Isopathy v Homeopathy
Have you ever wondered how measles can prevent whooping cough (par 46 of the Organon), cowpox prevent smallpox, yaws can prevent syphilis (see here), infection with Theileria mutans prevents infection with the similar though more deadly Theileria parva (known as East Coast Fever in cattle (see this post)) and chicken pox can prevent the related shingles?
Look for a pattern here and you’ll find diseases are prevented by similar diseases (See these posts). If similar diseases can prevent or cure each other, why couldn’t last year’s flu jab have a success rate better than three per cent!!! Yes, three per cent (link). On a good year, the effectiveness of the jab is only fifty per cent. The poor performance last year was “explained” by a “mutation”. So if the similar diseases above can prevent and treat each other, why can’t a flu jab still work in spite of a slight mutation? Obviously, because a “mutation” isn’t the explanation. The real problem is that the vaccine, like all modern vaccines, is isopathic. The aforementioned diseases are homeopathic, i.e. similar to each other in the symptoms they produce, vaccines are iso – the same substance; treating the same with the same. Isopathy has been disproven time and again. Homeopathy is treating like with like (similarity) and has been established as nature’s law of cure; it’s how nature works.
The difference between similar and the same in medical therapeutics is significant.
There are various examples, in recent days, in the media of isopathy not working. One example is the comment by the Irish Minister, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, “Methadone not working says Minister.”
The reason methadone doesn’t work – just think of all the addicts on it for decades! – is because it’s the same as heroin (i.e. almost the same; they are both from the opium poppy). Isopathy will work sometimes but not all the time whereas homeopathy will work every time (when the drug symptoms and disease symptoms are similar but from different sources). In fact homeopaths often prescribe homeopathic remedies isopathically, e.g. treating a patient who has ‘flu’ with a remedy made from the ‘flu’ virus (such a remedy is called a nosode). This is not homeopathy even though this type of prescribing, not based on proper principles, can be helpful or even curative (but this depends on luck, not the “rational art and science of healing” which homeopathy is).
Some have assumed an example of the successful use of isopathy can be found in a small study by a team at Loyola University Health System, Michigan (See here), in treating Clostridium difficile infections with a dose of more C. difficile. The success in this example may be due, however, to the fact that the patients were given spores of non-toxin-producing C. difficile to treat the toxin-inducing C. difficile, making the treatment similar rather than the same; therefore homeopathic and not isopathic. The experiment would have yielded far better results (than the study’s 69%) if the treatment was individualised since each person will have experienced different symptoms to the same infection. Treating the causative agent doesn’t treat the disease.
Hahnemann’s comments on isopathy can be found in the sixth edition of his Organon (see here); aphorism 56 as follows:
A third mode of employing medicines in diseases has been attempted to be created by means of Isopathy, as it is called – that is to say, a method of curing a given disease by the same contagious principle that produces it. But even granting this could be done, yet, after all, seeing that the virus is given to the patient highly potentized, and consequently, in an altered condition, the cure is effected only by opposing a simillimum to a simillimum.
To attempt to cure by means of the very same morbific potency (per Idem) contradicts all normal human understanding and hence all experience. Those who first brought Isopathy to notice, probably thought of the benefit which mankind received from cowpox vaccination by which the vaccinated individual is protected against future cowpox infection and as it were cured in advance. But both, cowpox and smallpox are only similar, in no way the same disease. In many respects they differ, namely in the more rapid course and mildness of cowpox and especially in this, that is never contagious to man by more nearness. Universal vaccination put an end to all epidemics of that deadly fearful smallpox to such an extent that the present generation does no longer possess a clear conception of the former frightful smallpox plague.
Moreover, in this way, undoubtedly, certain diseases peculiar to animals may give us remedies and thus happily enlarge our stock of homoeopathic remedies.
But to use a human morbific matter (a Psorin taken from the itch in man) as a remedy for the same itch or for evils arisen therefrom is – ?
Nothing can result from this but trouble and aggravation of the disease.
Whether in ordinary medicine or homeopathy, using the same substance to treat a disease is harmful, at least potentially. For example, the great Connecticut surgeon, Edmund Carleton in his book Homeopathy in Medicine and Surgery, quotes the great homeopathic doctor Adolphe von Lippe, who had the largest medical practise in Philadephia, as saying, “… To give the remedy Syphilinum to a patient with syphilis might help the patient to initially rally only to be followed by an aggravation and demise of the patient.”
Matt Ridley, in his article on Covid-19 “Could the key to Covid be found in the Russian pandemic?”, states what I have been arguing:
Some cross–immunity seems to exist today, whereby those who have had coronavirus colds do not catch, or do not suffer severely from, Covid-19.
Further Reading
Isopathic and Other Pathological Prescribing
by Edmund J. Lee, MD, reprinted from the Homœopathic Physician 1891; 11; 192-196) (click here or view on Archive.org)
Potentially deadly Clostridium difficile infections have been treated with a dose of… more C. difficile: BBC News
“Flu jab given to millions is ‘useless'” (Daily Telegraph, 05 Feb 2015)
As a result, it is working in just three per cent of people given it, when it is normally effective in around half of cases. And it has no effectiveness at all against the dominant strain of flu in circulation this winter, which is particularly dangerous in the elderly.