Treatment of Patient with AIDS
Despite the seemingly positive results that homoeopathic medicines provide for people who are HIV+, including those with early onset of AIDS, and those with non-extreme cases of AIDS, most homoeopaths do not observe significant improvement in treating people who have advanced stages of AIDS. That said, it should also be noted that there are exceptions to this general rule, and numerous homoeopaths find that select patients with advanced stages of AIDS experience dramatic improvement in their quality of life.
The experience of Dr. Bill Gray, a homoeopath in Davis, California, is among these. He has had 33 AIDS patients, only three of whom have survived. The remaining three patients were the only ones who insisted on avoiding AZT and DDI (another popular AIDS drug). Dr. Gray has also had 30 HIV+ patients for an average of five years, only one of whom developed AIDS. Although this one patient has suffered from two bouts of pneumocystis pneumonia, he is actually doing quite well under homoeopathic treatment.
Dr. Gray and most homoeopaths utilize classical homeopathy in the treatment of people with AIDS, using a single remedy prescribed individually for the unique pattern of symptoms experienced by the patient. This highly individualized treatment generally includes the use of homoeopathic medicines which are highly potentized (usually higher than the 200th potency).
Because of the urgency of some AIDS patients’ situations, some homoeopaths experiment with new homoeopathic remedies and with non-classical approaches to homoeopathy. For instance, Dr. Elliot Blackman, an osteopathic physician in San Francisco, occasionally prescribes CYCLOSPORIN in homoeopathic doses as an intercurrent medicine (an intercurrent medicine is one that is prescribed after another medicine which is individually determined). In conventional doses, Cyclosporin is an immuno-suppressant drug, thus suggesting that it can be effective in homoeopathic doses for treating people who have an immuno-suppressed condition (this prescription is not “classical homoeopathy” because each immuno-suppressant drug creates its own unique pattern of symptoms, and the classical use of this drug would be more individualized).
Dr. Alan Levine, a San Francisco physician who integrates homoeopathic and other natural medicines with occasional prescription of conventional drugs, has one patient who was so sick with AIDS that he developed dementia, a state of mental deterioration that tends to occur in late stages of AIDS. This patient refused all conventional drugs from Dr. Levine and from all other physicians. After using homoeopathic medicines, acupuncture, and herbs, the patient is now very healthy, has no signs of dementia, and has not had a single opportunistic infection in several years.
This case is mentioned, because despite the small chances of surviving late stages of AIDS and despite the generally accepted experience that dementia represents an irreversible neurological change, it is inspiring to know that significant and even substantial improvement is sometimes possible.
It should be noted that people with AIDS occasionally develop a fever shortly after taking the correct homoeopathic medicine. This fever is considered a beneficial response of the body to the remedy and should not be suppressed. Physiologists recognize the therapeutic value of fever as a response to infection, and homoeopathic medicine seems to be one way to augment this healing response.
By V.K. Pandey
