As many of you will know from bitter experience, though morning sickness is usually associated with the first trimester, it frequently extends way beyond the twelfth week and is by no means confined to mornings only. As homeopathy is safe for use during pregnancy, there is no need to put up with the symptoms when they get too much.
As what is written here is intended for self-prescription, we will not deal with those more severe cases of morning sickness which involve a lot of actual vomiting. In such situations, professional help is advised.
Before looking at the principal homeopathic remedies for morning sickness, there is a simple trick which many mums to be have sworn by. Keep a dry biscuit by your bedside, and eat it lying down when you first wake up in the morning. Sit up in bed and have a drink of water, then get up. Following this, try to avoid caffeine, and have ginger tea (ginger is an age old cure for nausea) or honey and milk instead. In general, eating and drinking little and often throughout the day is advisable.
In addition to these measures, take the remedy from the list below which most closely resembles your symptoms. Use the remedy in the 6c potency, and take one dose three times a day for up to 4 weeks. Seek professional help if the nausea extends beyond this time frame.
Sepia (Cuttlefish Ink) 
This is the first remedy to consider when you have nausea at the sight, smell or even the thought of food. Eating or drinking a little alleviates the nausea. The symptoms can be associated with backache, and feelings of being very easily irritated or depressed.
Nux Vomica (Poison Nut) 
The person who would benefit from this remedy would suffer a lot of nausea and retching without much vomiting. They are likely to also be constipated and bloated but be craving caffeine and other stimulants.
Pulsatilla (Wind Flower) 
Nausea for this person will be worse if eating or smelling fatty food. The nausea will ease when out in the fresh air and be worse in a warm stuffy room. The typical Pulsatilla person is tearful and much in need of kindness and understanding.
As ever, excellent homeopathic remedies are to be had from www.helios.co.uk. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any queries. 

Nicola Martin

It’s a question that sounds like a joke, and it won’t have many surgeons laughing. Homeopathy is the scientifically implausible idea that diluted substances can somehow treat disease: it has never been shown to work and any effect is, at very best, a placebo effect. It’s a world away from the glinting scalpels and cut-and-dried logic of surgery. See a problem, cut it out, sew it back up. Right?
Well, it is until you start looking for evidence of effectiveness for some operations, and then you’re left thinking that the line between the two is not as clear as you first thought.
 
Read more“Nobody is suggesting that a liver transplant, cancer surgery or a cataract operation is ineffective or down to placebo,” says Andy Carr, a professor of surgery at the University of Oxford. “But for more routine surgeries, where outcomes are subjective things, such as pain or stiffness, there’s good evidence that many are little more than placebo. Given that these operations cause risk to patients and cost to hospitals, that is good evidence that we should stop doing them.”
Evidence-based medicine works a little like a fairground ride in that there’s a you-must-be-this-high-to-ride sign at its gate. To be accepted, an intervention must be shown to work better than a placebo in a randomised trial in which participants don’t know whether they are getting the active treatment or the placebo. With drugs, that placebo is a sugar pill, but with a surgical intervention it’s what’s called a sham surgery: a faked procedure that omits the step thought to be therapeutically beneficial but includes incision and anaesthetic if necessary. When put through the wringer of this type of testing, many surgical interventions come up short.

You can no longer say, as a doctor, that homeopathy is rubbish because you’re doing the same thing

