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A new treatment for peanut allergies involving small doses of peanuts has shown promising results.
Peanut allergies are the most prevalent food allergy in the US affecting one and a half million people. The allergy is a disease affecting the immune system after exposure to the proteins in peanuts. It is also the most deadly allergic reaction.
Two new studies have found that medically supervised small doses of peanuts may help children increase their tolerance for the legume. According to the New York Times:
The new treatment uses doses of peanuts that start as small as one-thousandth of a peanut and eventually increase to about 15 peanuts a day. In a pilot study at Duke University and Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, 33 children with documented peanut allergy have received the daily therapy, which is given as a powder sprinkled on food. Most of the children are tolerating the therapy without developing allergic reactions, and five stopped the treatment after two and a half years because they could now tolerate peanuts in their regular diet. But four children dropped out because they could not tolerate the treatment.
The idea of curing allergies with the allergen is not a new concept, in fact is a principle behind homeopathy’s “like cures like”. If you are not familiar with the principles of homeopathy, homeopathic treatment involves giving extremely small doses of natural substances that mimic the symptoms of the same illness in healthy people when given in larger doses. I have tried using a similar method as in the peanut allergy studies to rid myself of my allergy to poison oak using homeopathic remedies, but I was unsuccessful at completely eliminating my reactions, although they have been lessened.
Researchers and doctors are quick to warn parents to not try introducing their children to small amounts of peanuts at home. The children who participated in the studies were under a high level of medical supervision. The results of the studies are promising and may prove there will be a treatment in two to three years for peanut allergies.
Image: laffy4k on Flickr under a Creative Commons License
This is more akin to vaccinations rather than Homeopathy. Vaccination use a small amount of a dead or weakened pathogen to teach our imune system how to recognize and fight that pathogen.
250 year old Homeopathy uses super dilutions of a disease or ailment causing agent, these dilutions are so extreme that not even one molecule of the disease or ailment causing agent is left in the remedy. Homeopathy states that the water molecules “remember” the disease or ailment causing agent and use this “memory” to teach the body how to fight the disease or ailment. There is some validity to this notion, with research proving that water molecules will align themselves into odd shapes when they come in contact with something. Homeopaths never cease to cite this research. What they forget to mention (either purposely or out of ignorance) is that this alignment lasts nanoseconds and certainly not the months the homeopathic “nothing more than water” remedy is sitting on a shelf waiting to be bought at an exorbitant price. Not to mention that the water molecules are most likely reacting to the vial they are contained in and aligning themselves into odd shapes because they come in contact with glass.
There’s a good reason homeopathy is still an “alternative” treatment after 250 years, it simply doesn’t work as well as science based medicine. Granted it is safer! Can’t expect much adverse reactions from plain water.
This doesn’t mimic homeopathy as peonuts do not cause reactions in otherwise healthy people. Furthermore, Homeopathy is known to be pseudoscience and has never been shown to produce results beyond a placeobo in high quality clinical trials. The medical scientists would be appaled by how their research was presented in this article.
Patrick, I used the word mimic because the treatment is not an exact replica of homeopathy. I have been treated many times successfully with homeopathy, and my MD is also a homeopath.
http://homeoint.org/books/bogphilo/index.htm
studies in the philosophy of healing,homeopathic science,pescribing,
interhomeopathy dot org
Skeptics in homeopathy always post the same rhetoric based on invalid analysis.One must study homeopathic principles to fully understand this complex form of healing medicine,otherwise keep comments to your personal oppinion.They are NOt based on factual/clinical data-