor, leaving me with little hope of full mobility, and no choice but to seek treatment elsewhere.
I decided on Homeopathy, and after treatment I experienced real change in my condition within a month, and was completely well within 3 months. I was so inspired by this I decided to study Homeopathy myself – and in 1994 I enrolled at the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy in London, qualifying in 1998.
After qualifying I set up my first clinic in Waterloo, Liverpool. I also became a senior lecturer at the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy, and founder of the Liverpool branch of the Hahnemann College.
I then moved my clinic to College Road Crosby, when I took up the role of secretary of Homeopathic Medical Association (since resigned). It was during this time that my wife Rosa found a lump in her breast, motivating us again to seek safer and alternative treatments, this time using Thermography. We now run Thermography and Homeopathic clinics side by side.
I had never heard of Mr Hughes until yesterday, when it was reported that he had treated a Sean Walsh, a young musician, for Hodgkin lymphoma that had initially been controlled with chemotherapy, but had later returned. Here is an excerpt from the sad story:
Sean was having scans at a clinic – Medical Thermal Imaging – run by a couple called Philip and Rosa Hughes. Philip Hughes, a homeopath, had previously told Sean’s parents he’d successfully treated Rosa for breast cancer. Dawn [Sean’s girlfriend] went along to Sean’s first appointment. “Phil was just talking all about how damaging chemotherapy is, you know, on the human body… saying, ‘I’ve had lots of people come to my clinic, but by the time I get them, they’re shot with all this chemotherapy, so I can’t help them … And then he was talking all about how you can change your diet, which can reverse cancer. He’d said that Rosa had developed breast cancer. She’d had a lump in her breast, and she decided not to do hospital treatment, and she was going to, you know, reverse the cancer herself. So obviously Sean’s listening to this thinking, ‘Well, if one person’s done it, and then I’m hearing other little stories off them, I can do this’. Sean’s scans did carry a disclaimer, stating that thermography does not see or diagnose cancer and recommending further clinical investigation. But the scan results seemed reassuring – and Sean was convinced his cancer had gone. ‘Medical Thermal Imaging’ describe their scans as “100% safe and radiation-free”.
To find out more about the service the Hughes were offering, a BBC reporter went to the clinic where Sean had his scans, posing as a patient who’d found a lump. They were seen by Rosa Hughes, who had provided scans for Sean. Rosa told our reporter that when she went to the breast clinic to have her lump investigated, she should have an ultrasound rather than a mammogram. This is a transcript of what she said: “Not a mammogram, because you’re going to get radiated, and it’s going to squash… and the amount of women that have had their tumours, the tumour burst, that spreads cancer.”
[The BBC] asked cancer specialist Prof Andrew Wardley, of Manchester’s Christie Hospital, to review the medical claims Rosa Hughes made to our reporter. “That’s preposterous. You don’t burst tumours, they are solid. You do squash the breast down to do a mammogram, it is unpleasant but it’s a short-term thing. You do not spread cancer by doing a mammogram, that’s a complete fallacy.” Rosa and Philip Hughes say they “utterly reject” the allegation that they gave Mr Walsh inappropriate advice. They added they had “consistently made clear” that thermography can only be used alongside other tests, such as MRIs or mammograms.
At first Sean believed he had cured his own cancer. But tragically Sean was wrong. Gradually his health declined, until he was rushed to hospital in Liverpool where medical staff found he had multiple tumours in his stomach and chest. He did eventually receive chemotherapy but it was too late.
Sean died in January 2019.
On Philip Hughes’ website, he advertises his services with the help of several testimonials from happy customers. Here is one of them:
In November 2000, I had an aggressive Sarcoma Tumour removed along with my left lung. Shortly after surgery I was referred to Weston Park Hospital, Sheffield for ‘follow up’ treatments where I was offered both chemotherapy and radiotherapy. At around the same time, I first visited Waterloo Homeopathic Clinic on a friends recommendation. After this initial introduction to Homeopathy I began ti educate myself about my condition and possible treatments. Consequently I considered chemotherapy to be a crude option and decided to refuse it. However, the frightening thought of this aggressive tumour returning encourages me to go ahead with a six week course of radiotherapy as a precaution alongside Homeopathic treatment. Accordingly this holistic approach resulted in my immune system being boosted by Homeopathy and my body prepared for this medical treatment. Leading up to the radiotherapy and during the six weeks of treatments, I took a rang of Homeopathic remedies. Radium Brom, in my opinion, was undoubtedly the input that enabled me to go through an intense course of treatment daily and continue my healthy recovery. I didn’t miss a days work and finished a half marathon only three weeks after completing the radiotherapy. I have since remained in good health and all checks been clear.
I have said it often, but it seems I have to say it again: the homeopathic remedy might be harmless, but the homeopath isn’t!
