Sputnik: Did Soviet scientists assess its "economic and social impact"? In , the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik gave the Western world a shock. I was a.
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Each individual dog may require a different remedy. The choice will be based on the exact objective symptoms, character, behaviour, phenotype and a detailed history. This is why homeopathy is not suited to unsophisticated double blind trials. Future conventional medicine won't be either.
Unsound Science
Serious Chronic Disease is Caused. It has been accepted for a few years in human medicine that stress is an important factor in the development of chronic disease, and recently the veterinary world is beginning to come on board. However in the Veterinary Times published a case of osteosarcoma successfully treated using homeopathy , leading to annoyed letters being sent by some vets wondering why the character of the dog and the stresses it had experienced were relevant.
One author described the possibility of homesickness causing osteosarcoma as 'farcical'. These demonstrate an association of stresses experienced as a child with health problems when an adult.
Unsound Science | leondumoulin.nl
This has been a notable landmark in epidemiological research, and has recently produced more than 50 scientific articles and conference and workshop presentations. Hahnemann had realised very early on in his homeopathic practice that understanding mental stress and emotional history was crucial in the choice of remedy.
There are no drugs in conventional practice that take into account the physical pathology together with the mental and emotional state, which may be why this area has been poorly explored by modern medicine. It is obvious to a vet taking a homeopathic consultation that animals are affected by specific emotional stresses, and subsequently develop disease in exactly the same way as humans. Their prescriptions reflect this. All remedies treat mental and emotional symptoms as well as physical. It is only recently that mainstream science has accepted that animals experience emotions 7.
Animal emotions were never mentioned in my six years at Cambridge. This had actually been a concept in medicine for centuries, referred to by Hippocrates and Paracelsus 8,9. However Hahnemann, through experiment and observation, was the first to develop a system that reliably employed the principle.
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In he grasped the law of Like Treats Like, or the Law of Similars , when he observed that the symptoms produced by eating cinchona bark containing quinine were very similar to the symptoms of malaria. He postulated that this was likely to be why quinine could successfully treat malaria. He then conducted his 'provings' experiments on medicines.
Groups of healthy volunteers took many different medicines and recorded the mental and physical symptoms they experienced with each. These drugs were then given to patients displaying a similar symptom picture. These were the first systematic drug trials performed in the history of Western medicine. Nine years later, again through a process of observation, Jenner proposed vaccination. While the principle is the same, homeopathy is only broadly similar to vaccination.
Jenner used doses of a similar disease cowpox to prevent smallpox. Hahnemann used medicines which caused specific symptoms in healthy humans, to prevent and treat diseases with a similar symptom picture. Epigenetics is the recent ground-breaking study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression, rather than alteration of the genetic code itself, and has transformed the way we think about genomes. Darwin wrote in ' On the origin of Species ' that species arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.
Previously in Lamark had proposed his theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which was later rejected. Modern observation and accurate recording has revealed that in principle Lamark had a point. Stress and disease in the mother or father impacts the health of their offspring before they are even conceived.
In one study, female rats were exposed to a fungicide vinclozolin and it was found that epigenetic changes that occurred in the first generation male offspring were faithfully passed on through at least four generations Scientists now think epigenetics can play a role in the development of cancer. Uncontrolled cellular growth can result from epigenetic change that silences a tumour suppressor gene. An individual's gene expression, health, and susceptibility to disease are changed by adverse conditions in the environment and these changes can be passed to subsequent generations in a non-Darwinian manner.
Epigenetics, or the equivalent in homeopathy, Miasm Theory, was fully understood by Hahnemann, and elucidated in his opus 'Chronic Disease', published in Hahnemann came to his theory by spending years poring over his patients' case files. He observed many did well with acute problems but returned ill with chronic ailments. He discovered by detailed history taking and observation that the diseases to which his patients were susceptible, and the way each individual expressed disease, was determined by the illnesses that their parents and grandparents had suffered, especially if these illnesses were suppressed by medication.
Using these observations, he developed a method of treating chronic disease. The story is a long one — Chronic Disease is pages long, but it was epigenetics years ahead of its time. Homeopathy uses solutions which have been serially diluted one in a hundred many times, vigorously shaken at each stage. This means that in most remedies there is none of the original material substance left.
Homeopaths understand these medicines contain an energetic pattern of the original starting substance. Homeopathy states that in all living organisms the ultimate control of the functioning of the body and mind, including the immune system, lies with a dynamic energetic force called the Vital Force. To interact best with this force, an energetic medicine is preferable.
The material body and all its chemical functions are simply the hardware. But are we even trying to compete with the big boys?
Government determination to water down cutting-edge research has now emerged as a dark partner to the bright idea of funding university departments based on their research profile. The bright idea started in the s when the government introduced its Research Assessment Exercise, where competent members of the academic community would assess each department in each university. Now our political masters are replacing it with the Research Excellence Framework REF — a mushy moniker if ever there was one — which boasts: This proposed change, which treats creative people as apparatchiks and apparatchiks as creative people, has led to an outcry.
A petition from the University and College Union says: I worked in America for 30 years because of its positive attitude to creative research, and only yesterday received a new solicitation from the National Science Foundation called Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation — a "bold five-year initiative to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes made possible by innovations and advances in computational thinking".
This is typical of the NSF, which supports researchers directly, rather than through a massive government plan to fund universities as a whole. This country, by contrast, has got its knickers in a twist. But there's a solution. Abandon the effort to manage universities centrally and instead support research on the basis of peer reviews as in the US. This will avoid having managers in universities looking over everyone's shoulder — there's little they can do in any case, apart from providing time and space for creative work.
Research support will come automatically from the grants that individual research workers funnel through the universities. Otherwise we're heading for a central planning nightmare. No bureaucrat should be assessing "economic and social impact", and as a recent petition to Number 10 puts it, "Academic excellence is the best predictor of impact in the longer term And while the Russians did not put up Sputnik on the basis of its economic and social impact, its effect was to inspire a vast programme of micro-electronics research, particularly in America, which has had more social and economic impact than any bureaucrat could ever have imagined.
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