Farmers stumbled on cure
Waihi dairy farmers Gerry and Nicola Strange accidentally stumbled across homeopathy 18 years ago and haven’t looked back.
Milking 390 crossbred cows on 200 hectares, the Stranges have been farming at Waihi for 20 years and first encountered the efficacy of homeopathy when a visiting friend administered arnica to her son whose nose had started to bleed. Gerry was blown away by its effectiveness.
‘‘And we sort of trundled off down that track from that moment,’’ he said. ‘‘Until then, I never knew homeopathy existed – I had never had any reason to come across it.’’
Gerry and Nicola contacted the Homeopathic Association, who put them onto a specialist bookshop in Auckland. The more they read about homeopathy, the more they became interested in the practice; they were also grateful for the passion and help provided by the several older ladies in the Auckland bookshop, who together could draw on years of practical experience in homeopathy.
One of the first times Gerry and Nicola tried homeopathy on their herd was during an outbreak of neospora, which causes abortions in cattle. Gerry had a few cows slip, and had a feeling they had contracted neospora. He sent an aborted foetus for testing, which came back positive for neospora, but before then had replied to an ad from Homeopathic Farm Support Ltd.
‘‘We had nothing to lose,’’ Gerry said. ‘‘ There was no vaccination for neospora, and nothing the vet could do; we were told it just had to run its course.’’
A nosode was delivered from Tineke Verkade and her team at HFS the next morning, and Gerry and Nicola administered it to the herd. While other farmers were seeing up to 30 per cent of calves aborted during the neospora outbreak, Gerry had five cows slip out of his herd of 270.
‘‘Once that happened, we thought, ‘ wow, there really is something in this’,’’ he said.
They have also successfully treated their herd for salmonella, with a homeopathic nosode to supplement antibiotics; a cow that fell was treated with arnica and hypericum to reduce swelling on its spine and help it to stand again.
‘‘A sceptic would say, well, it [healing] was going to happen anyway, but what we do is assist the process of healing with homeopathic remedies,’’ he said.
Gerry says he can’t understand why some people are so closedminded when it comes to trying alternative medicine.
‘‘It really uses the same principle as conventional medicine. ‘Like cures like’, the philosophy behind homeopathy, is reflected in conventional medicine with snake anti-venom and vaccines.