PS
The BBC documentary provides many more details about Sean and another of Mr Hughes’ patients. It also shows some rare footage from the inside of the Gerson clinic in Mexico where Sean went for a while. Very sad but well worth watching!!!
21 Responses to The homeopathic remedy might be harmless, but the homeopath isn’t!
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Sorry to say, but I can´t leave wrong statements like this.
There are two false statements in the heading:
“The homeopathic remedy might be harmless,….”
No, a (once taken) homeopathic remedy can, if it does not fit, have side effects (fortunately only briefly). A long-term homeopathic remedy that doesn’t suit you can develop uncomfortable exam symptoms. A well-known German skeptic, whom I gave Stramonium C 30 in a personal contact, could, if he were scientifically open, test this personally.
https://homoeopathiewirkt.wordpress.com/2020/06/25/double-blind-study-of-belladonna-c-200/
“….but the homeopath isn’t!”
No, 99% of all homeopaths know exactly their and the limits of homeopathy and therefore do not pose any danger to mankind. And: You can treat cancer homeopathically (successfully), as long as you adhere to the rules of adjuvant homeopathic tumor therapy.
And there are black sheep on both sides: see unnecessary surgeries and chemotherapy that are not expected to prolong life but shorten life…
https://homoeopathiewirkt.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/when-is-sole-adjuvant-homeopathic-tumor-therapy-permissible-and-useful/
if you think that the 2 links are anywhere close to evidence, you are even more deluded than I thought.
“No, a (once taken) homeopathic remedy can, if it does not fit, have side effects (fortunately only briefly)”
Utter garbage. Homeopaths repeatedly make this assertion. One on Twitter claimed to have tried to poison a colleague he disliked using a homeopathic remedy.
The depths of their delusions is quite remarkable.
@Lenny
“One on Twitter claimed to have tried to poison a colleague he disliked using a homeopathic remedy.”
lol…. we all know the easiest and most sure way to to eliminate a person by poisoning is with pharma meds. Simply consume according to the prescribed regimen year after year. If you want faster results, increase the dose.
@RG
Yes indeed. Everyone who takes Big Pharma medicines ends up dying. All of them. Proof of evil big pharma.
And can you point to any examples of physicians admitting on Twitter that they had tried to use medicines to deliberately poison people?
Your continuing ability to grasp the wrong end of the stick prior to poking yourself in the eye with it is quite impressive.
Maybe not admitting it on Twitter, but any doctor knows that any time a medicine is given the liver has to detoxify it i.e. they know its a poison. So yes, doctors are routinely poisoning people, violating the Hippocratic oath. Its called practicing medicine. The insanity of our times.
Oh, Dr. Hümmer is riding a dead horse again. Now it is no longer a carcass, but a skeleton.
“I experienced real change in my condition within a month, and was completely well within 3 months.”
If Mr Hughes had had any real experience of dealing with patients and understood the pathophysiology of disc troubles he would have known and recognised that his progress was typical and normal for the significant proportion of patients with his condition.
I suspect he does know that. How could he not?
And so the rest of his account is a description of how he sought to take advantage of gullible and vulnerable patients and then students. He must know this perfectly well unless he is deranged.
I look foward to learning how he answers any charge made that he is a fraud and scamist.
Not that I would suggest such a thing, he might be cross, but other folks might not share my reticence.
If it weren’t tragic it would certainly be funny…in a pathetic sort of way. Having dealt with innumerable SCAMMers and criminals in my life I’ve adopted an important rule-of-thumb: ALL TESTIMONIALS are lies, obfuscation or delusion. The whole point of “the testimonial” is to convince a sucker to believe something (And dish out some dough) without having to prove it.
I have just watched this fascinating but very sad documentary on BBC iPlayer. It is only 30 minutes long, and as the lad in question, Sean, posted regular updates on his progress on Facebook there is plenty of footage of him, including some glimpses of the Gerson Centre in Mexico. His sister made the point that the reinforcement of false beliefs on social media is akin to the process of radicalisation [of future jihadists]. The Gerson Centre had testimonials from Sean on their Web site, as one of their many success stories, until his family managed to persuade them to take it down The clinic that monitored his progress with thermal imaging were very careful in the wording of his reports (and in their promotional claims) not to say anything that was demonstrably false, while at the same time being quite misleading in their language, thereby continuing to support the false beliefs of their customers.
I’ve yet to watch the documentary, but it’s terribly sad to read Sean’s Facebook comments about chemotherapy, quoted on the BBC page: “Does it make sense to poison yourself back to good health…. It’s nuts….”
Where did the failure of basic education about a health condition occur in this case (and similar ones)? Was Sean convinced out of education he’d already been given, by the weasel words of a smooth-talking charlatan? Or had there been a failure somewhere along the line, earlier, to help him understand the nature of cancer treatment?
