Clearly the CDC and WHO dropped the ball on Ebola from the beginning. I think this is mostly due to being out of practice. We haven’t had a lethal epidemic potential in this country for over 100 years. Its been that long since we were threatened by the likes of Spanish flu or smallpox. We knew how to do this but it is just too expensive to be constantly prepared for a lethal epidemic. We did it by quarantining people at Ellis Island and then sending them to a smallpox hospital on Roosevelt island for 3 weeks. They either recovered or died. It was pretty harsh but we did what we had to do.
We don’t have drugs that kill viruses the way antibiotics kill bacteria. The anti-viral drugs slow down or interrupt viral reproduction but it is through our immune systems that we survive the onslaught of these deadly pathogens. The only conventional approaches that work are development of a vaccine or using the serum of somebody who recently survived the epidemic. These immunological approaches are now being used against Ebola but they’ll take time to develop.
The experts at the CDC and the WHO tell us that getting infected is only possible from a patient who is symptomatic – meaning the patient has a fever, a severe headache, muscle aches and is vomiting and having diarrhea. And yet, the first infected physician treated in the US has stated that to this day he doesn’t know how he became infected. Is it possible that we don’t know everything about this disease or that the virus has mutated recently?
The other misstep was the NYC doctor who returned from west Africa where he was treating Ebola patients, arrived in NYC asymptomatic, travelled about on NYC subways, took cabs, went bowling, etc. and then called 911 when he became febrile. Well, technically he wasn’t infectious at the time before the fever developed but common sense would dictate that you quarantine yourself to prevent the inevitable hysteria that would ensue. Just plain foolish! I doubt that the presence or absence of fever is a sufficient screening test at airports. What happens if the fever develops 30 minutes after you have cleared the screening at JFK? Do we rely on self reporting? What happens if a person took a dose of ibuprofen or Tylenol while on the plane for a non- fever health issue? Just plain foolish!
So what does all of this have to do with homeopathy or osteopathy ,for that matter? Well homeopathy has been around for over 200 years, long before the development of anti-virals and antibiotics so homeopaths have been successfully treating epidemic diseases like influenza, typhoid, smallpox, etc and we could do it again if permitted. The WHO and Doctors Without Borders have already declared that it is unethical to use homeopathy and other traditional healing methods for Ebola. If a disease is more than 50% lethal and all you have to offer is “supportive care”, then how is something harmless like homeopathy unethical? I think these so-called experts’ heads would explode if homeopathy was given a chance and it worked! This amounts to a sort of intellectual imperialism created by the cartel that the medical industrial complex has become over the past 40 years.
It is popular these days to talk about “open innovation” in business – letting outsiders submit proposals for new products to large corporations in an effort to feed product development. So, here is what I propose: OPEN INNOVATION AGAINST EBOLA.  The CDC/WHO make available 50 sick Ebola patients to each research team willing to tackle this problem. Funding and approval is fast-tracked and any anyone can apply. Each team treats the patients with their method whether that be homeopathy, osteopathy, intravenous vitamin C, low dose hydrocortisone, an herbal cocktail, shamanic healing, whatever. It wouldn’t take very long to find out what is working – about 21 days. Whatever worked would be tried on a larger group of patients.
Any homeopath worth his or her salt already knows that there are several remedy choices for the early stage of Ebola. It looks pretty much like a bad case of flu with vomiting and diarrhea at the same time. A remedy like Veratrum album comes to mind but there are others. For the later hemorrhagic stage, a remedy like Crotalus horridus comes to mind. It wouldn’t take long to find the remedy for this epidemic and having found the remedy or remedies that worked, they could then be used a preventive against catching a case of Ebola. That’s the common sense way to do it.