The following is an extract of the chapter on the influenza epidemic of 1918 from Julian Winston's upcoming history of homeopathy book-which does not yet have a title. Watch these pages for a review when it does come out.

From The New England Journal of Homeopathy, Spring/Summer 1998, Vol.7 No.1

It was called "the Great White Plague." It is hard to imagine the devastation caused by the Flu Epidemic of 1918-19. People who lived through it reported that some one who was up and well in the morning could be dead by evening.

Dr. H. A. Roberts was a physician on a troop ship at the time. Another boat pulled alongside to get any spare coffins- it's mortality rate was so high. On his return to port, the commander said to Roberts, "used all your coffins?" To which Roberts, who had been treating his ship with homeopathy, replied, "Yes, and lost not one man!"

The following is an extract from an article entitled "Homeopathy In Influenza- A Chorus Of Fifty In Harmony" by W. A. Dewey, MD that appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1920.

Dean W. A. Pearson of Philadelphia collected 26,795 cases of influenza treated by homeopathic physicians with a mortality of 1.05%, while the average old school mortality is 30%.

Thirty physicians in Connecticut responded to my request for data. They reported 6,602 cases with 55 deaths, which is less than 1%. In the transport service I had 81 cases on the way over. All recovered and were landed. Every man received homeopathic treatment.

Paris - Health researchers said on Thursday they had found a troubling link between higher consumption of rice and Type 2 diabetes, a disease that in some countries is becoming an epidemic.

Further work is need to probe the apparent association and diets that are notoriously high in sugar and fats should remain on the no-go list, they cautioned.

"What we've found is white rice is likely to increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes, especially at high consumption levels such as in Asian populations," Qi Sun of the Harvard School of Public Health told AFP.

"But at the same time people should pay close attention to the other things they eat.

"It's very important to address not just a single food but the whole pattern of consumption."

In the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Sun's team said the link emerged from an analysis of four previously published studies, carried out in China, Japan, Australia and the United States.

Parents who exercise a vaccine exemption for their children are often ridiculed for putting their own children and others at risk. However, legally and medically, unvaccinated children do not pose a significant health risk to themselves or anyone else. Alternative vaccine views support this assertion, but the reasoning in this article comes straight from mainstream vaccine beliefs, accepted medical practice and current law.[1]

First, from the legal perspective, forty-eight state legislatures, federal agencies (e.g., Department of Defense, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services), and all U.S. territories offer religious exemptions to immunizations. The state legislatures and federal agencies providing these exemptions are presumed to have considered whether or not the exercise of these exemptions would pose a significant health risk. They would not have enacted these exemption laws if their exercise would pose a significant health risk. Thus, there is a legal presumption that the exercise of a vaccine exemption does not pose a significant risk to anyone.

This legal presumption is not a mere exercise in semantics or logic. It is based on the widely accepted herd immunity theory, which tells us that so long as most of the members of a population are immune, all members of the population are protected.[2] Indeed, current vaccine policy necessarily depends on this theory. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says: "No vaccine is 100% effective. Most routine childhood vaccines are effective for 85% to 95% of recipients. For reasons related to the individual, some will not develop immunity."[3] (It's curious that they blame the "individual" and not the vaccines. Regardless, the CDC admits that this is why the majority of outbreaks occur in vaccinated children.) In contrast, national exemption rates run about 1% - 2.5% on average.[4] Furthermore, just as vaccinated children are not necessarily immune, exempt children aren't necessarily lacking immunity. Many exempt children develop natural immunity, and according to the CDC, they don't have to get sick for that to happen.[5] The bottom line is, you can't determine the immunity status of any given individual child by the child's vaccination status alone. But with the herd immunity theory, we don't need to; we need only be concerned with a populations' immune status collectively.

Scientists have gained insight into why lithium salts are effective at treating bipolar disorder in what could lead to more targeted therapies with fewer side-effects.

Bipolar disorder is characterised by alternating states of elevated mood, or mania, and depression. It affects between 1% and 3% of the general population.

The extreme 'mood swings' in bipolar disorder have been strongly associated with disruptions in circadian rhythms - the 24-hourly rhythms controlled by our body clocks that govern our day and night activity.

For the last 60 years, lithium salt (lithium chloride) has been the mainstay treatment for bipolar disorder but little research has been carried out to find out whether and how lithium impacts on the brain and peripheral body clockwork.

"Our study has shown a new and potent effect of lithium in increasing the amplitude, or strength, of the clock rhythms, revealing a novel link between the classic mood-stabiliser, bipolar disorder and body clocks," said lead researcher Dr Qing-Jun Meng, in the University's Faculty of Life Sciences.

"By tracking the dynamics of a key clock protein, we discovered that lithium increased the strength of the clockwork in cells up to three-fold by blocking the actions of an enzyme called glycogen synthase kinase or GSK3.

Homeopathic medicine practitioners may have to defend their practice in Austrailia after the National Health and Medical Research Council decided that their practices may be ineffective and unethical. A statement issued claims that it is "unethical for health practitioners to treat patients using homeopathy, because a homeopathic medicine or procedure has apparently been shown to be ineffective."

This statement is based on an evaluation of homeopathy by the British House of Commons Science and Technology committee, who came to the conclusion that the whole field of homeopathic medicine is no more effective than a placebo pill is.

Similarly, the statement suggests that homeopathic medicine is actually just joke medicine, and that "safe and effective conventional treatments" should not be delayed in favor of homeopathic ones.

