April 28, 2008
Julian Winston, (1941-2005) was one of our best scholars and historians of Homeopathy. His article about homeopathy in the treatment of epidemics has been widely republished. I include it here as it is becoming more relevant each year as global warming and antibiotic-resistant bacteria create new generations of epidemic illness that standard pharmaceutical medicine is unprepared for.
Homeopathy, on the other hand, is far more flexible than pharmaceutical medicine, and is routinely used to treat epidemics in India and other countries.
Some History of the Treatment of Epidemics with Homeopathy
by Julian Winston
From its earliest days, homeopathy has been able to treat epidemic diseases with a substantial rate of success, when compared to conventional treatments. It was these successes that placed the practice of homeopathy so firmly in the consciousness of people world-wide. (more…)
April 16, 2008
This very important collaborative statement was written in February 2002 by the Science and Environmental Health Network. I first found it soon after writing the Sustainable Medicine Manifesto, and was amazed and delighted to find that I was in such good company.
Ecological Medicine: A Call for Inquiry and Action
Ecological Medicine is a new field of inquiry and action to reconcile the care and health of ecosystems, populations, communities, and individuals.
The health of Earth’s ecosystem is the foundation of all health. Human impact in the form of population pressure, resource abuse, economic self-interest, and inappropriate technologies is rapidly degrading the environment. This impact, in turn, is creating new patterns of human and ecosystem poverty and disease. The tension among ecosystem health, public health, and individual health is reaching a breaking point at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century.
Public health measures, education, and medical advances have significantly reduced death and disease in many parts of the world, but some advances come at considerable cost, and the benefits are not equally distributed. (more…)
By Ted Schettler, MD MPH
Medical advances have resulted in substantial decreases in morbidity and mortality in many parts of the world. Some of these advances come at considerable economic as well as environmental costs, and benefits are not equally distributed. Now medicine and public health struggle to address the changing patterns of disease resulting both from a rapidly changing and degraded earth and from the ways people live on it. (more…)
This article, (originally published in 1998) by Randy Peyser, highlights the work of Joel Kreisburg, founder of Teleosis, another organization that focuses on ecologically sustainable medicine.
What’s Turning America’s Doctors Green?
The Case for Ecologically Sustainable Medicine
From community-based Earth Day events, to magazines on sustainability and “green” conferences, the environmental movement has inspired some to work tirelessly toward saving the planet, and motivated others to at least toss the right container in the correct recycling bin for garbage pick up every week. However, in spite of our collective efforts, both large and small, there is still one area of environmental awareness in which, even after twenty years of educating ourselves, we are sorely missing the mark.
According to Dr. Joel Kreisberg DC, an adjunct faculty member at JFK University, members of the ‘green community,’ and the community-at-large, have entirely neglected the area of ‘green medicine.’ (more…)
In this systems model of homeopathy, each person or organism contains patterned information about all the other organisms in the larger system of the universe. Theoretically, a healthy person should be able to draw on resources from any other substance at an appropriate time, and move fluidly through life using different energy patterns as they are needed—both in the outer world, and in the inner workings of the body itself. When cleaning one’s house, a person draws on mineral energy to create structure and order out of chaos, putting thing in their proper place, and lining things up into neat and predictable rows. In the human body, minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and silica create structure in forming bones, teeth, nails, and hair. Other minerals function to break down and rearrange other structures, form bonds, and convert energy into matter, and matter into energy.
When attacked by an assailant, that same person should draw on animal energy for survival—to run away quickly, hide, or fight back. (more…)
This article first appeared in The American Acupuncturist, Volume XXIII, Winter 2000. I am reprinting it here because Cuba is a country we will wish we had studied closer as we enter the post-peak-oil era. Cuba has already been through the changes we are just barely starting to feel the effects of, and their solutions were far more brave and creative than most other countries who have found themselves suddenly lacking resources.
Despite huge shortages in medical supplies due to the U.S. embargo, Cuba has one of the most advanced medical systems in Latin America-and a strong commitment to providing free medical care not just to its own people, but to poverty stricken areas around the world.
In recent years, a second revolution has taken root in the fertile soil of the first: “Natural and Traditional Medicine”-from acupuncture to homeopathy to music therapy-is now offered in clinics and hospitals alongside conventional therapies, and Cuban patients pay the same amount for open heart surgery as they do for an acupuncture treatment: absolutely nothing. I traveled to Cuba in November, 1999 to research this phenomenon, and returned with a great love for this small country. (more…)
