I got a surprise in a site about etymology:

Esculapius (Medicine) between Mercury (Merchants) and the Graces (Medicine, Hygiene and Panacea)
Esculapius dealt with Patients - Merchants make deals with Clients
Esculapius is linked with a Constellation of Idealistic Medical Ideas
Mercury or Hermes is linked with Hermaphroditism and Mercantile Mercenary views
Perhaps the single serpent on the Esculapian Caduceus represent one word or truth
Perhaps the two serpents on the Caduceus of Hermes represent the duality in "deals" or
"caviat emptor"

I had never before heard "Medicine" listed as one of the Graces. Now I've got to find out what responsibilities were assigned to each of the three.

After a lot of searching I found this, which appears to contradict the above material:

Aesculapius had 7 children who were all skilled in the art of healing like their father. Two of his
most celebrated daughters were Hygeia, the goddess of health in Greek mythology, and Panacea,
the Greek goddess of healing through herbs.(2) Modern readers will recognize the legacy of these
daughters in our words for hygiene and panacea.

Panacea

Interesting, Dr, Bill, that panacea, the word for cure-all, is derived from the practice of homeopathy, which you despise! If she became a word she must've been doin' somethin' right!

Dear WO'N: I have never heard "panacea" having any connection with homeopathy. Interestingly there has been a revival of interest in homeopathy. Amazing what some relatively intelligent people will believe.

Huh, Dr. Bill? Isn't "healing through herbs," herbal medicine, over which Panacea reigns as Goddess, the foundation of homeopathy? See Jethro Kloss's Back to Eden.

Well, I don't know nothin' scholarly about this, but I have experienced both types of treatment. What I understand from "homeopathy" is "like cures like" (kinda like a vaccination) whereas herbal medicine is a whole 'nother thang, using plants in natura for their medicinal value -- although the two can and do overlap, as most independent enduring ideas do.

Dear WO'N: As I said long ago, my grandfather graduated from a medical school that taught homeopathy, but he used it only for patients who requested it. Some of the tenets are really impossible for me to swallow. The section on it in my encyclopedia is so long it would bore you to tears, but here is a sample that I think is nutty as hell:

"Hahnemann established this principle when he investigated cinchona, the bark of a tropical evergreen tree and a natural source of quinine used to treat malaria. He observed that a healthy person who took cinchona developed symptoms of malaria, and decided that the effectiveness of the drug came from its ability to cause symptoms similar to those of the actual disease."

People who take quinine do not develop symptoms of malaria. I think that it was quite a few years after Hahnemann made that statement before the cause of malaria was discovered, and the parasites could be seen on a stained blood smear with the microscope. Before that, other fevers were wrongly called malaria.

And the other wacky idea in homeopathy is that really tiny amounts of medication can be more effective than the conventional doses. Some of the new ideas are equally absurd.



"Homeopathy," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

While living in Mexico, my ex-husband, a GP, frequently offered the option of herbs to patients that were indisposed but not in danger. There are many teas that are effective against the symptoms of the common cold, headaches, fever, stomach ache, etc. Many of these remedies he learned from his mother and grandmother. Additionally, many of his patients were aware of or had used herbal remedies in the past. A friend of my father had a very bad case of shingles once. He went to several specialists and even the Mayo Clinic, but nothing brought him relief from the itch until my ex-husband suggested soaking in an infusion of chamomile bath. It didn't cure his shingles, but to be free of the painful itching for hours at a time reduced the stress he was suffering, which in turn may have allowed his body to conquer the shingles. I'm with Max. If it works, don't knock it.

Regrettably it is extremely difficult to "prove" the value of any treatment. "Anecdotal" is a dirty word, but the experiences of just a few patients is just that. Look how long it took to prove that smoking was "hazardous to your health". Not untl many thousands of people had died of heart disease and lung cancer did even doctors stop smoking. Only with carefully designed studies with large numbers of patients and the expenditure of a lot of money can the value of a medication be determined.
The placebo effect which ought to be simple, is still baffling investigators.
Alternative medicine simply means acceptance of treatment not properly validated.

