Vaccination and Homoeoprophylaxis? A Review of Risks and Alternatives - 7th edition

Review

This book review is reprinted with permission from Volume 19, Summer 2006 Edition of Homeopathic Links.

Reviewed by Kaare Troelsen, MDSKH, Denmark

If there is one topic that can really provoke (classical) homeopaths into fits of passionate argument it's Homeoprophylaxis (HP). The resistance against even entertaining the idea of the possibility of HP by many intelligent homeopathic practitioners and teachers bears resemblance to the medical profession's total unwillingness to actually look at the evidence, when it comes to complementary medicine.

I recommend this thought-provoking book to anybody who thinks they possess the open mind we always demand from the society surrounding us.

This 6th edition is the result of a 15-yearlong HP research programme done by Dr Golden. The effects of HP on the receptivity towards specific diseases and also, importantly, the long-term effects on general health have been analysed.

The first part of the book describes the diseases in question. The second part takes a critical look at HP and normal vaccination using historical evidence and analysing statistics thoroughly. Since the reviews of research done on HP are mainly by Golden himself there is a potential problem, but I see that Golden, as a scientist, is able to take a fairly critical attitude towards his own work. The third part compares the risks and benefits of disease prevention options (HP and Vaccination).

In the first section Golden describes the diseases normally vaccinated against, the pathology, disease picture, occurrence, risk groups and treatment possibilities. While clearly acknowledging the role of food supplements and nutrition in disease prevention and the role of homeopathic constitutional treatment, Golden concludes that specific disease prevention is necessary.

Part Two addresses the main question in this book: What are the risks and benefits of vaccination and HP?

First Golden discusses the general problems and benefits from vaccination: the usual very interesting and worrying information, about links with autism, chronic damage and disease, lack of proper research, blatant manipulation of statistics, 'slow-virus disease', etc. At the same time he makes positive comments where relevant

After this section Golden examines the specific vaccinations and the respective risks and protection rates, again both very interesting and alarming. Trials of many vaccines show quite a high effectiveness, but these results should be treated with care, since other results show much lower effectiveness. Side effects do often not show in double-blind tests but only surface after many years. This part of the book is packed full of good information with source details and appendices to support the details. Good reading for anybody who wants to know more about vaccination and will not rely on hugely biased brochures provided by the pharmaceutical industry.

The argument against vaccination and the need for an alternative is something many homeopaths agree with, but now we come to the crux of the matter: what about a homeopathic alternative, apart from acute and constitutional treatment?

Arguments against HP are normally based on theory, philosophy and interpretations of Organon and similar works. Golden has made a huge effort to examine HP, both to find an alternative to vaccination but also to demonstrate to doctors and fellow homeopaths that this alternative works.

Golden starts by quoting Hahnemann, Boeninghausen, Burnett, Kent, Close and others, all writing in favour of using HP and telling about their experiences in this field.

Later Golden presents the results of his research in relation to safety, short-term reaction, effectiveness, long-term effects on general health, occurrence of other diseases not given HP for etc. The scope in time and aspects is impressive; nothing like this has ever been done for vaccination.

The results are equally impressive - Golden shows an effectiveness of between 80 and 100%, mostly lying above 90%, few, mild and short-lasting reactions, positive effects on long-term health and a definite reduction in the chance of getting asthma, eczema, allergies. Golden goes into great detail in explaining the statistical findings in the HP program demonstrated with ample use of tables and diagrams. There is no doubt that the matter has been well researched and analysed.

Golden's HP programme described in the book uses high potencies (200C-10M) of the disease nosodes and other diseasespecific remedies, each given at long intervals over several years. In this way proving symptoms can be avoided which are more likely to happen when daily low potencies are given, as some homeopaths advocate in HP against epidemics while travelling.

Golden also takes his time to comment on the criticisms of HP by other homeopaths, which gives us a hint of the resistance he has been, and is still, subjected to from within the homeopathic community.

If vaccination is as inefficient and damaging as many of us believe and if there is a safe and more efficient alternative, why will the health authorities not use it? This is a question most of us have ready-made answers for: rigid thinking, lobbyism by medical companies, limitations of the 'scientific perception' etc.

