A New York midwife who gave nearly 1,500 children homeopathic pellets instead of required vaccinations has been fined $300,000, the state’s health department announced this week.
Jeanette Breen, who operates Baldwin Midwifery on Long Island, administered the pellets as an alternative to vaccinations and then falsified their immunization records, the agency said Wednesday.
The scheme, which goes back least to the 2019-2020 school year, involved families throughout the state, but the majority reside on suburban Long Island. In 2019, New York ended a religious exemption to vaccine requirements for schoolchildren.
The health department said immunization records of the children who received the falsified records have been voided, and their families must now prove the students are up-to-date with their required shots or at least in the process of getting them before they can return to school.
At its roots, it’s like PETA–originally started out by nice people who wanted people to be nice to animals. Over time, the whackadoos took over and now they are a hateful org.
Homeopathy had its origins in treating the whole person and not just the disease, but was quickly taken over by quacks and placebo salespeople.
That’s actually holistic medicine, not homeopathy. Homeopathy was invented in the late 1700s as an evolution of the medieval belief in humours.
Homeopathy’s premise is that ‘like cures like’ (a substance that causes symptoms in healthy people can cure them in sick people), coupled with a belief that water has a spiritual memory that can be unlocked by ritually diluting and shaking until no molecules of the active ingredient remain. Common dilutions are 1:10^60 or higher.
Here’s a great write-up on what it is and how it began from the National Library of Medicine.
It’s commonly mistaken for holistic medicine, but it’s a very different (and potentially dangerous) thing.
Thank you.
Homeopathy was developed and thriving in an era when “do nothing” was better for the patient than contemporary accepted treatments.