Patients too, of course, have surely some responsibility to educate themselves about a health condition – to ‘take ownership’. But when you are still a teenager (as he was when diagnosed) and perhaps not of a particularly educationally-enquiring disposition (“Chemotherapy, I’ve already had it, it done me no good”) it is maybe too much to expect penetrating analysis of educational materials.
No doubt there are materials available to people, written in plain English, that explain treatment options for health conditions. But perhaps more effort needs to go into producing a range of such materials written to “head people off at the pass” so that they won’t be fooled by charlatans.
The people involved in these bogus ‘treatments’ of no proven efficacy (or safety) seem not to be particularly clever or particularly educated (except for being clever at talking a good game), yet they blithely write off vastly qualified and experienced NHS Consultants as uneducated fools who lack the wit to have discovered the proper treatments.
A perusal of the website of the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy where Mr. Hughes studied, does not inspire confidence.
There is some odd English in the headings: “Brief About of HCH-UK”, “What Courses we Offered”, “Our Experts College Staff”. When we look at “Our Experts College Staff” we find a list of twenty–three Doctors. None has a biography or any reference to what medical school they qualified from. All have names which sound Indian and if English is not their first language, that might explain the odd English on the web page. But surely it would have cost very little to get a proof-reader to check the site before going live. It looks very unprofessional.
We see that the D. Hom (Med) course (those are the letters after Mr Hughes’ name on his own website) is a two-year course, and D stands for Diploma, not Doctor. What Mr Hughes’ M.A.R.H. stands for, I have not yet found out.
What gall does it take, to ask people to put their health and wellbeing in your care when you have a two-year diploma, instead of in the care of someone with a proper medical degree from a proper medical school – someone who can actually diagnose, write an NHS Prescription, and make Referrals where necessary.
Proper medical schools make their entry requirements public, in published prospectuses. You have to be CLEVER, proven in terms of A-Level results (or in Scotland, ‘Highers’) to even submit an application, let alone get near the interview stage (entry MAY be a little more flexible for mature, non school-leaver applicants). The Hahnemann college does not seem to specify what its entry requirement is, apart from a Reference of some kind.
I watched the half-hour documentary. I thought it was very well presented and struck an excellent tone. Aimée, Sean’s girlfriend, sounds so sensible and percipient in her observations. Tragically and ironically, we see the footage of poor Sean making the inverted commas sign and saying of NHC Consultants “Are they ‘Doctors’ or are they pill salesmen”. Yet who was it in the end who made Sean open his wallet and hand over his money? Who SOLD him treatment? Not the people working in the NHS, free at the point of need. Who in the NHS took money from Sean? No-one. But in SCAM?
@Lenny
I’m not sure what Twitter has to do with anything, I don’t subscribe to it. As for an MD admitting to what you speak would be an admission of murder, don’t expect to see it.
What I can give you is many a website that physicians testify that various pharma-meds are detrimental to good health. I should know, since I suffered a heart attack while using Vioxx. I am convinced that had I continued consuming Vioxx, I would have died from it.
If you read this, you will find that Merck knew much more about the cardiovascular dangers of Rofecoxib than they will admit to knowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib
RG / Lenny,
I agree that this is worth reading, and it is a salutory account of a pharmaceutical company behaving badly, and the drugs was rightly withdrawn. I was on holiday in Italy when the story broke, and the headline in an Italian-language newspaper caught my eye as I was on Vioxx myself at the time.
I suspect that many other commonly-prescribed non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and not just COX-2 inhibitors such as rofecoxib, would be found to increase the risk of cardiovascular events if they were examined closely enough, but in this case Merck had the data and suppressed it, and furthermore deliberately designed the clinical trials which would license their product not to show this effect.
While there is no doubt that Vioxx was responsible for many avoidable cardiac events, and probably some deaths, on the balance of probablilties it was not responsible for your heart attack (i.e. it did not as much as double the incidence of this already common event), and I doubt if it would have killed you. Many gamblers are convinced that if only they still had something left to wager they would have won back their losses, but mathematics does not support their contentions.
@ Dr JMK
I suspect one of the problems with rofecoxib is that it was a bloody BRILLIANT painkiller and the uptake was massive. Patients anecdotally told me how great it was and how frustrated they were when it was withdrawn. I kept it at my practice because it was fantastic for dental pain. Lots of the boxes disappeared because my nurses – and my wife – discovered that it was fantastic at relieving period pain.