Carr and his colleagues reviewed 53 trials of less invasive surgical interventions(ones that didn’t include cutting open entire cavities or lots of dissection) and found that, for half of surgeries tested, there was little sign that they were any better than placebo. Under the harsh light of the evidential operating table, it’s tough to justify their continued use.
Here are some of the surgical interventions that have been tested worldwide and have failed to convince: arthroscopy for arthritic knee; spinal cement injections for vertebral fractures; some gastric balloon procedures for obesity; meniscectomy (the surgical removal of all or part of a torn meniscus in the knee); sphincterotomy to reduce pain after gall stone removal; and laser surgery for angina.
Advertisement“Once you accept that some or all of the effect of the surgery you are doing is down to placebo, but you carry on doing it anyway, you have removed the only barrier between mainstream medicine and alternative medicine,” says Ian Harris, a professor of surgery at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
“You can no longer say, as a doctor, that homeopathy is rubbish because you’re doing the same thing.”
How, in the hyper-regulated and much scrutinised world of medicine, have we been doing surgeries that are ineffective and might put patients at unnecessary risk? Part of it is down to the culture and tradition of surgery. “Surgery evolved around the middle ages, in wars, and was all about saving lives,” says Carr. “We’d operate if there was a bullet wound or if a bomb went off, or if we needed to amputate a leg.”
Put simply, there is not much time for boffins when someone is dying on your operating table. This led to a culture in surgery, stretching from training to regulation, of learning from others and improvising as you go, says Carr. “It was fine for life-saving operations, but as you start doing surgery for softer, subjective indications such as knee pain and back pain, you introduce the possibility that an element of what you’re delivering is the placebo effect. Pain is hugely modifiable and affected by things like mood, context, expectation and belief.”
It’s tempting to think of the placebo effect as magic but it’s not. In much the same way that information from a drug can cross from your blood to your brain and cause it to effect change, information can also enter your brain through your eyes, ears, mouth and nose and cause it to effect a similar change.
“We know that placebos can make your brain release more neurotransmitters such as endorphins or cannabinoids or dopamine,” says Ted Kaptchuk, a placebo researcher and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “We know that the doctor-patient relationship is an important factor in how patients feel about their treatment, and we know that patients respond to the rituals of medicine.”
The rituals of surgery are strong – the nil-by-mouth command, the surgical gown, the anaesthetic and smell of surgical spirit, the incision, the sound of the drill, the reassuring words as you flinch, the overnight stay, the (probably terrible) breakfast, the pain, the leftover scar. All these factors can cement in your mind the belief that something happened that was done to help you.


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 ‘If the end result is still a happy patient: what’s the problem if the operation is a placebo?’ Photograph: Ridofranz/Getty Images/iStockphotoPlacebo aside, there’s probably a more likely reason that people feel better after these surgeries: the fact that things tend to get better on their own, or to give it its fancy medical name, regression to the mean.
Advertisement“People with arthritis of the knee or recurrent sore knees will have good times and bad times,” says Harris. “If you see them at a time when their symptoms are particularly bad, then any time after that their symptoms won’t be as bad. It fluctuates, but people incorrectly associate the surgery as something that caused their pain to get better.”
It’s not just patients who fall for this association, says Harris, doctors do too. “Surgery is taught like an apprenticeship – you rotate around hospitals, watch senior surgeons and learn what they do. You don’t necessarily learn the scientific method, you don’t necessarily learn about the biases you may form about the effectiveness of a particular operation, and you end up forming the same biases that other doctors and the general public fall for by assuming causation where you see association.”
For that reason, he says, much of the change in surgery might have to be generational. “Younger practitioners coming in understand the concepts and realise that they need sufficient evidence to justify what they do. But to tell a surgeon who has been doing knee arthroscopies for 30 years, and who has seen patients getting better, that they have just been wasting their time is very difficult.”
It will be especially difficult to convince surgeons who are known and respected for their skill in specific operations – more so when those operations are the source of their often comfortable livelihood.
The path forward is clear, says Carr. “We need to do the proper, definitive trials of surgical interventions where uncertainty about effectiveness exists. I don’t think people should be subjected to operations, particularly routine ones that are done in their tens or hundreds of thousands a year, if there is insufficient evidence for knowing whether they work.
“We need a whole community, which involves patients, doctors, regulators, the industry, the politicians, the press, all to come to a realisation that the most important thing is that we do good clinical studies and do trials that provide clear, robust evidence.”
It is important that patients understand the need to do placebo-controlled studies so that they are more willing to take part in the studies needed to weed out the operations that don’t work, even if it means they received sham surgery.

Risk to patients aside, it just means that we are wasting a hell of a lot of money

