Archive for January, 2010
Local Food – By and For the People
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Protesters To Take Mass Overdose Of Homeopathic Medicines
Saturday, January 30th, 2010Campaigners throughout the United Kingdom are to take part in a protest by taking a mass overdose of homeopathic medicine as part of a national bid to prove that the medicines are worthless.
The so-called overdoses will occur outside Boots (a large pharmacy chain) in Birmingham, Bristol, Brighton, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hampshire, Leeds, Leicester, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford and Sheffield. Boots sells homeopathic products and says it is committed to providing customers with a wide range of products. The company added that many people believed in complementary medicines.
Organizers say sympathy events will also take place in Australia, Canada, Spain and the USA.
One group, calling themselves the Edinburgh Sceptics said homeopathic medications were nothing more than ineffective sugar pills.
The protest is being organized by the Merseyside Skeptics Society MSS, a non-profit organization whose aim is to “develop and support the skeptical community.” Michael Marshall, MSS spokesperson, said “We believe that they shouldn’t be selling sugar pills to people who are sick. Homeopathy never works any better than a placebo. The remedies are diluted so much that there is nothing in them.” He took a product containing arsenic, but added that they are so diluted that the chances of finding one molecule of arsenic in the tablets were negligible.
Marshall added that shoppers trust Boots, a well known and reputable UK pharmacy chain, which should not be selling these products alongside other medications.
What is homeopathy?
As homeopathic remedies are person specific, and doses are generally small, the Society of Homeopaths said the protesters should not have any reaction to their overdoses, unless somebody had symptoms linked to their remedy.
Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine. It was first proposed by Samual Hahnemann (1755 – 1843), a German physician in 1796. He proposed that patients could be treated with heavily diluted preparations of products which are thought to cause effects similar to their signs and symptoms.
Homeopathic medications are prepared by succession – a form of serial dilution with shaking by forceful striking after each dilution. It is assumed that this process makes the treatment more effective. The whole process is called potentization. Sometimes dilution continues until there is none of the original substance left.
Homeopaths use aspects of the patient’s physical and psychological state, as well as their symptoms when recommending remedies. Repertories (reference books) are consulted and a remedy is selected.
In the vast majority of cases homeopathic remedies are considered as safe. There have been some cases of arsenic toxicity. Although most homeopaths work alongside mainstream medicine, there have been cases where patients have been advised not to take proven treatments for some serious diseases (Malaria Advice Risks Lives, BBC).
Homeopathic treatments are recognized by the National Health Service (NHS), UK, which spends billions each year on it. The protesters say this is a waste of resources.
What is the difference between alternative medicine and orthodox medicine?
Other related articles
What Is A Clinical Trial?
New Biological Models Of Homeopathy Published In Special Issues
British Researchers Call For WHO To ‘Condemn Homeopathy’ For Serious Diseases
Review which claimed that homeopathy is just a placebo, published in The Lancet, was seriously flawed
There are many interpretations. Put simply, orthodox treatments/medicine has been proven through well organized clinical trials, in which the treatment is compared with either another medication or a placebo (or both). Alternative medicines have not been proven, either because trials found no difference compared to a placebo, or proper trials have not yet been carried out.
Imagine that people claimed that placing a flag at the bottom of the garden helped get rid of flu faster – until proven, this would be an alternative treatment. However, if a proper clinical trial were carried out with a large group of people in several centers, comparing the use of the flag with a placebo, and it was found that the flag was significantly more effective and did not have serious side-effects, the flag treatment would become orthodox medicine as soon as the authorities studied the results of the trials and approved its use.
Written by Christian Nordqvist
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/177670.php
Calming The Shen: A Chinese Medicine Approach To A Good Night’s Sleep
Saturday, January 30th, 2010This month HuffPost Living has featured an abundance of great articles on the importance of sleep, with excellent tips on how to enhance your slumber from experts in a variety of fields.
An approach that can also aid in the quest for a good night’s sleep is that of Chinese Medicine. This ancient healing system has offered relief to the sleep challenged for thousands of years. While new to many, Chinese Medicine is mainstream in China, and it is used today for a wide range of conditions by an estimated one-fourth of the world’s population.
The Roots of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Chinese Medicine is considered the oldest, most continuously practiced, professional, literate medicine in the world. Written records date back over 2000 years, although the medicine is believed to go back even further. Some experts believe Chinese Medicine is at least 5000 years old.
Chinese Medicine employs acupuncture, herbal medicine, nutritional therapy, tuina (pronounced “twee nah”) massage, acupressure, and qigong.
See the rest of the article here:
There’s No Place Like Here: Communal Living with Nikki Silva
Monday, January 25th, 2010Alternative medicine sales soar consumers shake cynicism
Monday, January 25th, 2010By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:31 PM on 25th January 2010
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1246009/Alternative-medicine-sales-soar-consumers-shake-cynicism.html#ixzz0dgezQfso
Sales of alternative medicines are booming as consumers shake off their cynicism.
Analysts say the market has grown by 18 per cent in two years and is worth £213million a year.
