Homeopathy is often overlooked as a modality for pain management. However, it deserves to be a first-line treatment due to its safety, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness. Limitations to the acceptance of homeopathy in the United States include physicians' lack of familiarity with the research studies, which primarily come from Europe, where homeopathy is integrated into the national healthcare systems of nearly all European countries. The database of the social security system in France, where citizens can choose a homeopathic or conventional family doctor, shows that the former modality provides comparable results in pain management while significantly reducing the use of conventional painkillers. Research in the United States is minimal due to lack of government or industry funding. In addition, exaggerated media reports as to the potential harm from homeopathy have resulted in undue reluctance to use it among both physicians and the general public. A large-scale review of the German drug safety database has revealed a miniscule number of adverse events. Finally, resistance to the use of homeopathy-based on the mistaken notion that it contains nothing but water-is addressed by citations from the newly emerging field of ultrahigh dilution physics. A description of the most common homeopathic medicines for various types of pain is provided, including back pain, dental pain, labor pains, and trigeminal neuralgia. Homeopathic medicines must be customized to the individual patient in chronic conditions. Yet, a severe acute trauma can respond to the same homeopathic medicine in nearly all individuals. As an example, a standard protocol is provided to speed healing and reduce pain after surgery or dental extraction. While homeopathic medicines are rarely tested against conventional painkillers in a head-to-head trial, certain research studies show that homeopathic medicines can enhance healing for those already on conventional medications and can reduce pain in a condition such as a fracture for which effective drug treatment is lacking.
A close examination of the incident reports to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding homeopathic teething tablets reveals a lack of evidence either for the FDA advisories regarding them or the media reports claiming that hundreds of infants were harmed soon after ingesting them. Many of the incident reports were requests for information from concerned parents, while the rest lacked a temporal association with ingestion or failed to rule out confounding medications or health conditions. The only other recent example of alleged harm from a homeopathic product was the case of Zicam Ò , withdrawn from the market after users reported loss of their sense of smell. Two views of Zicam are examined-that it was a supplement falsely labeled homeopathic or that it was an outlier among bona fide homeopathic medicines-neither of which would implicate the safety of homeopathic medicines in general. A recent New England Journal of Medicine perspectives piece is addressed: it calls for homeopathy to be regulated more stringently, as pharmaceuticals are. This article agrees that additional regulations and enforcement are needed. However, they should be limited to minor adjustments to make homeopathy more accessible to consumers and to minimize fraudulent products. This article asserts that homeopathy is already safer and can be more effective than pharmaceuticals, while current regulations of pharmaceuticals have failed to ensure their safety or effectiveness. The low risk-benefit ratio of homeopathy is asserted based on its minimal risk and its potential great benefit to consumers and the healthcare system as a whole, including cost savings, reducing antibiotic usage in humans and animals, and providing a rapid response to an epidemic. Finally, a proposed "new therapeutic order" is recommended in which safe holistic modalities such as homeopathy are used first, with drugs and surgery used only as a last resort.
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