Each year, cholera infects 1.3 to 4 million people around the world, killing 21,000 to 143,000 people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) (https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/history-of-cholera). With outbreaks in 31 countries in the past year, cholera’s most recent resurgence can no longer be ignored.
Cholera is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, an organism that typically lives in salty and warm waters such as estuaries and along coastal areas. V. cholerae is contracted from drinking liquids or eating foods contaminated with the bacteria, for example, raw or undercooked shellfish. So long as there are communities lacking access to clean water and sanitary bathrooms, the disease can erupt with shocking swiftness. A risk remains even where it had seemingly been eradicated. The cholera epidemic in the southern African country of Malawi provides a shocking example of the disease’s reemergence.
As reported in an article in the December 22, 2022, edition of the New York Times, “In a Nation That Nearly Wiped Out Cholera, the Disease Is Surging Back,” only two cases of cholera had been reported in 2021. Now, over the past eleven months, more than 28,000 cholera infections and at least 900 deaths have been reported in Malawi. The government is desperate to contain its spread. Though health experts say cholera typically kills only about 1 percent of infected people now, in the country’s worst cholera outbreak in two decades, Malawi’s death rate hovers at around an alarming 3.3 percent.
I have previously reported how, within a different context, treatment choice for today’s mentally troubled has been forfeited. At blame is the high-jacking of a history, an informational theft concerning the cover up of successful homeopathic psychiatry practiced within mental asylums from 1875 through the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century. (https://rightwhalepress.com/when-history-has-been-hijackedthe-narrative-must-be-seized-or-else-choice-is-forfeited/).
The topic of today’s blog is the fallout from similarly disastrous chicanery. I refer to the 1854 whitewashing of cholera research findings where key information was suppressed because it delivered unwelcome news for London’s orthodox physicians. Scrupulous documentation comparing the effectiveness of homeopathic care at London’s Golden Square Hospital with hospital care in orthodox medical settings revealed homeopathic care to be overwhelmingly superior. The disparity was too embarrassing to be acknowledged.
Author Michael Emmans Dean documents astonishing outcomes resulting from homeopathy’s employment of a small number of remedies (https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2022-DON426). The medicines providing safe and effective means against cholera are well-known to professional homeopaths. They include Veratrum Album, Arsenicum Album, Cuprum and Secale Cornutum.
Here is a thumb nail description of the remedies and their mental/emotional characteristics that when present render someone susceptible to contracting cholera or intensifying their illness experience:
-
- Veratrum Album needing individuals have usually suffered loss of social position due to a life-up-ending event. Their delirium will feature distortion of perspective, self-righteousness sudden exhaustion and vomiting.
- Arsenicum Album needing individuals are restless, anxious–especially for family members—perfectionistic, focused on death and aging. Diarrhea and exhaustion will be accompanied by chilliness or burning heat sensations.
- Cuprum needing individuals are belligerent about how things should be, loud, physically tense, prone to violent cramping and vomiting.
- Secale Cornutum needing individuals can be gripped by maniacal fear, but also be discouraged and mentally dull. For them, cholera features bloody, involuntary stools and icy cold skin, and gastritis with a strong burning sensation.
Unearthing this buried history taught Dean the truth of an adage attributed to Mark Twain, “The truth is easy to kill, a lie told well is immortal.” Dean had ostensibly dispelled a lie that homeopathy cannot work. Confronting this immortal falsehood, his article, published in the May, 2016 issue of the “Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine,” was greeted with a collective yawn. Skepticism concerning homeopathy’s effectiveness and an established institutional bias against its practice allows hundreds if not thousands in countries such as Malawi to suffer and die unnecessarily. Oh well.
Background
Dean was aware that cholera haunted the nineteenth century. The origins of this painful and frightening new disease that might result in death within hours were unknown. All treatments employed were useless. The bacterial cause was not understood until 1883 and the gold standard of treatment, oral rehydration therapy, was not used until 1960.
Dean states, “Of the six 19th-century cholera pandemics, the third, in 1849–1860, resulted in the most fatalities. In Great Britain, there were 23,000 deaths, 10,000 in London alone. The government responded with an epidemiological survey and a comparative evaluation of rival treatments.” (Dean ME. Selective suppression by the medical establishment of unwelcome research findings: the cholera treatment evaluation by the General Board of Health, London 1854. J R Soc Med. 2016 May;109(5):200-5. doi: 10.1177/0141076816645057. PMID: 27150713; PMCID: PMC4872209).
A chart compiled by Dean, below, compares the number of cholera deaths reported by London’s Golden Square, the homeopathic hospital, with the combined totals of such deaths reported by St Thomas’s, St Bartholomew’s, St Mary’s, the Westminster, and the University College hospitals, each a bastion of allopathic medicine. With respect to stages 1 and 2, the homeopathic hospital recorded a 0.2% death rate as compared to a 0.6% death rate for the orthodox hospitals. With respect to the more serious stages 3 and 4, the homeopathic hospital had an 18.4% death rate as compared to a 46% death rate at the orthodox hospitals.
Sources: Medical Council (p. 87ff) and House of Commons.
In an unsolicited February 22, 1855, letter to the homeopathic hospital from district inspector David Macloughlin, an ardent opponent of homeopathy published in an official notice known as the Parliamentary Return, he wrote:
You are aware that I went to your hospital prepossessed against the homoeopathic system; that you had in me, in your camp, an enemy rather than a friend, and that I must therefore have seen some cogent reason there, the first day I went, to come away so favourably disposed as to advise a friend to send a subscription to your charitable fund.
Macloughlin was no neophyte when it came to understanding how horrific cholera was. Dean notes, “As important as his prior hostility towards homeopathy was the fact that he (Macloughlin) had spent 20 years in India,” where in 1817 a lethal outbreak emerging in the Ganges Delta had spread throughout the entire country.
I need not tell you that I have taken some pains to make myself acquainted with the rise, progress, and medical treatment of cholera, and … claim for myself some rights to be able to recognise the disease, and to know something of what the medical treatment ought to be; … That there may be no misapprehension about the cases I saw in your hospital, I will add, that all I saw were true cases of cholera, in the various stages of the disease; and that I saw several cases which did well under your treatment, which I have no hesitation in saying would have sunk under any other.
Macloughlin insisted that the homeopathic results should be placed “for accurate observation of the disease by the side of St Thomas’s, St Bartholomew’s, St Mary’s, the Westminster and the University College hospitals.” He concluded with:
…and what I have told everyone with whom I have conversed, that although an allopath by principle, education and practice, yet was it the will of Providence to afflict me with cholera, and to deprive me of the power of prescribing for myself, I would rather be in the hands of a homoeopathic than an allopathic adviser.
The organization Homeopaths Without Borders provides homeopathic health care clinics in Haiti. In the event that a similar initiative in Malawi or another country struggling with cholera is sought the agency so interested can contact me.
The organization Homeopaths Without Borders provides homeopathic health care clinics in Haiti. In the event that a similar initiative in Malawi or another country struggling with cholera is sought the agency so interested can contact me.