The researchers who support this statement maintain that many homeopathic treatments are wrongfully being covered by health insurance companies, despite the fact that they are largely ineffective and sometimes more costly than conventional methods.

The difficulties that many women describe as memory problems when menopause approaches are real, according to a study published today in the journal Menopause, the journal of the North American Menopause Society.

The findings won't come as a surprise to the millions of women who have had bouts of forgetfulness or who describe struggles with "brain fog" in their late 40s and 50s. But the results of the study, by scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center and the University of Illinois at Chicago who gave women a rigorous battery of cognitive tests, validate their experiences and provide some clues to what is happening in the brain as women hit menopause.

"The most important thing to realize is that there really are some cognitive changes that occur during this phase in a woman's life," said Miriam Weber, Ph.D., the neuropsychologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who led the study. "If a woman approaching menopause feels she is having memory problems, no one should brush it off or attribute it to a jam-packed schedule. She can find comfort in knowing that there are new research findings that support her experience. She can view her experience as normal."

The study is one of only a handful to analyze in detail a woman's brain function during menopause and to compare those findings to the woman's own reports of memory or cognitive difficulties.

Reversing clinical signs of aging, especially in eye diseases like cataracts, is a promising prospect. It is also a popular topic based on the success of our previous post on aloe gel visibly reversing signs of skin aging. Who, after all, would not like to age slower and/or reverse the process when unnecessarily accelerated? And especially when loss of vision and/or potential blindness are at stake.

Watchful waiting, some vague nutritional recommendations, increased use of sunglasses, and, of course, surgical intervention, are still the standard of care from the conventional medical viewpoint. With half of all Americans in their mid-80's suffering from them, cataracts are generally considered a natural -- and inevitable -- part of the aging process. Well, there is a reason why not everyone in their 80's (i.e. the other 50%) gets them, and it likely has far more to do with nutritional factors, than genetics. How do we know that? Well, the following research may bring the point home poignantly....

There are a broad range of natural substances which have been researched for their ability to prevent cataract-associated lens opacity, but wheatgrass steals the show when it comes to demonstrably improving the condition, at least in the animal model.

Some years ago, I was going to lunch with two friends. The restaurant had a special, a brisket pot roast that smelled wonderful, and made us all hungry. One of my friends wanted to order the special, but he was afraid. He said "That looks so good, but it will clog my arteries and take years off my life. I cannot risk it." He ordered a chicken salad he did not want and did not enjoy. He had no chronic disease, but he was afraid that one serving of meat would shorten his life.

Fear is the great convincer. Fear overwhelms reason, education, logical thinking, and common sense. Fear is used routinely by the government, the medical profession, the food industry, and large corporations to get us to do what they want.

Fear has been used very effectively in scaring people to change what they eat. We are told that we must have GMOs, or the world will starve. We are told that we must stop eating butter, or our arteries will be clogged. We are told not to eat cholesterol, or we will die from heart disease. We are told not to eat animal fats, or we will die from diabetes, cancer, heart disease, or all of the above. All of these lies are not true. Yet all of these lies are believed by most of the American people.

Anybody following the discussions in these pages know that: Limiting carbohydrate intake reduces risk for coronary heart disease and heart attack.

First of all, why do conventional diets advocate restricting saturated and total fat? From the standpoint of surrogate markers of cardiovascular risk, cutting saturated and total fat reduces total cholesterol; reduces calculated LDL cholesterol; and may reduce c-reactive protein modestly (an index of inflammation). It also increases blood sugar and HbA1c (reflecting the prior 60 days blood sugars), increases glycation of the proteins of the body leading to cataracts, arthritis, and hypertension.

Problem: Total cholesterol is a combination of HDL cholesterol, an estimate of VLDL cholesterol (triglycerides), and LDL cholesterol. It is a composite of both "good" things (HDL) and "bad" things (LDL and VLDL). Cutting saturated and total fat results in reduced HDL, increased VLDL/triglycerides, and a reduction in calculated LDL. Pretty weak stuff. The last item, i.e., reduction in calculated LDL, is not even a real phenomenon. In fact, the net effect in most genotypes (genetic types) may be negative: increased heart disease risk.

On July 13, 1994, an obituary in the Washington Post reported the death, at age 60, of Richard Joshua Reynolds, III, an heir to the founder of the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company. The headline and an accompanying photograph showed the deceased smoking a cigarette and implied that Reynolds died from emphysema, caused by smoking. Reading the obituary in detail, however, it turned out that he had quit smoking eight years prior to his death; and that there was a family history of emphysema, the deceased's own father having died from the disease at the age of 58. Furthermore, the obituary disclosed that the deceased's own doctor was unable to state the "immediate cause" of his death.

Medical opinion concerning emphysema has had an interesting history. My 1973 edition of "Diagnosis and Treatment" (a standard medical textbook), states that emphysema is a disease which involves destruction of the alveolar (lung) tissue but that the cause is unknown, although "many doctors" think it is caused by "cigarette smoking". In 1973, Chronic Pulmonary Obstructive Disease (COPD) had not yet been invented. COPD, while now discussed at length in modern medical textbooks, did not exist in 1973.

Some time subsequent to 1973, a genetic cause of emphysema was discovered. In an article in the latest on-line edition of Grolier's Encyclopedia, Howard Buechner, M.D., explains that a significant number of the people with the disease lack a gene that controls the liver's production of a protein called alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT). This protein controls or degrades an enzyme called neutrophil elastase, produced by the white blood cells. When the enzyme is left unchecked, it destroys alveolar tissue.