Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Cancer and Homeopathy

What does homeopathy specifically offer the cancer patient? There are several ways homeopathy can help cancer patients. First, there are specific remedies for various cancers. These remedies may be used whether a person has conventional treatment or not. A number of remedies can make conventional treatment easier for the cancer patient. Finally, homeopathic remedies can help with terminal pain and with the fear of dying.

Let us begin with helping a cancer patient through conventional cancer therapies. One remedy which may be used during cancer chemotherapy and radiation therapy is cadmium sulph. This remedy has a number of uses but one of its main uses is for severe projectile vomiting. Thus this remedy can be taken before any cancer treatment which causes vomiting. This remedy is also an antidote to radiation sickness. A 30C dose of this remedy before and after treatment will ease any possible vomiting.

Homeopathy was developed at a time when conventional medicine had little to offer the cancer patient. Later there was cancer surgery, but the surgery and the diagnostic testing underlying the surgery were not as sophisticated as that of today. Homeopathic physicians found that there were remedies for cancer. Although it may seem that the more advanced the cancer, the less likely homeopathy would be to help but this was not always true. The successful use of homeopathic remedies depends on being able to identify characteristic symptoms which lead to specific remedies. Sometimes the more severe the cancer the easier it is to find the symptoms and the appropriate remedy.

Cancer from a homeopathic perspective must be seen as a disease and as a disturbance of the vital force and that something must have disturbed the vital force to lead to cancer. Homeopaths would thus often search for a cause in trying to find the appropriate remedy. For example physical trauma to the breast leading to cancer, also points to a specific remedy. Another cause would be a miasm, an underlying predisposition to illness.

The problem is that for someone choosing surgery over homeopathic treatment is that the disease, the disturbance of the vital force, does not go away because the cancer is cut out. The cancer can recur elsewhere and can be more malignant when it does. This is not really explainable under current understanding of cancer. For example if a woman has had cancer in one breast, why should cancer then appear in the other breast, which unfortunately happens all too frequently. The academic model that cancer arises because of hits to DNA, the genes, which somehow results in cancer, means that cancer has a certain probability of affecting a certain tissue, such as the breast, but why once the cancer is removed surgically, that cancer should show up in the other breast has no obvious explanation if everything is random hits to the genes, to DNA.

But in homeopathy, there is an explanation. The disease, the disturbance to the body's vital force, is still present even after the diseased tissue is removed. The disease can then move to other tissue. The important thing to know about cancer and choosing whether to use homeopathy or not is that surgery will not remove the disease.

Most people will still opt for conventional treatment, so how can homeopathy be useful to them. They can take the appropriate remedy starting before the surgery and continue the same remedy after surgery, to prevent recurrence. For strict homeopathic thinking such a procedure is not optimum. Nonetheless, it is quite possible to do things this way.

In reviewing cases from the past, one finds that cancer treatment was a lengthy process and even in past written cases by the masters, not all remedies that they tried worked. But there were patients in those days who did not want surgery and there are books of cures. But the treatment was lengthy. Sometimes even people with very advanced cancers were cured by homeopathy.

Homeopathy can also help with the psychological issues which occur in cancer. There are remedies for ailments from bad news to fear of dying. Homeopathy can also help with terminal pain.
Some of the main remedies used for cancer are arsenicum, hydrastis, conium, phosphorus, carcinosin, lycopodium, asterias and the cadmiums.

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