But why will many homeopaths not use HP or even consider it? Are we afraid to take that responsibility? Maybe it is easier to say: We oppose vaccination but offer no alternative. What if this field could really bring homeopathy into the forefront, give it much-needed visibility and highlight its potential in the world today. I believe that we all need to give this topic some serious thought. Read Golden's book: even an attempt to disprove his findings will bring awareness.

This book review is reprinted from Volume 99 Number 2 Summer 2006 edition of American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine with permission of the American Institute of Homeopathy

Vaccination and Homeoprophylaxis? A Review of Risks and Alternatives
and

Homeoprophylaxis: A Fifteen Year Clinical Study

Reviewed by Richard Moskowitz

This self-publishing venture is an excellent treatise on homeoprophylaxis; i.e., the long-term use of homeopathic nosodes, or disease-specific remedies like Drosera for whooping cough, if the nosodes are unavailable, in lieu of conventional vaccines, for prevention of the corresponding diseases. The author, whose engaging photo on the back cover conjures up the aura and likeness of a Talmudic scholar, is a naturopath and homeopath who has indeed studied the subject with estimable thoroughness and for a very long time, based largely on his own experience and that of his colleagues in Australia.

I should begin by confessing my own prior lack of enthusiasm for this practice, which was also of long standing and might well have made me reluctant to undertake this review at all. I have always championed the use and effectiveness of nosodes and specific remedies in treating and preventing acute contagious diseases, as was clearly shown by Hahnemann for scarlet fever and confirmed repeatedly by his successors in epidemics of cholera, typhoid, influenza, and the like, all the way to our own time. But these brilliantly successful yet oddly forgotten applications were limited to short-term protection over the weeks and months of an actual outbreak.

Employing them for long-term and indeed lifelong protection, as an alternative to our current mandatory vaccination laws and policies, is of much more recent and to my mind more dubious provenance, and dates from the 1940's, when the industrialized countries, led by the United States, began waging systematic warfare against not only smallpox, or even diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus, which were added at that time, but now against an ever-growing multitude of acute contagious diseases as our automatic, first-line defense against every such ailment that captures our attention, simply because it lies within our power to do so, virtually without regulation or oversight, and with no end in sight.

Back in the 1940's, when smallpox and OPT were the only vaccines available, prominent homeopaths like Elizabeth Wright-Hubbard used these nosodes as a way of circumventing the already stricter enforcement of our mandatory vaccination laws, administering them as simple intercurrents at comparatively rare intervals in the course of their constitutional treatment, signing them off as genuine vaccinations, passable imitations of the real thing, and conferring a modicum of short-term protection in the process. As long as the public health authorities remained unaware of the subterfuge, or at least tacitly accepted it, it never interfered with the relatively strict yoga of classical homeopathic practice significantly enough to cause leading prescribers like Dr. Hubbard to lose any sleep over it.

But by our own time, when a newborn baby is required or expected to receive twenty-five different vaccinations before they're two years old, many of them combinations of several ingredients, like OPT and MMR , plus another 25 by the time they reach 18, using nosodes in lieu of vaccines for long-term protection against so many different conditions entails giving a large number of remedies repeatedly throughout life, with very little unmedicated time or space in between for the organism to be capable of responding freely and maximally to constitutional treatment without such interference. In short, what began as an intercurrent in the background of a lifetime of constitutional treatment would slowly crowd out and thus ultimately replace the foreground or basic context for whatever possibilities remain for homeopathic self-healing to proceed.

This at any rate has always been my concern, as well as my reason for preferring to work on changing the laws to make the vaccines optional, as they are in many European countries, and for opposing the goal of lifelong protection itself as generally unattainable, unnecessary, and even at times undesirable, quite apart from whether conventional or homeopathic methods are employed to achieve it. I also suspect that this old and inveterate prejudice on my part made me extremely curious to see how Dr Golden would respond to it.