And they predict sales will increase by 33 per cent to £282million over the next four years as more patients reject prescription drugs in favour of natural remedies.
Even relatively unknown treatments such as ayurveda – the Indian holistic system of diet, yoga, massage and herbs – are picking up in popularity.
Analysts Mintel said the rise can be explained by growing official acceptance of many treatments such as acupuncture, which is available on the NHS.
A rise in the number of patients diagnosed with depression and stress has also led to more people exploring holistic approaches in favour of potentially addictive prescription drugs.
Around 1.5million Britons bought St John’s Wort last year, predominantly for depression.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1246009/Alternative-medicine-sales-soar-consumers-shake-cynicism.html#ixzz0dgf3LUPL
Times, They Are A Changing
Monday, January 25th, 2010A national survey, published online in the journal Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine found that three-quarters of the med students (future physicians) surveyed believe that conventional Western medicine would be improved by integrating more complementary treatments such as: massage, herbal medicine, yoga, acupuncture and meditation.
The data was gathered by researchers at UCLA and UC San Diego from 1,770 surveys received from students at 126 medical schools throughout the United States. There was some hesitation however and students wanted more scientific evidence about the effectiveness of the treatments, not surprising since their training is based on Western studies.
We have come a long way.
Sympathetic Vibratory Physics
Monday, January 25th, 2010Keely reported disintegration of mass with standing waves (which is now a commercial process),
Keely reported producing light in water (what is now termed sonoluminescence),
Keely reported acoustic levitation (verified by NASA and others) though Keely went FAR BEYOND this brute force technique,
Keely reported geometries that could intensify sound pressures without adding additional energy (recently patented and in use by MacroSonics),
Keely reported cold in the presence of certain ‘orders of vibration’ (now patented as an acoustic refrigration and cooling system),
Whales changing their tunes
Monday, January 25th, 2010Lower singing is puzzling researchers
WASHINGTON — Something curious is going on with the songs of blue whales in oceans all over the world. The whales are singing their same old songs, but year by year they’re all shifting the frequency lower.
The blue whale is the largest creature ever to have lived on Earth, but it doesn’t follow that everything about them is easy to detect and figure out.
The theories on the change in their songs’ frequency levels range from the effect of global warming to the increase in ship traffic to rising populations of the mighty creatures.
Then again, it might be something to do with boy meets girl. Only male blue whales sing. The ability to sing at a low frequency and make the song carry a long way is one indicator of large body size, something female whales may favor.
In tune — all over the world
Mark McDonald, an oceanographer, discovered the change in whale frequency about eight years ago when he was working with restricted Navy data. McDonald runs Whale Acoustics, a small business that does research work on ocean noises and whales.
McDonald and his collaborators couldn’t publish a report using the restricted data, so they spent several years gathering other blue whale recordings from all over the world. Whales have regional song types. Within regions, whales maintain their songs over decades. The data showed that in all regions, the frequency declined over time.
So the scientists started looking for an explanation.
McDonald and co-authors John Hildebrand, a professor of oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, and Sarah Mesnick, a biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’..s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif., describe their finding and the quest to explain it in a recent article in the journal Endangered Species Research.
“There are a number of things that first come to mind. One is that it’s a cultural shift — that the whales are changing their song over time more or less randomly, but in a trend direction,” McDonald said. “But then it got to be really problematic when we started digging all around the world and hey, they’re going in the same direction all around the world and yet they’re different song types.”
‘It’s somewhat mysterious’
The best records exist for the whales off California, and they showed that the whales sing at a frequency 31% lower than they did in the 1960s, when blue whales around the world had been commercially hunted to the brink of extinction.
One possible explanation was warming ocean temperatures and changes in ocean chemistry as a result of emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. But the difference of warming temperature was much less than the differences whales encounter as they swim from polar to tropical areas.
“We can’t see how climate change can do it. Maybe there’s something we’re missing,” McDonald said.
Another was that the change in frequency was a response to the greater amount of noise in the ocean from shipping.
“The trouble is, every way we can look at it, increasing ocean noise should make them shift to higher frequency, not a lower one,” McDonald said. “They’re able to make louder sound at higher frequency, so that would get them more easily heard over the noise.”
“The best guess we have as a technical physics answer is population, but I’m not at all convinced that’s the correct answer,” McDonald said. “I really like that it’s somewhat mysterious.”
The population hypothesis is that blue whale populations have increased since commercial hunting ended, and so blue whales don’t have to project their songs as far to be heard.
http://www.freep.com/article/20100124/NEWS07/1240537/1322/Whales-changing-their-tunes
Permaculture for Humanity
Sunday, January 24th, 2010Peak Moment 146: The future is abundant, asserts permaculture designer Larry Santoyo. His vision of living in the present provides a wonderful antidote to fear about uncertain futures. People need to rediscover that we’re part of the ecosystem, and apply permaculture design principles to the many problems we face. Larry teaches sustainable permaculture design as a discovery of the world around us. He notes that trying to be self-sufficient is really anti-permaculture. Instead, we need to develop self-reliance skills. Then as we find others in our communities to interact with, everybody gets to play! http://www.earthflow.com