Skip to main content

Debunking Myths

J was all of three when her doctor put her on a regular regimen of Albuterol and Claritin. I did as I was told but felt very strongly about "drugging" a child that young without giving her body a fair chance to resist seasonal allergies. As a full-time working single mom, I did not have the luxury of letting her stay home, work through the colds and fevers on her own time with only TLC and warm milk to fortify her. There was a huge amount of guilt associated putting her on the nebulizer before bed-time and giving her Claritin daily before dropping her off at daycare.

Then I got a homeopathic prescription for her that worked like a charm. There were no immediate miracles but in time, J was able to battle the allergies completely on her own. There has been no Albuterol or Claritin in the household for nearly two years now. I don't know about placebo effects and other
scientific debunking of the homeopathic myth but I have seen it work time after time for J.

As a parent, I would choose homeopathy over the regular "scientifically proven" medicine any day as it frees me of the guilt of making a child dependent on medication because I don't have the wherewithal to mother her like I ideally should. Whereas she needed the nebulizer more and more, she needs her homeopathic medicines less and less over time. Maybe science and rationality fail me when I need to assure myself that I am not cutting corners with my child's health and well-being for the lack of time.

Comments

Anonymous said…
yup. homoeo is safe and works marvellously provided u find a competent practitioner.

- the 'pretentious' commenter
ggop said…
Homeopathic medicine seems to work for chronic conditions like throat aches/colds, skin conditions.

Wish the Ayurvedic industry would get its act together too.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...