Homeopathic Remedies: Flower Essences

[Guest Energy11]

I use Bach's Rescue Remedy (*not without alcohol), A LOT for anxiety with mine. I also use it when we travel distances. No experience with other "Flower Essences," but LOVE this one!

 

 

[Guest longdogs]

 

As I said in my previous post, the fact that Homeopathy and Flower Essence Therapy does work with animals negates the placebo only argument. I gave a quick summary of the     times it has worked for us in my previous post. But it has worked on everyday stuff too.

 

 

 

How can you be sure it was the homeopathic remedy 'working' and not your perception of it? I don't know a parallel example for homeopathy, but an experiment was done with accupuncture and horses. Horses were assessed by vets before and after treatment and scored for symptoms. Owners were also asked to give an assessment. Many thought they could see marked improvement when vets found none.

 

 

 

 

I had a laugh over asking how people feel about what remedies are made from. Penicillin is made from fungus. One type of ACE inhibitor drugs that control blood pressure is made from snake venom. (These drugs cause the fewest side affect of all blood pressure medication). The first Malaria medication was made from bird poop.

The safety issue is a good point. If you do not pick the right remedy it won't do you any good. But it also will not do you any harm.

 

I think life is more fun if you keep an open mind and learn new things. You never know where something might come in handy.

 

What the origins of successful drugs happen to be is irrelevant. The point is they are drugs with active ingredients and testable effects. Penicillin mould produces a strong antibiotic, which makes a lot of evolutionary sense for something competing for food against bacteria and doesn't seem particularly 'funny'. Snake venom quite clearly has active ingredients too. Homeopathic remedies are 'made' of odd things but contain no active ingredients. A big difference.

 

As the adage goes, "Being open minded is good, but not so much that your brain drops out."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[CaliforniaGreys]

I think life is more fun if you keep an open mind and learn new things. You never know where something might come in handy.

 

I don't know about the fun part, but you are so right about keeping an open mind and learning new things.

 

I can still remember laughing at acupuncture, and even though I was willing to try anything to help one of my boys, I still laughed at it.

I remember listening to the vet explain the flows of energy in the body and how they can be blocked. My first thought was...welcome to the twilight zone

 

I don't laugh anymore, at that or anything else for that matter, especially things I don't understand or don't believe in

 

"Keeping an open mind" does not mean believing anything that someone claims, no matter how silly, such as that a solvent, in homeopathy's case water, is able to retain a memory of a solute that has been diluted so much that there is unlikely to be a single molecule left.

~D~

 

Gee, no kidding

[Guest mcsheltie]

 

As I said in my previous post, the fact that Homeopathy and Flower Essence Therapy does work with animals negates the placebo only argument. I gave a quick summary of the     times it has worked for us in my previous post. But it has worked on everyday stuff too.

 

 

 

How can you be sure it was the homeopathic remedy 'working' and not your perception of it? I don't know a parallel example for homeopathy, but an experiment was done with accupuncture and horses. Horses were assessed by vets before and after treatment and scored for symptoms. Owners were also asked to give an assessment. Many thought they could see marked improvement when vets found none.

 

 

 

I really don't think my perception had anything to do with it. But judge for yourself I'll re-write my experiences with a little more detail.

 

Touie had an antibiotic resistant sinus infection. It had moved in the surrounding bone. On the other side of that bone is the brain. My vet could do nothing, MSU (Michigan State University School of Veterinary Medicine... the big buck Specialists...) could do nothing. $4700 later she was at the point where she was going to have to be put down soon. They told me to spoil her for what time she had left. I turned to homeopathy as a last resort. The vet I was put in touch with was a master. Touie is alive and healthy.

 

This one I prescribed myself. Tiki had anaphylactic allergic reactions to bird feces. Every spring - fall she had to be kept on high doses of Prednisone and antihistamines in order to survive. Basically they suppressed her immune system to keep the allergic reaction at bay. I had EpiPens on hand when the allergy over came the medication she was on. You can go back and re-read how I used the homeopathic remedy. I gave it to her during an acute reaction, stood there and watched (shot in hand) as the swelling went down. She had one mild reaction a week later and I treated her for the acute reaction again. And the remedy worked a second time. Then I started treatment with the higher a potency for a month (there is a protocol to follow) and she never had another reaction. I stopped cold turkey with the antihistamine during the treatment and weaned her off the Pred. She was 3 1/2 yrs old at the time. She is now 13.

 

Ella belonged to one of my clients. She had three litters and had developed uterine inertia each time resulting in a C-section (I don't need to hear she should not have been breed, this isn't my bitch) I was asked to whelp the fourth litter. True to form she developed uterine inertia once again. (Uterine inertia is the absence of effective contractions. The cervix doesn't dilate completely and the bitch is unable to rotate or expel the puppies) I gave her the remedy I was prescribed and to cover my bases, went to call the owner's vet. I didn't need to take her in, she started into full labor twenty minutes later.

 

This bitch going into labor could be a coincidence. But that is unlikely. Usually as a bitch gets older they have a harder time giving birth. Uterine tone doesn't improve with age. If a dog always had to have c-sections it is highly unlikely she would go into labor on the fourth litter. But wilder coincidences have happened.

 

With Marv and Flower Essence treatment... all I can tell you is that she went from a cat who would attack any other cat who came into reach, to one who lived peacefully out in the house with everyone. When I got lazy and slacked off on her combo she would start to get hostile again. Go back to the schedule and she mellowed out. I definitely perceived her as more easy going. So did everyone one else in the household.

 

Owners thinking they see improvements in their horses doesn't surprise me. I trained American Saddlebreds professionally for 18 years and most owners couldn't tell me when their horse was lame. Much less grade a small improvement.

[Guest longdogs]

I'm sorry, anecdotes don't count as proof, however encouraging they seem. At best they are are a starting point. Alternative explanations exist and the most probable is that exactly the same thing would have happened had you done nothing because homeopathic remedies are the equivalent of doing nothing. There is really nothing more to say except to paraphrase the spokesperson for 'Boots', one of the UK's biggest pharmacists and retailers of homeopathic 'remedies'. Asked why Boots continued to sell what are basically fraudulent products, he said that although there was no evidence they worked, people want to buy them, so Boots will sell them. Read that as, "There's one born every minute".

 

I have no objection whatever if people choose to use these remedies on themselves, I just hate it when used on an an animal that needs real help, or children who have no choice, or people who think they are getting real treatment and don't know the difference. There are pages of information listing the harm people have done - often fatally - by trusting in homeopathic remedies that plain don't work. People (including practicing homeopaths) who have inadvertently killed their own children when they could easily have been cured, people who thought that homeopathic 'injections' would immunise them against malaria. If a doctor was caught selling fake drugs they would be jailed and probably hated.

Edited February 4, 2010 by longdogs

[Guest Bang_o_rama]

I'm sorry, anecdotes don't count as proof, however encouraging they seem. At best they are are a starting point. Alternative explanations exist...

 

Thank you for saying this. The scientific method is in essence merely a systematic way of telling whether something we think might be true, really is. My cold will go away whether I tape a magnet to my nose or not; scientific investigation can tell me if it was the magnet that did it. Absent proof, the magnet curing the cold is merely an anecdote.

 

Although it does make a handy paper-clip holder.

~D~

Edited February 4, 2010 by Bang_o_rama