From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!trb
Newsgroups: net.med
Title: Re: homeopathic medicine?
Article-I.D.: floyd.1308
Posted: Wed Mar 16 14:48:00 1983
Received: Wed Mar 23 01:23:57 1983
References: cbosg.2828 mcnc.1597

I'm not going to claim that we know all there is to know about healing
ailments in human bodies.  I will claim that this ignorance is not
evidence that homeopathy/(w)holism is valid.  There is a proponent of
such highways to health here in New Jersey named Dr. Carolyn Thorburn
(sp?).  She is a professor at Upsala College in East Orange, NJ, and
she has a radio show every two weeks on WFMU 91.1.  What follows is my
personal opinion.

I find this woman quite repulsive.  She espouses the virtues of wholism
and usually has guests who practice one form of voodoo or another.  She
doesn't seem to have a very firm grip on science (she is a professor of
Spanish, I think that's what her doctorate is in).  She uses the most
ridiculous logical arguments to support her theories.  She often talks
about the benefits of certain dietary practises, about organic foods
and such drivel.  She says she's a personal friend of Dick Gregory.

This past week she had an expert on homeopathy on her show, and she
talked about how the active parts of homeopathic medicines were
administered in such small quantities that there was actually no
material evidence of the active parts in the medicine, just an essence
of the material.  Really hard to swallow, I say.

I listen to her because I always listen to WFMU (for its variety) and
she's only on for an hour every two weeks.  Sometimes her guests are
interesting, but once, two winters ago, there was a nasty snowstorm
going on and I was stuck in traffic for many hours while Dr. Thorburn
was extolling the virtues of coffee enemas.  I was going nuts trying to
keep myself from getting killed, I switched stations until her show was
over.

Thorburn is on every second Monday evening from 5 to 6 (or is that 6 to
7) on WFMU 91.1 in East Orange, NJ.  You might want to give a listen.

I'm not saying that the non-mainstream medical sciences are invalid, I
have derived benefit from chiropractic, and I am not about to say that
something is wrong just because I don't understand it.  I will say that
many practitioners of wholistic medicine don't seem to know very much
about real life.

	Andy Tannenbaum   Bell Labs  Whippany, NJ   (201) 386-6491