What is better, blindly trusting medicine to treat our children's ailments or trusting in the wise nature, our power of self-healing and the use of alternative therapies? Well, I don't know, maybe we have to find among all the middle terms one in which we trust in medicine, but without abusing, moving away from "medicate everything" and "medicate nothing".
And it is that in recent years many families who have not trusted medicine have ended up paying it dearly, such as the parents of an 18-month-old girl, who saw her as her little girl I died from an otitis which resulted in meningitis, for deciding to treat it with homeopathy and herbal therapies instead of antibiotics.
According to the News, the girl, like many of today's children (few children have never had an otitis), took an ear infection that the parents decided not to treat with modern medicine, but with the remedies they used usually (homeopathy and herbal remedies). Apparently, they didn't trust vaccines or all medical advances, confidence that they had lost after a long time investigating about it.
Given that most otitis are viral, the decision could have worked out well, because when they are viral they resolve on their own. However, this did not happen, as there was a bacterium proliferating in his ear that did not stop and went further, to the point of lead to meningitis.
Seeing that the girl was getting worse, they ended up going to the hospital, where they could do nothing for her. When doing the autopsy and analyzing the origin of the infection, Dr. James A. Terzian (responsible for the autopsy) stated that a common antibiotic would have saved the girl.
A similar case, happened in 2013
In March 2013, as we said a couple of years ago, Ryan Alexander Lovett, a seven-year-old boy, He also died for not being treated with antibiotics to overcome a group A Streptococcal infection, which is treated with commonly used antibiotics. The mother preferred to give him homeopathy until after 10 days they saw that there was nothing that could be done to save him.
This happened in Canada and the child was not only not taken to the doctor that time, but never really, and not because they were careless parents, but simply because they did not trust current medicine. As there, by law, parents have an obligation to provide food, shelter, care and medical care to their children, they were considered guilty of his death.
And another case because of homeopathy, back in 2011
What is the problem of homeopathy? That has no primary effects. It has no side effects, we all know that, but neither do we. That is, they do not cause any change in the body, beyond the psychological suggestion of taking something, or what is the same, the known Placebo effect. You take something that you think is going to make you feel good, that it will heal you, and then you start to feel better.
In many mild ailments this does not carry any risk nor is it irresponsible, because as we all know, the body has the ability to heal itself from many things (thanks to its immune system). If we talk about more important diseases, then we have a problem, because there are some that can get worse, more and more, to the point of ending a life, if there is no remedy before.
I talked about this case in 2011, when some parents were accused of manslaughter for treating Luca Monsellato with homeopathy, a 4-year-old boy who had the bad luck of having a homeopathic father.
Luca took a respiratory infection that resulted in pneumonia and his father treated him with homeopathy and natural remedies.
When parents don't vaccinate ...
Other children have lost their lives or been close to it because of not being vaccinated. Parents are informed, they conclude that conventional medicine does not like, does not convince them and that everything in general is a business, including vaccines, and they choose not to vaccinate them.
At the end of June we echoed a terrible news, which hurt us more for having it near home, for being a child from here, from Spain. He was six years old, had never been vaccinated and he was detected a month before diphtheria. Despite the treatment, he could not overcome the disease and died.
Two years ago, in 2013, a family regretted not vaccinating their son when he took tetanus, a disease that left him, with seven years, in a very vulnerable situation.
And in February 2015, in a measles outbreak in Germany they are not getting control because the number of vaccinated children does not reach the desirable minimumThey had to regret the death of an 18-month-old boy who did not overcome the disease.
But ... vaccines have side effects
I did not say the opposite. Vaccines have possible side effects, like any medication, but we know that they are effective to prevent very important and dangerous diseases. That a child can die after a vaccine is given? Yes, it can happen, because there are people with sensitivity to some component of vaccines, or of a drug. However, What is more dangerous, the vaccine, or not vaccinate? Well, considering how dangerous some contagious diseases are, if they stop vaccinating, they will start to appear again in outbreaks and epidemics and the deaths would be more than those produced by vaccines.
But medicine is also dangerous
Sure. We are talking about doctors, people who make different decisions every day and prescribe drugs. We cannot expect it to be infallible, because it is not. Medications are drugs, substances that modify us in one way or another and that have some desired effects and may have other unwanted ones. Therefore parents have to be sensible and treat the things that should be treated.
It cannot be that because the child has 3 mucus, he is given a syrup, or because he coughs twice, or because he has two tenths more on the thermometer ... the medications are to be used when they are needed and when we see that they can help the child to feeling better, because he is really bad. For more banal things, all life: patience and proper hydration.
That's why I speak of a middle ground. A point where you go to the pediatrician and if he sees that what your child has does not need medication, he says "you don't have to do anything special, just wait, go giving him liquids, that he is well hydrated, and let's see how he continues", and you go home without thinking that "go pediatrician, who does not send me anything" ... because if the next day the child is worse, perhaps it is necessary to treat him and then he will give you what he needs, but if it is better, you will have saved your child a drug that he didn't need.
A middle ground in which you do not fall into the temptation to demonize medicine, thinking that it is nothing more than a business that deals with your health and jumps to homeopathy, a field in which nothing is invested in research and has very high net benefits (It is also a business): Homeopathic preparations have a very high price If we take into account their effectiveness, which is null ... come on, I dream every night to find an easier way to make money (put sugar balls in plastic bottles and collect them as if they were good for a lot), only that my ethic slows me down staff, the one that tells me "do business, but don't play with people's health" ... that's when my house of cards is dismantled and I stay as I am.
But homeopathy works!
No, it does not work, as you have just seen in the cases I have explained. And not only for those cases, but because studies have shown time and again that they do nothing beyond the aforementioned placebo effect. As I do not want to lengthen more in this regard, I leave a link where I already put the bibliographic references in which it was shown that Homeopathy has no benefit in children, neither to cure them of anything, nor to prevent anything.
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