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Keith Spaulding ND LAc
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Being Vital, Simple Ways to Live
Healthy in a Stressful World
|
The Flu Pandemic,
an Alternative Perspective |
The following article is copyrighted to the publisher (Nature Cure). Article can be used for informational purposes only but please contact the publisher for permission.
One Way
Clifford
Adams woke at 7 AM with a sore throat. The previous year he wouldn’t
have thought anything about it, and probably would have gone off to his
hospital job as an orderly. But this year was special. It was November
1918, and at the hospital he had seen bodies piling up in the morgue
faster than they could be buried. He was worried. Within two hours he
felt feverish, his head and whole body ached, and he could barely move
off his bed with fatigue. He thought he needed to see his friend, Dr.
Ashley, at the hospital. When he entered the hospital, he saw that all
his colleagues were now wearing masks; he wished that he had worn a
mask, but he had seen hospital colleagues that had worn masks still fall
sick and die. And they died fast - often within two days.
At the hospital he was ushered into a large expansive room that probably
once held great dinners. Today it held 100 cots with men and women
writhing in searing pain, some with pools of blood by their cots. That
surprised him, all the blood. He had heard that this sickness caused
people to cough blood, vomit blood, and bleed from their noses. On some
people the blood seeped out of anywhere it could. When he saw Dr. Ashley
at 11 AM he had never felt worse in his life, and he began to cough
globs of mucous almost incessantly.
Dr. Ashley was a caring man, but he never felt as impotent as he had the
last two months. Sometimes the medicines worked, sometimes they did not,
there was no way to predict. He gave Clifford the medicine that he was
instructed to give, aspirin, but as the hours passed, each time he
checked on Clifford he saw his face looking more and more blue. When he
went home at 11PM, Clifford looked almost black. Clifford died at 3 AM.
He was 29 years old.
Another Way
Jonathan Welch woke at 7AM with a sore throat. The previous year he
wouldn’t have thought anything about it, and probably would have gone
off to his hospital job as an orderly. But this year was special. It was
November 1918, and at the hospital he had seen the bodies piling up in
the morgue faster than they could be buried. He was worried. Earlier in
the week he was talking with his mother about the carnage at the
hospital, and she mentioned a homeopathic doctor at the other side of
town who was claiming to have good success with this sickness. By 11 AM
he felt feverish, his head and whole body ached, and he was so fatigued
that he could barely move off his bed. His mother encouraged him to see
the homeopath. It was a struggle, but he made it.
When he turned down the street where the doctor lived, he was surprised
to see so many people outside of the house. In the surrounding gardens,
some people were lying in the sun, and others were receiving hot and
cold baths. Even though they looked sick, there was not a somber air of
disease and death, as was the case at the hospital.
When he entered he was greeted by an assistant, and saw the doctor soon
afterwards. He was given Gelsemium, a homeopathic remedy, and was told
to take it every hour that day and the next - until he was better. And
if he was not feeling better within two days, he was told to try another
remedy. Unfortunately, he could not afford the other recommendations of
sun baths and hydrotherapy, so he went home.
As the day progressed his cough became worse and he wondered if he
should go to the hospital. His mother tended to him, and did her best to
implement the hydrotherapy treatment. That night, he slept from 8 PM
until 8 AM. When he woke, his mother was still sitting in the chair next
to him, crying with joy that he was still alive. He took the remedy
throughout the day and his mother gave him hydrotherapy. The following
week, he had improved enough to return to work, only to see the pain and
death still piling up.
1918, a Medical Failure
I find it
strange that only recently, with the hype about the avian flu, are we
seeing glimpses into the horror of the fall and winter of 1918. The US
death toll for what became known as the Spanish Flu was 675,000 people.
675,000! And worldwide the estimate is 20 to 40 million deaths. The
statistics are staggering: On October 10, 1918, the worse day in
Philadelphia’s history, 759 perished. In one month 11,000 died in
Philadelphia alone. Philadelphia suffered perhaps worse than any city
because the leadership dithered in warning its people. It failed to
cancel all public assemblies as was done in Boston and New York. The
unusual thing about this flu was that it struck down dead not only the
elderly and the young, as happens with most flus, but also the robust
population in their 20’s and 30’s.
The medical system was overwhelmed. The staff and doctors became sick
and died just as readily as the rest of the population. The books are
filled with heroic tales of doctors and nurses doing their best;
researchers studying frantically trying to figure out how to ebb the
flow of death. These people were heroes. The cowards were those that
downplayed the pandemic the following years to cover up mistakes made by
the government and the medical establishment.