Homeopathy is effective in many cases, especially situations around general health and well being. It cannot fix everything that might be wrong. It is the main modality I have used for several decades, but it could not fix the left bundle branch blockage in my heart, nor can it fix the nerve damage caused by Polio many years ago, but it did help me recover from surgery, and it has helped me recover from bouts of Post Polio Syndrome that I experience from time to time. I have consulted several homeopaths over the years and my wife has studied homeopathy for many years. We do know that not all homeopaths are equally competent. We also know that not all homeopaths know their limits. The tragedy I see over and over is that since the entire practice is so completely shut out of the US Medical Establishment, many opportunities to be helpful are lost. It is harmful when you must hide your use of homeopathy when talking to your MD.
“Homeopathy is effective in many cases”
EVIDENCE PLEASE
I had thermal imaging done at one of the clinics in Norfolk, Rosa phoned me with my report, advised me not to have a mammogram done and to not have the vaccine done either due to it causing Heavy Metal toxicity, I’m so confused I don’t know what to think, She said about changing my diet and seeing a Homopathy to change my life around, Th4 in one Brest and TH2 in the other my thermal scan came back abnormal, I’m so scared now after seeing all this I don’t know what to believe.
my advice would be to ignore totally what she told you and see your GP asap.
@Maria
Your story, short as it is, raises several huge red flags:
– Thermal imaging is useless as a diagnostic procedure for cancer. At best, it can tell if someone has a fever (but even then it is quite unreliable, because it only measures superficial skin temperatures).
– More alarming is the advice NOT to have a mammography done when these people explicitly tell you that a scan comes back abnormal. If there really is an abnormality, you absolutely want to have this checked out and confirmed by a real doctor, using real diagnostic tools. And if in reality there is nothing wrong with you, you still want to have this confirmed by a real doctor – because chances are that this very scary ‘diagnosis’ is merely a way to sell you useless homeopathic treatments, as you mentioned.
– And no, there are no heavy metals in any vaccines. In fact, Covid-19 vaccines work in the exact same way that the actual virus itself works. The only difference is that the vaccine does not result in the production of new, infectious virus particles, but just one virus protein – which triggers the immune system to create antibodies to fight off the virus. There are no heavy metals or other ‘toxic chemicals’ at all in vaccines.
I fully agree with Edzard: ignore everything that this Rosa person said, and please consult a real doctor.
@Maria: That is a horrific story. But AltMed scammers generally use one of two tactics: seduce you by telling you precisely what you want (and like) to hear, or send you into a blind panic by weaponizing your darkest fears against you. Sounds like you got #2, and “Rosa” is an absolutely vile, evil human being for the terror she’s put into you. But, snakes smile too. I suspect she cares less about whether you live or die than how much profit† she can extract from you along the way. She’d make an effective cult leader, I’m sure. However, she is absolutely not qualified, competent, or to be trusted where medical decisions are concerned; least of all where the wrong decisions, whether made from arrogant vanity or terrified self-deception, might lead to a truly appalling death.
(I warn you now: that link is graphic. I offer it not to frighten anyone further, but to illustrate what cancer scammers are happy to live with as the consequences of their “advice”.)
Edzard and Richard are right. Thermal breast imaging is a scammy practice and its results not to be trusted either way. Find yourself a good empathetic conventional medical practitioner if you don’t already have one, ideally one who has time to talk you through your fears and uncertainties (though I appreciate the entire medical profession is under huge stress right now), and go see them. If you are concerned because you’ve felt a lump yourself, tell them this right away. Not all lumps are tumors, and not all tumors are aggressive and malignant, but you owe it to yourself to get it checked out by someone who genuinely knows what they’re doing. I realize it is frightening to find out, but knowing gives us choices whereas fear does not.
There are also many cancer charities‡ that provide information and support on all aspects of education, emotional support, prevention, treatment, and so on. I don’t know where in the world you are but Cancer Research UK is a good one which we have over here.
Oh, and a commenter here I think you should talk to is Dr Julian Money-Kyrle. Lovely chap, a medical doctor (I think an oncologist; and maybe retired?) who is living with cancer himself. Of course, this is only an internet forum, so nothing said should be taken as medical advice (see your own doctor for that), but if anyone here can help you through your fears to a clearer, calmer understanding, I’ll bet it’s him.
Take care.
—
† Which may be measured in cold hard greenbacks, narc food, or both.
‡ Googling myself for “breast cancer charity uk” I was concerned that the #1 hit was a charity (Breast Cancer UK) that within a minute smelled a bit off to me. Further reading found clear signs of an ideological ax being ground (one that the “Rosas” of the world would no doubt find very acceptable). The #2 (Breast Cancer Now) looked okay to me at first glance though not one I’m familiar with, and the #3 was for Cancer Research UK which is solid. CRUK was my go-to when educating myself about the breast and prostate cancers in my own family members (both successfully went into permanent remission following conventional standard-of-care treatments, I am glad to say).