Is Public Health Trustworthy?

Some unorthodox ways (such as homeopathy) to make public health departments more effective, & why they won’t listen to anything that Secretary Kennedy, head of Health & Human Services, recommends.

This began as a blurb about homeopathy, which works on livestock and pets (and even plants!) and on babies, so set aside the usual objection that it only seems to work due to the placebo effect.

At the end of this long essay about new health paradigms knocking at the door of our public health department (a door that is firmly shut), there is indeed a blurb about homeopathy.

No time for my pushy diatribe? Go directly to an excellent new film on homeopathy, which is airing for free until April 28 (this site may say “free until April 18,” but it’s still available for a week):

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/introducing-homeopathy/homeopathy-thank-you-page/

Public health used to be a non-partisan topic. After all, regardless of political party, everyone agrees about the benefits of clean tap water, good sewage treatment, and healthy children.

However, in recent decades, there has been a shift that few have noticed: no longer do people agree about basic notions promoted by their local public health department (PHD).

Public trust¹ in sources of health information among US adults, 2022
……………………………………..High ……Some ……Little or none
Doctors ……………………..55% …….38% …….7%
CDC …………………………..36% …….38% …..26%
Public Health Dept ..27% …….50% …..23%

Note that confidence in the PHD is half the trust in their family physician.

Yes, we still have clean tap water (with some notable exceptions like Flint Michigan), and we still have good sewage treatment. However, voters are taking sides on some once universal assumptions, with Republicans asserting neglect in 3 areas that needs to be corrected:
● Americans do not top the charts on health, especially American children are sicker than children in other developed nations.
● Our food is not the most nutritious in the world
● Our medical care is the most expensive but among the least effective² of developed nations

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb235d99f-b2f7-47fe-bdd2-c370944351dc_3400x2825.png

Over a fifth of Americans have little or no confidence their county public health departments (PHD) in the USA (which has 3,142 counties). Why is this dissatisfaction so widely ignored by public health professionals?

Evidently county public health departments think they’re doing fine, and they attribute any failings to “inadequate funding.” I’m guessing they probably dismiss their low grade of 23%, if they notice it at all, as mere political bias against all governmental agencies.

Unlike public health professionals, politicians are not so quick to ignore this shift. One of the significant reasons for the change of party in the White House and Congress was MAHA— Make America Healthy Again. The MAHA movement arose from the Kennedy-Shanahan campaign and then morphed into RFK Jr’s endorsement of Donald Trump, a shift that many believe gave Republicans their clear victory last November.

California, of course, leans strongly to the Democratic party; in Yolo County, about 2/3 of voters³ voted for Kamala Harris. Nevertheless, about a third voted for Donald Trump. Besides which, the 2020⁴ election had a 2% rise in votes for Donald Trump over 2016⁵, and in 2024⁴ there was another 2% rise in Republican votes.

Here are some tsk tsk articles about Americans low trust in public health:
● “The Crisis of Trust in Public Health”⁶
● “Public health leaders, besieged and regretful, talk of re-establishing trust”⁷
● “Gen Z respondents (born 1997-2012) consistently reported lower levels⁸ of trust in institutions.”
● “None⁹ of the efforts to improve public trust in various institutions have been very successful to date.”

Here’s another sad statistic regarding the ever-descending trend⁹:

“In 1958, nearly three-fourths (73%) of the public believed they could trust the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. By 1980, trust had dropped to 25%, and although the level of trust has varied, at no time since 2006 has more than one-third of the public expressed trust in the federal government. Currently only 1 in 5 U.S. adults (20%) believe they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time.”

Of course, the authors pin the blame on factors that are out of their hands:

“Apart from COVID-19, the most important issue to the public is the high cost of health care and prescription drugs for individuals.”

What if, as an alternative explanation for public health’s low score, Americans realize there’s something stupid about spending a fifth of the nation’s GDP on medical care, yet we’re sicker than a hundred years ago when medical care was only 3.5% of GDP?

The usual explanation we hear from public health is: “Now we’re living longer and therefore ailments of old age happen to more people.”

Anticipating that old chestnut, I asked Ai: What was the rate for dementia of any kind for people aged 65 to 75 in 1925 compared to the rate for that age bracket today?