One of the most comprehensive tales of the Spanish Flu is The Great
Influenza, by John Barry. Though his descriptions are real and his
storytelling riveting, his aggrandizing of the medical establishment is
disappointing. His heroes are the researchers from the nation’s great
universities who persuaded big money to fund their research for decades
following the medical fiasco, to ensure allopathic medicine’s hegemony
over the health care of the nation. (Rockefeller was one such source and
Barry repeatedly mentions that he had a personal homeopathic doctor to
take care of his health.) This was a job that had been started by the
AMA 60 years before: There were dozens of homeopathic schools in the US
in 1850, by 1918 only one was still open.
My discussion is not to say allopathic medicine is an inferior medicine.
Over the last century it has succeeded in maintaining the health of the
population as we have seen the life expectancy continue to rise. It has
also succeeded in creating multi million dollar businesses, calling them
hospitals, and repeating that by the thousands throughout the country.
In these hospitals, only those that have the credentials outlined by the
same people that run the hospitals are allowed to work there and
practice medicine.
Know the Facts, Not the Hype
There are
alternatives. Over the past few decades, people have noticed that the
mainstream health care system is slipping and have chosen to visit
alternative medical practitioners for some of their health care needs.
Though traditional allopathic Medical Doctors succeed in keeping the
symptoms of disease dormant, their approach to ‘health’ fails to produce
a thriving human population. On an individual level, allopathic doctors
have difficulty with the aches and pains of modern life: stress induced
disorders, fatigue, headaches, chronic infections and allergies among
the many. And now with the danger of another bird flu looming, the
efficacy of allopathic medicine needs to be considered. It failed in
1918, is it really better positioned nearly 100 years later?
The current Avian flu, H5N1, is a virus that presently affects mostly
birds and occasionally infects people living in close quarters with the
infected birds. The amount of deaths to date is minimal; more people
have probably died at your local hospital from pharmaceutical
drug-induced causes in the past year. However, if the flu mutates then
we could have a pandemic bolder than 1918, due to increased urbanization
in today’s world.
Unlike 1918, money is pouring into research before the pandemic. Money
to ‘find a vaccine,’ may be as elusive as ‘find a cure for cancer,’
because no one knows what the virus will look like when it mutates (even
the yearly flu vaccine is of questionable benefit for that virus).
Additionally, governments and populations are stockpiling anti-virals
like Tamiflu. But the question is: will they work? There is no question
that we will be more prepared than we were in 1918, and hopefully the
emergency procedures will flow smoother than the Katrina disaster. With
modern technology and global communication, we will be able to detect
its spread early on. But the question remains: will they work?
Not Everyone Dies
Researchers speculate that by 1920 half the population of the world
had been infected by the Spanish Flu. It is important to note that for
most people, it was just another case of the flu: aches, fever, a few
uncomfortable days, and then they were back to their normal state of
health. It is important to know that not everyone dies if they are
infected. If the Avian Flu were to ravage our world, the disease
would progresses into the depths of the respiratory tract in only a
certain percentage of the population. In these instances, the lungs
would produce such profuse amounts of phlegm, which would result in the
lungs almost drowning in their own mucous. For the rest of the
population, the virus does not reach the depths of the lungs, this
immune reaction of mucus production does not occur, and they recover.
In the
Spanish Flu, healthy, vibrant people, in their 20’s and 30’s suffered
the brunt of the casualties. This group possesses the strongest immune
system of the population. However, the alternative medical approach of
improving the immune system may well protect you. The respiratory
reaction, the immune response that causes the bleeding, and the searing
pain all appear to have been an acute autoimmune reaction. In my
opinion, if this occurs, we may find that the most effective allopathic
medicine would be to prevent and stop this autoimmune reaction. Which
would be the ole standby, prednisone.
Alternative Approach
The
disastrous experience of 1918 was the last time a devastating pandemic
swept the world. It has been repeated that allopathic MD’s had a
mortality rate of 20 - 30 % while homeopaths, using homeopathy and
hydrotherapy, had a mortality rate of 1 %. Homeopaths chiefly used a
remedy called Gelsemium; this was reported in the Journal of the
American Institute for Homeopathy following the pandemic. The
results were self-reporting, and the homeopaths were bitter that
allopaths had pushed them out of the health care system. The evidence
speaks for itself: homeopathy and hydrotherapy must be considered as a
viable option.
When people become sick with the flu, most people progress with the same
symptoms: a sore throat; body aches with fever; and a cough. This
symptom presentation determines which homeopathic remedy to use. Hence,
in a pandemic, when the symptom progression follows only a few routes,
only a few homeopathic remedies are needed. In 1918 the main remedies
used were gelsemium, bryonia, and eupatorium. Instead of looking for a
substance, be it a synthetic anti-viral or a more natural anti-viral, I
think the better choice is to follow the natural healing process of the
body using homeopathic remedies and hydrotherapy to keep the disease
from settling in to deeper levels.
Don’t fear the avian flu: be informed, be prepared, and stay healthy.