Dengue eradication:
Immunity is best medicine
Chamikara WEERASINGHE
Asian Homeopathic Medical League Vice President and Sri Lanka
Homeopathic Medical Association President Homeopathic doctor M I Latiff
says dengue is not a disease to panic. Be it chikengunya, swine flu or
dengue, it is the name that makes people panic.
Homeopathic treatment starts at the outset of the symptoms of a
disease. Dengue is no exception. Forget the name “dengue” and start
treatment for headaches and other symptoms.
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Dr M I
Latiff. Picture by Saman Sri Wedage |
Dr Latiff said the best advice he could give a dengue patient is not
to do anything that weakens your immunity. Avoid taking cold baths,
having cold drinks and avoid taking showers in the evenings as well.
Water you drink should be boiled and lukewarm. Even the slightest thing
that can reduce your immunity should be avoided if you want to combat
dengue. He requests President Mahinda Rajapaksa to make use of
Homeopathy as a system of treatment against dengue to address the
current situation.
Following are the excerpts of an interview with Dr Latiff on dengue
fever.
Q. What is dengue in the context of homeopathy?
A. Let’s forget about dengue. What is disease? Disease itself
is an altered state of one’s immune system. Diseases are not produced
from outside. We keep on breathing bacteria and viruses every second.
The doctors say dengue and chickengunya are viruses. Although we get all
these agents through air or water we do not fall sick because we have
immunity in our bodies. As long as the state of immunity stays unaltered
or healthy we are not sick.
No sooner immunity deteriorates , we fall sick. There is a constant
battle going on inside our bodies. When immunity goes down the body is
unable to defend. This is what we call disease. First we must determine
what the disease is and the cause of it. The bacteria and viruses are
able to attack our bodies only when our immunity is weak.
When our energy or the vital force goes down, the body expresses
signs and symptoms of disease. The conventional medical practitioners
depend totally on physical symptoms.
Whether a disease is epidemic or endemic, the lack of immunity is its
cause. Mosquitoes bite without any discrimination but not all of us get
infected. If you take an area where 10,000 people live, only 50 to 100
people get affected by the virus. Those whose immunity is weak, display
signs and symptoms of sickness.
Q. Are the Health Ministry conducted dengue eradication
programs effective in controlling the situation?
A. This indeed is good. Cleaning the areas and destroying
mosquito breeding grounds can prevent a future dengue outbreak. But it
does not mean it could prevent people from falling sick by mosquito
bites. It does not help saving the lives of those who are affected by
dengue in the country.
Q. What is your opinion about the Cuban produced BTI bacteria,
which the Government plans to import to control the disease?
A. The BTI bacteria kills only the larvae . It cannot kill
mosquitoes. The disease is not spread through larvae. It spreads through
the mosquitoes that carry the virus from one person to another. No doubt
that BTI bacteria is a good long term solution. But in the current
context with over 165 deaths due to dengue.
Of them most victims have been children with over 23,000 infected
persons throughout the country. The bacteria cannot do anything to save
the affected. Our problem is to save the lives of dying patients. The
bacteria may prevent future mosquito breeding, but it will not prevent
the patients from dying.
Q. Are programs introduced so far to eradicate dengue
ineffective?
A. They have overlooked the most important aspect, saving
lives, which should be the priority.
Q. Where do you think that things have gone wrong?
A. The allopathic system does not have the capacity to treat a
viral infection. What they do is give more fluids to avoid dehydration.
Another thing is when you have more fluid , you are flushing out your
system. But once you are infected , there is nothing they can do. If you
have fever , they can give medicine to bring it down. But I am against
bringing down the fever. You may control it to an extent because fever
is a natural way of defending the internal organs from being affected.
The body produces fever to prevent infection. So if you bring down the
temperature you are giving more chance to the infection to manifest.
The increased temperature supports the system to fight. If you bring
the temperature down , you are reducing the patient’s capacity to fight
the virus. Therefore you have to keep it under control with an ice cap
or something.
Q. Do you mean it is wrong to keep your normal body
temperature if you are infected with dengue?
A. Yes, it is wrong to bring down the temperature under the
conditions as it will reduce power of the body to fight the virus. You
must maintain the temperature at a certain level, but should not bring
it down.
Q. How can homeopathy help?
A. Homeopathy treatment has no antibiotics. It just induces
body’s immunity to fight the infection within the natural system.
Homeopathic medicine is not material but based on energy. What
homeopathy does is it gives stimulation to your system.
Q. What kind of stimulation?
A. For example take the TB vaccine. It contains little
property of TB. You will not get TB from the vaccine because it is very
minute quantity that you get from the vaccine. It is like cheating your
system with a false alarm to defend your body from a TB infection. The
system tries to react by enhancing its resistance to the bacterium. Even
if a large quantity of TB should enter into your system, the body is
ready to fight it. The stimulation is similar kind. The mums and polio
are also addressed in the same way. When the polio vaccine is given,
there is fever, which means that your immunity is being enhanced. The
fever indicates that you can defend the disease.
Q. Is that what you do in homeopathy?
A. In homeopathy what we do is something similar to what we
normally do against TB. We do not use TB, we use something similar to
TB.
We use this in one in a million quantity, or an atomic quantity to
give a person to create an artificial condition inside. As you know,
artificial is always stronger than the natural. It makes
artificially-induced symptoms overpower the natural disease causing
agent, but not directly but by enhancing the immunity, making your body
fight.
Q. Do not antibiotics produce the same effect as in
homeopathy?
A. The difference is antibiotics are given after the disease
has set in to kill the bacteria. After its power is gone, the bacteria
can manifest again. This cycle goes on. The reason is antibiotics kill
the bacteria but it does not improve the immunity. Homeopathy is
different.
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