Posted on: Tuesday, October 22, 2002

ISLAND VOICES
Alternative battlefield medicine bad idea

By Jack H. Scaff Jr.
Physician and Honolulu resident

I found a recent Sunday Advertiser's commentary entitled "Pentagon should consider alternative battlefield medicine" to be disturbing.

While superficially it might appear the comments have merit, upon definitive reading, it becomes more apparent that the conclusions arrived at by Patrick Linton and Dr. Wayne Jonas cannot withstand scientific scrutiny. That's not to state that complementary or alternative medicine should not be researched or applied when appropriate.

But I find it stretches credibility to assume that acupuncture might be as effective as a morphine syringe, which can be readily administered by soldiers in the field with minimal training. To try to carry low-level lasers to accelerate wound healing or reduce bleeding and scarring through bio-electric magnetic treatment likewise stains credibility.

Nevertheless, I find that it is their application of "homeopathic" doses to be the least credible of all. Homeopathy was developed by Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), who developed his "Law of Similars," i.e., symptoms of a disease might be cured by substances that produce similar symptoms in healthy people.

Hahnemann believed the diseases represented a disturbance in the body's ability to heal itself; he felt that perhaps only a small stimulus might be needed to begin the healing process. Therefore, while initially using small doses of accepted medications, he followed up by using enormous dilutions, concluding that the smaller the dose, the more powerful the effect, i.e., the "Law of Infinitesimals."

This of course is the opposite of scientific reasoning, and as noted in a 1977 report of an Australian Parliament Committee of Inquiry: "For each drug property, there is a clearly defined dose-response relationship in which increasing the dose increases the effect. There is no example in the whole area of pharmacology in which simple dilution of a drug enhances the response it produces any more than diluting a dye can produce a deeper hue or adding less sugar can make food sweeter."

The authors' assumption that ultralow doses of apis melifica, a form of bee venom, might reduce damage caused by ionizing radiation defies scientific scrutiny, not to mention the laws of physics.