With the costs and professional upheaval involved in such testing, it might be tempting to turn a blind eye: if the end result is still a happy patient, what’s the problem if the operation is a placebo? Kaptchuk, for instance, has shown that openly giving placebo pills to patients with chronic lower back pain or irritable bowel syndrome can help them manage their discomfort better. “A placebo pill is one thing,” he says, “but the risks involved in surgery are huge – I do not think people should undergo surgery to get a placebo effect.”
Carr agrees: “I’d be very concerned if surgery was being used as a sham because every now and then somebody will have a pulmonary embolism or a life-threatening infection, which would completely negate any benefit.”
It’s acceptable for a magician to conjure a string of colourful napkins from his pocket, but if he has to knock you out and drill a hole in your kneecap to do so, even David Blaine would agree that that’s probably a step too far.
AdvertisementOnce a surgical operation has been tested and shown to be ineffective, money could instead be used on finding treatments that actually work.
“You name it, public transport, education, literally anything is a better use of public money than ineffective surgery,” says Harris, who suggests that there might also be a need to address the expectations around the surgeon-patient relationship.
“If a patient comes to you and says they’ve got trouble with their knee, then it should be reasonable to tell them that you understand that it’s making life difficult for them but that over time the pain will subside,” he says. “We should be able to reassure them that it’s nothing serious, and that without any treatment, and without any added cost to them, their pain will settle down.”
“More and more, it’s looking like a lot of surgeries have no benefit,” he continues, “and as long as we keep doing them anyway – risk to patients aside – it just means that we are wasting a hell of a lot of money, and that doesn’t even touch the surgeries that we haven’t studied yet.”
If evidence is the line that separates robust science from squishy pseudoscience, and if that evidence is missing in many cases of surgery, what is the difference between a homeopath and a surgeon? You’d hope that it is the way they react if they find out their treatments don’t work.

In the wake of the  major earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on 11 March 2011, Japanese officials are still struggling to contain and prevent further radiation leaks from the country’s damaged nuclear power plants.
Should the situation worsen,
leaking radioactive material has the potential to spread further afield to contaminate neighbouring islands and countries through sea and air currents.

For all concerned, there are protective steps that can be taken with homeopathy.
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Useful RemediesThe whole of homeopathic prescribing is based on the principle that a substance treats or prevents symptoms that are similiar to those it produces. (See Tutorial 1: The Law of Similars) .
In the instance of radiation poisoning, all that has to be known for homeopathic treatment to begin is which remedies, during their testing phase, produced symptoms similar to those of radiation poisoning. Those remedies are then used by homeopaths with a reasonable degree of confidence for either protection against radiation sickness or treatment of it.
For this reason, homeopaths and homeopathic organisations have been releasing statements since the beginning of the crisis, listing remedies that may be helpful.
At Homeopathy Plus, we have confined our suggestions to those remedies whose effects are also supported by research and/or confirmed with clinical successes as reported by doctors and physicians dealing with radiation exposure during the Great World Wars. (References regarding research and clinical usage of these remedies can be found in links at the bottom of this Alert.)
Those remedies include the following:

1. Cadmium iodatum (Cadm-i.)
2. Cadmium sulphuricum (Cadm-s.)
3. Phosphorus (Phos.)
4. Strontium carbonicum (Stront-c.)
5. X-ray

Obtaining RemediesThere are several ways of obtaining remedies. At a time of emergency, most homeopaths will be able to supply them to you and many natural health stores or pharmacies also carry a limited range of homeopathics. In some countries, homeopathic pharmacies supply direct to the public. Of the above remedies, Phosphorus is the most well-known remedy and likely to be the easiest to obtain.
InstructionsProtection: Any one of the above remedies may be used along with other precautionary measures if under threat of radiation exposure. Take a dose of a 30C potency, three times a day.
If a 30C potency is not available, use whatever potency is on hand, taking a more frequent dose for lower potencies (4-6 times a day) and a less frequent dose (1-2 times a day) for highter potencies. Of course, all other emergency response precautions should also be taken.
Do not exceed 6 doses without guidance from your homeopath who will help you to adjust the frequency of dose according to the risk of exposure and your sensitivity to the remedy.
Treatment: If radiation sickness has developed, your homeopath is the best person to advise on homeopathic treatment – remedies, dosages and potencies – as these will depend on the symptoms you are experiencing and their severity.
Do be aware that a larger range of remedies may be referred to for treatment as idiosyncratic reactions of the sufferer are taken into account for best results. This is not the case with symptom prevention, however, where only the characteristic symptoms of that disease (rather than of the person) have to be matched, requiring a smaller group of remedies.
If you are unable to contact a homeopath, the following three links have information to guide you on when and how to dose.
How Often Should I Take a Dose of My Remedy?
What to Expect (Part A)
What to Expect (Part B)
More InformationThe following articles were written for the treatment and prevention of radiotherapy and chemotherapy side-effects but the information and references they contain are just as useful for accidental radiation exposure and the current threat.
Preparing for Radiation
Homeopathy for Radiation and Chemotherapy Side-Effects
Two other useful articles that discuss more disaster and emergency remedies are:
First Response Homeopathy: Remedies to Use in a Disaster (Part 1)
First Response Homeopathy: Remedies to Use in a Disaster (Part 2)

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