Advantages of homeopathy in developing immunity against Covid 19

Kolkata,11 May(HS): As the outbreak of COVID-19 has caused havoc in the whole world and left billons of people panic-stricken with the entire global scientific community looking for a useful vaccine to successfully combat and contain this pandemic, a city-based senior researcher and eminent homoeopath feels that the use of homoeopathy as an accredited and recognized system of medicine might also be used for the treatment of  COVID 19 patients with no or minimum side effects for successful results.

This system of  homoeopathy medicine has an excellent track record in the treatments of Epidemics and Pandemics in different parts of the world for ages said renowned homoeopath Pratip Banerji.

According to him ‘Homeopathic medicines are safe to use and ‘we can expect  none or very little side-effects among the patients for its use simultaneously along with other systems of treatment’.

The primary issue is that COVID-19 is a viral infection, and we as human beings have no natural immunity to viruses, Banerji said adding while the frontline medical community is doing a very good job despite all and  limited resource available to them, the research community is perplexed because any useful and viable vaccine or virus targeted treatment will take at least 18 to 24 months from the drawing board to disbursement and application.

Speaking to Hindusthan Samachar here today over telephone in the middle of lockdown he said an only real and effective way for a population to combat viral infection is to develop Herd immunity which can only be developed in two ways, firstly, by massive cross-community infection or secondly, by mass vaccination. Since allowing massive cross-community infection is unwise as this may result in devastating consequences, we are left with the option of vaccination, which is not viable as there will be no relief in this respect before 18 to 24 months, Banerji pointed out.

He said another problem with vaccinations is that they are viral strain-specific, the scientific community also knows that mutation of viruses is a given fact and it has already been reported that the Corona viral strain in India has already mutated from the original strain that caused the outbreak in China.

The Covid virus found originally in humans in Wuhan, China has been labelled Type-A. Subsequently, there has also been detection of Type B and C, which seem to differ amongst different races of humans. Due to this, and due to the fact that there will be further mutations, there is a fear that different strains of the virus may not respond to vaccines whose sphere of action will necessarily be limited to certain strains. Thus, we are all caught in a difficult situation.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that we are faced with incomplete or erroneous data as to the extent of the infection in the population, as many of the tests that have been done and are the basis of our tracking of the disease has been found to be of low reliability in many cases giving false positive or negative results, he told HS over the telephone.

According to him, currently, conventional treatment of Covid 19 infections is being done with some anti-viral medicines and anti-biotics. While these anti-viral medicines were found to have some effect on earlier SARS and MERS infections, which were caused by a similar virus, so far there is no definite information that they are having an effect on Covid 19 cases. Anti-biotics are usually used to treat bacterial infections and have no effect on viruses and at best may help secondary bacterial infections in Covid 19 positive cases.

This is where Homeopathy has its advantages. Homoeopathy is an accredited and recognized system of medicine in India and for this reason alone, there should be no bar to its use in any disease, let alone COVID 19, Dr Banerji said adding this age-old system of medicine is in very popular use and other than this, historically homoeopathy has an excellent track record in the treatments of Epidemics / Pandemics. Homoeopathic medicines are safe to use and we can expect very little if any, side-effects as can be experienced by using other systems of medicine.

He said in homoeopathy an agent is used to treat the same symptoms in a diseased human being, that it can produce in a healthy one. Thus the homoeopathic arsenal against any disease already exists and it is only a question of matching the symptoms of the contagion to the known symptoms of medicine which is the most similar. Taking this into consideration the symptoms and the physical systems the Covid 19 is affecting, can be analyzed and a Protocol for treatment can be designed. Thus the reaction time between diagnosis and treatment is reduced dramatically.,Dr Banerji also the founder of a homoeopathic institution in the city said.