Page 14 - Summer 14

IAVH Newsletter
(continued)
The BAHVS/IAVH Data collection project began in January 2013. The aim is to collect and collate peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed papers on veterinary homeopathy to provide a searchable database of the evi- dence for Veterinary Homeopathy that now has assumed global significance.
The vehicle for the project is the website www.homeopathicvet.org. This is an open website, which is freely accessible and therefore provides a resource, which is avail- able to anyone wishing to investigate the evi- dence base providing the foundations for the use of homeopathy in the veterinary sphere.
The information is sourced by searching the scientific literature, using on-line and open databases. In the main it can only access at this time the data in English, so collaboration with overseas colleagues could well expand the data still further by adding papers, we cannot read the language of, and thus source.
As a bit of fun at first, but now as more information has been discovered as a seri- ous part of the project we also have a grow- ing database on Agrohomeopathy.
I am the co-ordinator of the project: I am the present President of the BAHVS and an elected member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons Council. I am grateful for the help of Lindsay Cope in performing a lot of the practical work transferring the information onto the site. This work takes an enormous amount of time and we have been fortunate in receiving a generous donation from Ilse Pedlar VetMFHom MRCVS, which helped us to grow the body of work remark- ably rapidly.
So far the site contains over a thousand publications, approximately 840 of which are peer reviewed and 490 non-peer reviewed. In addition there are 379 Agrohomeopathy ref- erences.
Case histories, which have been pub- lished, can be accepted; otherwise they should be submitted for inclusion in the MMVH project. If you have a paper, which you would like to be included, or you know of one which would be of interest, please send them directly to me at homeopathicvet@ btinternet.com or to IAVH via the IAVH office: office@iavh.org
At present the information is not sub- divided, and a goal for the future is to collate it into categories for easier research. We also hope to access more work in other lan- guages.
If you have any queries or wish to be involved in this project, please feel free to contact me: Mark Elliott BVSc VetMFHom MRCVS, Co-ordinator BAHVS/IAVH
Data collection project
12
(continued from page 9)
that he had tried other ways and this was the best! Whatever was the spark which lit the fuse of change, the improved results bear out the validity of the approach.
I returned from the day enthused and keen to start with this new method. The whole approach seemed to me to be instinctively right on many levels, although there were many “classical homeopaths” who were clearly unhappy at such a standardised approach being taken, and there were many challenging questions from the floor. It did not take me long to realise that the chances of many owners see- ing through 10x a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year regime was not great. I had one lovely cat owner who did so religiously with a cat with an oral melanoma, treating with alternating Carcinosin 200c and Aurum muriaticum 200c, and this patient survived 5 months – marginally longer than the prognosis which had been given. I have often felt that the stress of dosing this poor cat 10x a day orally, when she had mouth pain and bleeding anyway, was not appropriate given the severity of the presenting condition, but that is with the hindsight of know- ing the outcome.
I think we must take a pragmatic approach to the regime if we are to keep our clients on board for long enough. I also feel that one week is too long between remedies for our patients, though I have not had enough patients on these regimes (and no other patients as spectacularly successful as Bob) to be able to give statistical evidence of this. I have settled on a regime of 4x a day dosing, whenever the owner has time to do it (could be 4x in one hour, or 4 hours apart, but trying to stay constant) with a remedy change every five days, not every seven. Perhaps the frequency of administration; the degree of vigour in plussing; and the frequency of change of the remedy, needs to be dictated by the severity and energy of the enemy con- fronting us, rather than limited by the rigidity of a “system”.
The second consultation was interesting, as the information about the stabbing came for- ward. I confess that had this been available to me from the outset I may well have been tempted to use Conium, with its well-known injury picture. Maybe this is another area where we should not be so restricted by a rule book – why would it be wrong to use three well indi- cated remedies simultaneously? I can hear the classical homeopaths among you recoiling in horror just at the thought! I actually think that “classical” homeopathy often needs to be thrown out of the window when dealing with the very special situation of cancer – a thought which may merit further consideration in another submission. I opted not to start Conium as the energetic response had been so clear between the first two consultations (and this was before the thyroid supplementation was commenced) even though the mass itself had not regressed at all.
I am sure a number of readers will also question whether, following appropriate home- opathic intervention, thyroid supplementation
was necessary. There is much conjecture as to whether thyroid neoplasia has an increased incidence in hypothyroid patients because of the constant attempted stimulation by the raised levels of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), or if the hypothyroid state develops after the onset of the carcinoma. Most dogs with thy- roid carcinoma are euthyroid, but there are no figures available for what percentage are hyper- or hypo-thyroid. It is considered that some cases of low thyroid develop as a result of inva- sion of the normal thyroid tissue with the neo- plastic cells.
Treatment with thyroid supplements was, in my opinion, essential for the optimal outcome for Bob. This was no ordinary case of hypothy- roidism, and the potential for an ongoing hypothyroid state to impact negatively on the case was great on two important counts: - firstly, increased TSH levels are thought to potentially be able to cause excessive stimula- tion of the cancerous thyroid follicular cells, potentially increasing the rate of growth of the cancer: secondly, on a more general level, the immune system develops hypo-function when a hypo-thyroid state exists, resulting in a sub-opti- mal contribution on its part in the battle against a formidable foe. For both of these reasons I believe it was important to identify and address the problem as part of our therapeutic approach.
Was this to be a new, potentially money- making, side-effect free chemotherapy regime, the money for research would be piling in. I know many of you have far more cases than I have showing similar results, and I hope this case report may act as a stimulus to get larger numbers of such clear-cut cures published. It would be nice to think that this evidence would then go some way to save more patients the ignominy and horrors of chemo- and radio-ther- apy when such gentle alternatives are available.
There are a number of homeopathic ques- tions to be answered too. What are we actually treating when we approach a cancer case? How is this different from a non-cancer patient and why is a different therapeutic approach neces- sary? What role does “classical” or “constitu- tional” prescribing have in such cases, if any? What is cancer in terms of our energetic bod- ies? What does it represent? Does it actually reflect changes in our higher energetic bodies at all? And, if we are a microcosm of the uni- verse, and the cosmos, and thereby also the earth (as we are), and therefore these are a macrocosm of ourselves, do we see a “cancer” forming in a more general, metaphysical form on these levels? These are questions that may have no answers, but we can all have our own ideas, and it could be fun to discuss. Watch this space........!
References
Prisma – The Arcana of Materia Medica Illuminated. Frans Vermeulen
A Homoeopathic Approach to Cancer. Dr A U Ramakrishnan and Catherine R coulter
Radar homoeopathic software (version 10.5.003) Kirk’s Current Veterinary Therapy XV (2014) John D Bonagura and David C Twedt
Bob