Posted on 12/08/2010 1:20:59 PM PST by topher
Various places on the Internet falsely attribute a cure for leprosy with Mother Eugenia Elisabetta Ravasio.
This is a cure based on (apparently) Chaulmoogra Oil. The following web articles claimed she found the cure for Leprosy. This is incorrect.
Eugenia Elisabetta Ravasio (Wikipedia)This is a just a few of the many links that spread this misinformation about Mother Ravasio as being the first person to find a medicine to cure to leprosy.
Mother Eugenia Elisabetta Ravasio (The Work of God)
Mother Eugenia Elisabetta Ravasio (World Lingo)PDF -- http://www.fatherspeaks.net/pdf/the_father_speaks_english_v-2005-02.pdf -- Mother Eugenia Elisabetta Ravasio (The Father Speaks)
These web references all state the Mother Ravasio found the first medicine as a cure for Leprosy -- the articles refer to the seed of a tropical fruit. The tropical fruit tree Kalaw has a seed that the Chaulmoogra oil is produced from. However, this cure for Leprosy was known about for centuries in Burma and China.
In point of fact, Chaulmoogra Oil was used for centuries as a cure for Leprosy before a British army physician documented as a potential cure in 1854 -- about 100 years before these other attributions.
And this was only the first time in the West that this was oil was mentioned as a cure.
It had been used in other places in Asia for centuries as a cure.
A source about Chaulmoogra Oil is found in the PDF -- http://www.lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/lhc/docs/published/2003/pub2003048.pdf -- Chaulmoogra Oil and the Treatment of Leprosy -- by John Parascandola.
The fruit of the Kalaw tree (of genus Hydnocarpus) was used for centuries as a cure for leprosy.
There is misinformation about Mother Eugenia Elisabetta Ravasio that has spread through the Internet -- attributing to her as the person who first found a medicine as a cure for Leprosy.
The the false attribution to Mother Ravasio might be due to the fact that she may have helped promote this oil as a cure for leprosy as well as getting the Pasteur Institute to study this cure.
The fact that she helped establish the largest center for lepers (200,000 square miles in the Ivory Coast) is an enormous accomplishment by itself.
Her religious order was given the highest social award by the French government for the establishment of this center.
The [Chaulmoogra] oil was introduced into Western medicine by British physician Frederic John Mouat in 1854. Mouat, who came from a family of army surgeons, took his medical degree at Edinburgh in 1839. ... From 1841 to 1853, Mouat was professor at the Bengal Medical College, and it was during this period that he first became acquainted with chaulmoogra oil. He had an opportunity to try the remedy [for leprosy] himself when he became first Physician to the Medical College Hospital in Calcutta in 1853.Thus, in 1854, almost a hundred years before Mother Ravasio, a British physician experiemented with this cure for Leprosy.
The cure was even tried in the United States in a Leper facility in Carville, Louisiana, for the first time in 1901.
“The the false attribution to Mother Ravasio might be due to the fact that she may have helped promote this oil as a cure for leprosy as well as getting the Pasteur Institute to study this cure.”
I don’t know anything about this oil or Mother Ravasio but once a potential cure for anything is rejected by the medical community it is essentially dead. If Mother Ravasio is responsible for reviving an actual cure, as the above quote seems to suggest, then where is the “false attribution”.
Mother Ravasio established the largest center to help people with Leprosy in the Ivory Coast. This was a facility that was over 200,000 square miles in the Ivory Coast.
She should be recognized for this accomplishment. Additionally, I believe there is an effort to have her cause for sainthood to move forward.
In general, if there are errors involved in the process, it makes it harder for the person to be canonized. An example is what happened to Padre Pio when he was alive. He was banned from writing because of erroneous opinions about him.
My effort is to clear up this error so it is not propagated.
This huge center in the Ivory Coast probably allowed the focus of most of the world's resources for curing leprosy -- which might explain why it was known about the chaulmoogra oil. The amount of resources that this allowed to be applied to help people with leprosy probably helped them realize the benfit of the cure that was known about for centuries in China and Burma.
It is just that she is incorrectly the label that she found the first medicine that was a cure for leprosy. She did help promote this cure -- which is a wonderful thing.
The Chaulmoogra Oil was not a miraculuous cure. People who had advanced cases of leprosy saw limited benefit of this medicine.
However, people just coming down with leprosy could be easily cured.
Today, a trio of drugs are used to treat leprosy. The only reason for the multidrug regime is that leprosy was becoming resistant to the original drug (dapsone).
I see. Thanks for informing me.
Graves disease has several treatments. Theoretically, they don’t “cure” the immune process behind the disease, but they do “cure” the problem of too much thyroid hormone.
You misunderstood what you were told, and now you are taking a ‘cure’ that some quack is claiming works?
Get to a doc and get your radioactive thyroid, your tapazole, or your hemithyroidectomy...
Ha! You must be married to my endo! I don’t think he wanted me to get better, and he laughed in my face when I showed him the herbs I was taking given to me by my chiropractor for Graves Disease, however, he said I could take them. Now my blood tests are laughing back at him, as I no longer need 15mg of Methimazole/day (taking 5 now), just by taking Thyrodex by Evergreen Herbs and Wintergreen oil from Young Living.
as I said, the disease is burning itself out...
Faith is a wonderful thing.
So where are the double blind studies that show these herbs work?
Convergent therapeutics is the practice of applying insights from allopathic mainstream conventional medicine and other holistically supportive treatments when one or the other on their own, fail to adequately allay symptoms or treat the disease state. Looking at disease states by addressing systems through the lenses of multiple vantage points helps in the development of a more comprehensive and thorough regime. Most physical complaints can be easily remedied with the appropriate corresponding medication. However, some symptoms linger or influence the body in a myriad of ways that are not best accounted for by medication management alone. In these instances, Dr. looks at, and analyzes, possible co-occurring explanations for symptom presentation including: toxicity, glandular disorders, heavy metals presence, food allergies and substance intolerance.I like this manner of doctoring much better than holistic alone, or mainstream conventional medicine alone (because doors are not shut, but opened), and it seems his other patients think similarly as well.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.