I was quite surprised and delighted to learn that he is quite familiar with this "purist" objection, as he likes to call it, and I freely admit that he has answered it in a wonderfully cogent, disarming, and persuasive manner. A Talmudic scholar, after all, is one trained and even consecrated to consider every possible aspect of every question, with a systematic thoroughness that includes roughly equal parts of learned textual exegesis, broad life experience, and a strain of personal reflection that weaves them together

Dr. Golden's book happily contains ample helpings of all three, in part because it is about much more than homeoprophylaxis alone. Its real subject comprises the dangers and adverse consequences of conventional vaccines, which are summarized as well as anywhere else in the literature. Another major subsection discusses the natural history of the corresponding diseases, about which he again provides a wealth of useful information. Homeopathic prophylaxis only makes sense in this context, as a safer and more practical alternative to conventional vaccination, and it occupies only about a third of the text. His scriptural commentary likewise discusses the writings of reputable homeopaths from the whole of our history, including Hahnemann on scarlet fever, Bonninghausen on cholera, Burnett on smallpox, and Shepherd, Blackie, Eizayaga, and the elder Sankaran in more recent times, when more diseases were involved and a more general strategy seemed to be called for.

His ingenious and eminently practical solution to my scruples about giving too many nosodes and specific remedies too often, in effect blanketing the vital force of the individual for many years, is simply to limit his protocol to major diseases that he believes truly warrant long-term protection, namely, tetanus, whooping cough, pneumococcal disease, HiB disease, polio, and meningococcal meningitis; to give them not throughout life, but only for the years of highest risk, in most cases from birth to age six; and to keep the number of such remedies sufficiently low to remain "intercurrent;" that is to say, in the background of their ongoing constitutional treatment, which he likewise strongly advocates. He omits measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and influenza altogether, but does provide Morbillinum, Hepatitis B, and Oscillococcinum for actual outbreaks of measles, Hep B, or influenza if imminent or threatening.

I would still take issue with his selection, especially with HiB and pneumococcus, which are part of the normal pharyngeal flora, as he says, and with meningitis and polio, which are serious but not common enough to warrant routine protection necessarily. But the principle of his selection remains basically sound, and his practice strikes me as sufficiently enlightened and sensible that my remaining objections are merely pragmatic and involve the subtler issues about which serious practitioners will always appropriately differ.

Perhaps the most distinctive part of these works lies in the author's extensive review of his own cases and those of his colleagues who follow his protocol, using modern statistical methods wherever possible. After many years of painstaking data collection, he concludes that long-term prophylaxis with nosodes and/or specific remedies is not only considerably safer than conventional vaccination, and comparably effective, as seems entirely plausible to me, but also safer and more effective than no treatment at all; i.e., in those children who are given no nosodes or vaccines and simply left alone, a fascinating conclusion which cries out for further comment. For he is not merely saying that his protocol is comparably effective to conventional vaccines in preventing the corresponding diseases, and much safer, with fewer adverse effects. In the category of adverse effects, he includes exacerbation of the ordinary diseases of childhood, such as asthma, eczema, otitis media, allergies, and behavioral problems, which is precisely the spectrum that I have been blabbing about for decades, and for which any vaccine will do.

That is amply surprising in itself, for these global and nonspecific effects have been so largely ignored by almost all other writers in this field. But he further contends, producing ample data to corroborate it, that the children following his protocol are much less prone to these ailments, or at least suffer from them less severely, than those who are not given remedies at all. In other words, he believes that even using nosodes routinely for everyone; i.e., without the individualization of constitutional prescribing, confers a significant general health benefit of the same kind, perhaps even to a comparable extent.

To test this assertion, it would be necessary and also fascinating to compare the long-term health history of children receiving his protocol alone with two other groups, namely, those receiving constitutional treatment alone, and those receiving both, which he seems to regard as optimal. Would we both not be amazed and more than a little chagrined if his protocol-only group proved the healthiest of the three? Would that simple program not be a whole lot cheaper and simpler than the elaborate rigamarole on which we now pride ourselves? To be sure, I doubt that such would be the result, but our scientific obligation to examine our own dogmatic prejudices, which Hahnemann himself both recognized and insisted upon, is the strongest and most compelling reason to carry out this further investigation, and I can think of nobody more admirably qualified to do so than Dr. Isaac Golden, perhaps in his Seventh Edition.