Friday, September 25, 2009

Sir Wiliam Osler to the rescue.

I was in a heated debate with an eminent doctor about Homeopathy and I sent him a quote by Sir William Osler. Here it is.

THE GREATER THE IGNORANCE THE GREATER THE DOGMATISM.
DR. WILLIAM OSLER, CHAUVINISM IN MEDICINE 1902

The doctor's answer was as follows.
"Funny you should quote Osler to me. He was one of Medicine's first scientifically oriented clinicians basing his ideas on observation research and the brilliant pathological studies of Rudolph Virkow.
He knew that homeopathy was bunk and said so along with comments about phrenology etc. ..."

I looked up Sue Young's site http://homeopathy.wildfalcon.com/ The site has histories of all the famous men who used Homeopathy or said something about it. It is surprising the famous people who used and spoke well of Homeopathy. Press search and enjoy... Below is what I found for William Osler to refute the eminent doctor's prejudicial and blind response to my first quote from Osler's book Chauvenism and Medicine 1909

William Osler 1849 – 1919

William Osler, Time Online - “Founder Hahnemann was given his historic due by no less a personage than Sir William Osler. “No individual,” said Dr. Osler, “has done more good to the medical profession than Samuel Hahnemann.”

Harvey Cushing The Life of William Osler P. 171

“His belief that over-treatment with drugs was one of the medical errors of the day has been hinted at, and it was always one of his favorite axioms that no one individual had done more good to the medical profession than Hahnemann, whose therapeutic methods had demonstrated that the natural tendency of diseases was toward recovery, provided that the patient was decently cared for, properly nurses, and not over-dosed.”

Hans J Eysenck on William Osler

“It is more important to know what kind of person has a disease than what kind of disease a person has”

William Osler A Concise History of Medicine

“One notable example is typhoid fever. At the outset of the nineteenth century it was treated with ‘remedies’ of the extremest violence–bleeding and blistering, vomiting and purging, and the administration of antimony and mercury, and plenty of other heroic remedies.

“Now the patient is bathed and nursed and carefully tended, but rarely given medicine. This is the result partly of the remarkable experiments of the Paris and Vienna schools in the action of drugs, which have shaken the stoutest faiths; and partly of the constant and reproachful object lesson of homeopathy.

“No regular physician would ever admit that the homeopathic preparations, ‘infinitesimals,’ could do any good as direct curative agents; and yet it was perfectly certain that homeopaths lost no more of their patients than others. There was but one conclusion to draw– that most drugs had no effect whatever on the diseases for which they were administered.”

William Osler

“It is not as if our homeopathic brothers are asleep; far from it, they are awake (many of them at any rate) to the importance of the scientific study of disease.

“It is distressing that so many good men live isolated in a measure from the great body of the profession. The grievous mistake was ours: to quarrel with our brothers over infinitesimals was a most unwise and stupid thing to do.” and “Our homeopathic brothers pursue very seriously the scientific study of disease.”

William Osler

“Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.”�

William Osler

“The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.”

William Osler

“All scientific truth is conditioned by the state of knowledge at the time of its announcement.”

William Osler

“I fear that we may return to the state of polypharmacy, the emancipation from which has been the sole gift of Hahnemann and his followers….”

William Osler

“But, fortunately for medicine, some hundred and fifty years ago Hahnemann appeared…”

Dr. Osler not only recognized Homeopathy and Hahneman, he recognized the hate that ignorance could generate. I find that this kind of blind hate is still alive; this inordinate resistance to honest investigation.

I also find that there is a growing community who are using and examining Homeopathy and it includes many doctors, scientists, artist and everyday folk. Homeopathy is the medicine of the 21st Century.

Now have to band together to stop Pharmaceuticals from weakening our immune systems and harming our emotions and minds with the medicines they sell that have debilitating side effects.

No comments:

Post a Comment