Page 16 - Spring 14

You have said Placebo ?
by Jacques Millemann, France
Current situation
Once upon a time in Alsace, some km from Soultz-sous-Forêts ... a ‘poultry farm’ with confined laying hens. The shed didn’t have a single window. The lighting was provided elec- trically over an adjustable timer, to allow longer “laying days” even in winter. Indeed the length of daylight has a great influence on the activity of the ovaries in poultry, thus also in egg-laying hens. A five-floor pyramid of cages filled the shed completely. Huge ventilators evacuated the damp, dusty, sultry old air to bring some fresh and cool air into the place. 5.000 hens, grouped by 4 in a cage, where they had a living space of about 21 x 29,4 cm. A drip pipe pro- vided them with drinking water and a conveyer- belt provided the food. The mess falls through the mesh of the wire-netting floor. The hens’ movement makes the eggs roll on the oblique cage floor onto a conveyer belt that brings them directly to a machine measuring the size of the eggs. During the long artificial day, the immobi- lized hens can just eliminate and transform their food and the crushed oyster shells into eggs. Thus during some months, 95% of these brave animals lay one egg per day. Normally after a laying season a hen has to moult and rest. During this period she is not productive but still needs feeding and drinking. To avoid the loss of income, instead of resting, she gets slaughtered and ends up in chicken broth or dog food. During the time, in another shed, female chicks have grown and got prepared by progressive increased lighting to lay eggs at the age of 3 months. A third shed, cleaned and dis- infected, stays empty awaiting
new female chicks, delivered by a professional breeding hatchery.
Case presentation
Now it can happen that a pro- duction chain fails. In this mod- ern egg farm one had to demand the hens to produce eggs for a longer time than nor- mal. But they were physiologi- cally so exhausted that they had more and more difficulties to transform the calcium carbon- ate of the oyster shells into eggshells. The increase of limestone contribution only resulted in white stool. Yet 5% shell-less eggs equals a loss of 250 eggs per day! Residual allopathic medicines in the eggs or in the poultry broth are unwanted and the economically
feasible life of the animals was approaching very quickly.
Therefore the homeopath was called in.
Anamnesis
When a human being enters this egg factory, panic arises alongside terrified wing flapping accompanied by thick clouds of dust and wild cackling. I was completely unable to observe and individualise 5000 balled-necked (due to friction against the bars when feeding). My symptom collection was therefore very poor. One could just notice that :
1 The birds were more than sedentary
2 Obviously, to have such a production, they
had to eat all day long.
3 The hens were exhausted by daily loss of
substantial mounts of vital fluid.
Treatment
As a homeopath I just had two reliable symptoms:
1 Sedentary with overfeeding 2 Loss of vital fluids
For the first symptom I thought of Nux vomica. For the second symptom I thought of China.
I had made a trituration with equal parts of Nux vomica 5 CH and China 5 CH and had it mixed with the farinaceous food in a cement mixer at the rate of 200 grams per ton of food.
Results
Three days later I receive a joyful phone call: the egg production went on steadily and the per- centage of shell-less eggs diminishes visibly.
Two months later I hear that the percentage of broken bones due to the collecting the hens in cages during the night (when the hens were asleep) for the transport to the slaughterhouse had been much decreased.
Discussion
As we had here a failure in the calcium metab- olism, I should have added a calcium salt like Calcarea phosphorica (for highly prductive ani- mals) or perhaps Gallina ovi pellicula (the inner membrane of the eggshell). This remains still to be tried.
Let us notice that the interference of humans, even with good will in such a universe, has cer- tainly a NOCEBO effect rather than a PLACEBO effect.
Conclusion
Poor animals! Poor Mankind, who loses his own soul and health when industrialising breeding and food production of animal origin! Our duty as vets is to help both humans and animals as much as we can. We only can try and prevent and eventually support organic or even biody- namic agriculture and shout out to the con- sumer: “Pay attention to the origin of the ingredients in your food!”
Poor “scientific” medicine looking down contemptuously on those experimental facts, which could weaken their own statistically based certainty and refuse any reconsidering of their way of thinking.
“Eppur si muove” [But it moves] Galileo Galilei said. T
The hens still chuckle over this
14