For the Health of It: When It’s Not the Real Flu Vaccine, You’re Not Protected

By ROBERT BENON GENERATION NEXT

Question: My dad is worried that there might be a flu epidemic, and he wants me to get a flu-vaccine shot. My mom says the flu shot can give me the flu and it would be better to get a natural homeopathic flu vaccine. Would it hurt me to get both? Would they cancel each other out?

Answer: The regular flu vaccine — which, by the way, cannot give you the flu — has a pretty good chance of preventing you from catching influenza this winter. The homeopathic flu vaccine has chance to do that, too: that of a snowball’s chance on a beach in Baja.

The homeopathic flu vaccine hasn’t been tested in an objective way like regular medicines legally have to be, and there’s no more reason to think it would offer more protection than crossing your fingers.

A number of regular medical clinicians have been willing to keep an open mind about whether the practice of homeopathy might work, since some research has supported it and some hasn’t. Lately it’s become clear, though, that that dog just won’t hunt, as the Dachshund owners like to say.

You don’t even have to be able to spell the word homeopath in order to call yourself one. There are no licenses you have to get or training you’re required to have. Still, it amazes me that homeopaths will tell people to avoid the regular flu vaccine and take their concoction instead. What if someone with asthma or a weakened immune system follows their advice and then catches influenza and dies? This could certainly happen on a large scale if we ever get the bad flu epidemic that public health experts have been predicting will happen again before very long. The really big one in 1918 killed about 50 million people.

What is homeopathy, anyway? About 200 years ago, it was probably developed as an alternative to the dreadful practices that passed for conventional medicine at the time. Homeopathy calls for treating “like with like.” For instance, if you have a juniper allergy, you are given a tiny amount of juniper in a water-based solution. In the case of the flu, the practitioner would consider your symptoms and give you something that would replicate those symptoms, like mercury.

In the past 20 years, homeopathic medicines have finally been getting some decent testing. In this way, there is a chance of determining if patients are getting better because of the medicine or if they are getting better because their illness was going away on its own. Some of this new research looked good for homeopathy.

A very highly respected medical journal called The Lancet has, over the years, been very willing to publish research that seemed to support homeopathy.

A couple of months ago, that same journal published research that took into account other factors in over 200 previous experiments that could have resulted in inaccurate results for both homeopathic and conventional medical treatments. The Lancet editors, open- minded as they’d been, finally came to a conclusion, and the cover of their Aug. 27 issue had only 16 words on it: “Now doctors need to be bold and honest with their patients about homeopathy’s lack of benefit.”

Inside, the editors added that doctors also need to be honest with themselves about the failings of regular health care to address patients’ needs for care that’s more personal, since many alternative practitioners outshine many mainstream clinicians in that respect.

Another seemingly powerful scientific reason to believe in homeopathy got shot out of the water back on Nov. 26, 2002, when a prize of a million dollars was put up for anyone who could prove that homeopathy works. It was on a British public TV (BBC) documentary show called Horizon, with the queen of England’s own royal homeopath present. With big bucks on the line, they tried to duplicate a previously published experiment in which a homeopathic drug had been shown to have an effect on human blood cells. For this show, the experiment was done in a way that completely “blinded” the experimenters so that accidental bias could be avoided. When tested in this truly scientific way, the stuff showed no effect on the cells, much to the surprise of the queen’s homeopath, who probably went back to the palace and unplugged the royal TV.

But despite the lack of research supporting homeopathic drugs, it wouldn’t do any harm to take them.

Questions can be mailed to The New Mexican, For the Health of It, 202 East Marcy St., Santa Fe, NM 87501; e-mailed to teens@sfnewmexican.com or phone in to 986-3050.