I'm not setting out to challenge or support any branch of medicine being of the opinion that if it works for you - great.

However, in so saying, it's always struck me how the same symptons presented to a range of practitioners are diagnosed and treated in such different ways. Take migraine headaches for instance - and allow me some latitude in making my point.

Western GP's will often diagnose a slipped this or a pinched that and prescribe pain killers. It's also a good opportunity to do an MRI or CAT scan to identify any malignancies or circulatory system malfunctions.

A physiotherapist will diagnose likewise, but concentrates moreso on manipulative therapies and/or exercise.

A herbalist will propose a range of teas.

A chiropractor always seems to find a miss-aligned pelvis or shoulder girdle and sets about correcting this.

An acupuncturist fills you full of needles.

A naturopath links the problem to diet and proposes a whole new food regime.

And so we go. Obviously each of the practitioners is batting to their strengths - what else could they do? My problem arises when the practitioner OR the patient dumps on the other methods - a sort of unwarranted cultural arrogance.

In my opinion.

stales

I think that my GP's willingness to suggest non-pharmaceutical remedies may have been formed during the ten years he spent practicing in some remote Inuit community in what is now Nunavut. A similar situation, where isolation and poverty had forced a reliance on herbal lore

Ah. I knew when you said in a previous post that he didn't like prescribing that he couldn't have been a proper New Zealand doctor. Most doctors I've encountered (mercifully few - I have little faith in the medical profession) reach for their prescription pads before you've had time to sit down ...

Having said that, my doctor in Wellington actually listened to your symptoms before prescribing one of the penicillin equivalents!

most pharmaceuticals today, are simply the refine, filtered active ingredients from former "herbal" remedies.

herbalist where using "foxglove"--in latin digitalis-- to treat "dropsy" in the middle ages.. many cases of what they called dropsy where visible edema, caused by congestive heart failure.. which to day is treated by --digitalis...a drug that contains the refined active ingredient -- found in the herb foxglove!

repeat for willow bark as a treatment for fevers, and (though much less effective) cherry bark for soothing sore throats and reducing coughs.

treatments persist because practitioner's ( and sometimes patients) think they work. and modern medicine, for all its claims to scientific, blind studies has persisted in using treatment proven to be either ineffective, or more dangerous than the ailment they are treating.

routine hysterectomies, radical mastectomies, prefrontal lobotomies, shock treatment, sedatives used during birth delivery that cause hallucination's, drugs to treat miscarriages, --treatement and drugs that were never proven effective, and had a long term impact,(especially on the mother, and child ) continued to be used simple because some doctors believed them to work, even when the facts proved otherwise.

while individual doctors might be competent and caring, modern medicine is far from perfect, and has had glaring examples of creating and using treatments that are worthless and dangerous.

Once again Helen speaks sooth. We were practicing herbal medicine before we were human if evidence of the practices of our cousins the gorillas and chimpanzees is any indicator. When we got to the point were we could think about what we were doing we developed theories about how things work and we went off on our little tangents. Sometimes allopaths will seem to treat symptoms rather than diseases. When we have a fever the fever is a symptom of the body fighting some invader; treating the fever, unless it is so bad that it threatens to fry our little brain, would be counterproductive. So too would be prescribing nothing more than pain killers for a broken leg.

I find AnnaS's point about vaccination being essentially a homeopathic technique to be interesting (No bias here, no sir!).

So what's the difference between allo- and hetero-? Just to keep this post word oriented

I think it could be truthfully said that digitalis is the most useful herbal agent so far discovered. BUT it took a good many years of study to derive from it a safe yet effective dose. The amount of active drug varies immensely. There is simply no way an herbal practitioner could have told whether his/her leaves contained enough digitalis to be effective, and when it contained a poisonous overdose.Oh, what fools these mortals be!

>So what's the difference between allo- and hetero-?

oh, those Greeks and their excessive combining forms.