Answer: “The rate for dementia of any kind for people aged 65 to 75 in 1925 was 1.7%, while the rate for that age bracket today is 13.1%.”

Get it? That’s almost 8 times higher today than it was a hundred years ago!

These facts may explain why Yolo County’s public health department should pay more attention to the health concerns of Republicans, who, along with some ’No Party Preference’ voters, constitute about one third of the adults in our county.

Imagine the shock to PHD staff to find out that those Trump voters comprehend the problem better than they, the official experts, do.

After attending about 30 meetings put on by the Yolo County PHD, I have come to the conclusion that they have blinders on because they can’t think outside their comfort zone. Since the November election, they will tactfully mention how “different” things are now, without conceding that voters knew what they were doing on November 5.

One thing that hasn’t changed is their resistance to out-of-the-box thinking. Trump voters should demand at least a few token representatives of MAHA on this committee, a nutritionist or chiropractor, for instance. Right now, a third of voters have no voice at the Maternal, Child & Adolescent Health Advisory Board meetings (except me with my 3-minute public comments every month).

Back in 2022, I participated with the County Health Improvement Plan (CHIP), a series of meetings that recurs every 3 years. Well-cited information I brought about the role of nutrition in health was ignored.

At the end of those months of meetings, one of their main conclusions was the need to increase availability of a “medical home” for everyone, in particular our lowest-income county residents.

But the need for a “medical home” would be much lower if our public health department supported these goals:
● Better cafeteria meals at school instead of food that Moms Across America lab tests¹⁰ found to contain heavy metals, pesticide residues, and other toxins while also being so highly processed that vitamin and mineral content is almost totally absent.
● Ending water fluoridation (in Yolo County, only West Sac has it), which is toxic¹¹ to soft tissue and later research found isn’t as effective as earlier flawed research claimed.
● If parents read the package insert for every vaccine (the one place that must, by law, list the full range of side effects¹² from that particular shot), many would not allow their children to be vaccinated, and even the adult uptake would drop.
● Awareness of the hazards¹³ of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from wireless technology (WiFi, smart meters, cell phones, and even baby monitors).
● Glyphosate (Roundup), with a half life of up to 22 years, is not just in genetically modified plants like soy and corn, it’s also routinely sprayed on wheat right before harvest; because it dries the grain in one day, rather than the 3 days needed for sunlight to dry it. Which means the only Roundup-free bread is organic! It’s true that humans don’t have the EPSP-Synthase enzyme which insects have, which glyphosate targets. However, the amino acids glycine can be replaced by glyphosate, so when we ingest food with glyphosate residue, our cells will use it in place of glycine¹⁴, weakening every cell. Plus, as many people know, our microbiome is very sensitive to glyphosate, so even if it didn’t affect our human cells, it deprives us of the essential nutrients our gut bacteria make for us. The public health department should warn parents to buy only organic bread and other baked goods!
● Lower consumption of seed oils¹⁵, because they promote inflammation, increase oxidative stress, disrupt hormonal balance, and don’t provide us with the essential nutrients found in butter, lard, seafood, coconut oil, and olive oil.
● Incorporate homeopathy¹⁶ into public health clinics supported by our tax dollars.

Another remarkable boost to public health would be if our tax-supported medical clinics for low-income people would include holistic therapy modalities, such as acupuncture, chiropractic, and homeopathy. They have no idea what they’re missing, as I know from having been a patient at both Winters Clinic and Communicare.

Besides good diet and avoiding toxins as methods for preventing illness, there are many non-Pharma ways to treat illness. One of the most underrated in the USA is homeopathy. Below, you’ll find my 3-minute Public Comment about homeopathy at the April meeting of the Maternal, Child & Adolescent Health (MCAH) Advisory Board.

Improvements like these could prevent or reduce a lot of human misery, not to mention saving tax dollars.

If you agree that More of the Same won’t solve our public health problems, feel free to let the director of Health and Human Services for Yolo County know:
"Brian Vaughn" <brian.vaughn@yolocounty.gov>
Or call: 530 666-8771

You might want to contact your county supervisor as well— they want to be re-elected, so they are good listeners, which doesn’t always apply to county employees.
"Oscar Villegas, 1st" <district1@yolocounty.gov>
"Lucas Frerichs, 2^nd" <LucasF@yolocounty.gov>
"Mary Vixie, 3^rd" <Mary.VixieSandy@yolocounty.gov>
"Sheila Allen, 4^th" <Sheila.Allen@yolocounty.gov>
"Angel Barajas, 5th" <angel.barajas@yolocounty.gov>

Citations
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11318038/
2. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb235d99f-b2f7-47fe-bdd2-c370944351dc_3400x2825.png
3. https://ktla.com/news/california/election-2024/how-each-california-county-voted-in-the-2024-presidential-race/
4. https://www.sactopolitico.com/post/categories-numbers
5. https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/sov/2016-general/sov/2016-complete-sov.pdf
6. https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/crisis-trust-public-health
7. https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/09/public-health-leaders-see-decades-progress-slip-away-misinformation-disinformation/
8. https://www.aamchealthjustice.org/news/polling/trust-trends
9. https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/151/4/67/113710/Trust-in-Medicine-the-Health-System-amp-Public
10. https://www.momsacrossamerica.com/national_school_lunch_testing_program
11. http://greenermagazine.com/fluoridebad.html
12. https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2024/08/18/dissolving-illusions-vaccines.aspx
13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15368378.2021.1881866
14. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1382668923000911
15. https://www.insidershealth.com/the-truth-about-seed-oils-risks-you-cant-ignore/
16. https://laurenayers.substack.com/p/conventional-medicine-not-working

Homeopathy— An Approach to Healing that Could Transform America

Public Comment
Maternal, Child & Adolescent Health Advisory Board
Lauren Ayers
4-16-25

In 1976, 48 years ago, I went to hear a Stanford Medical School grad give a talk about homeopathy. By then homeopathy was 165 years old, and Dr. Bill Gray had been practicing homeopathy full time for 5 years.

Before that, he spent his first year as a family care physician at Kaiser, where he began using homeopathic treatment when conventional therapy didn’t work. But soon he reversed the order, starting out with a homeopathic approach, and he never needed to revert to the Pharma model.

When I heard his talk, Dr. Gray was still in the midst of regular visits to Greece to study under George Vithoulkas, who, a quarter of a century later, won a Right Livelihood Award (which is often called the “Alternative Nobel Prize”).¹

Nine years after his talk, in 1985, Dr. Gray co-founded the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy here in California, in the East Bay.²

Back in 1976, I was a New Age mom and had already used homeopathic first aid, such as Arnica for injuries like my daughter’s hand being slammed in a car door. However, Dr. Gray’s talk convinced me that homeopathy was a better approach for just about any medical problem, which is why I transcribed his lecture and have been sharing it ever since. A link to it will be in the Public Comment section of the minutes for today’s meeting.³

According to the World Health Organization, homeopathy is practiced in over 100 countries.⁴

A timeline:
● Samuel Hahnemann published the first homeopathic materia medica in 1811
● 14 years later Hans Gram, a Dutch homeopath, emigrated to the United States in 1825
● 20 years after his arrival, homeopathy had become spectacularly popular in the United States and Europe, enthusiastically endorsed by European royalty, American entrepreneurs like the Rockefeller family, and literary giants like Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Mark Twain
● Homeopathy’s popularity was enhanced by its success in treating the various infectious epidemics that raged throughout America and Europe during the 1800s. Statistics indicate that the death rates in homeopathic hospitals from these epidemics were often one-half to as little as one-eighth those in orthodox medical hospitals.⁵

In 1844, homeopathy was so popular in the United States that practitioners founded the American Institute of Homeopathy, which became America’s first national medical society. Two years later, partially in response to the growth of homeopathy, the American Medical Association was founded in 1846.

Despite the efforts of the AMA, dozens of homeopathic medical schools flourished in the US for the next 60 years.

Then, in 1910, Flexner Report funded by the Carnegie Foundation, contrived to disqualify all but Pharma-centric approaches to medicine. Homeopaths couldn’t practice medicine unless they had the letters “MD” after their name, midwifery gave way to hospital births. Chiropractors, osteopaths, herbologists and such were pushed to the background for decades.

But the rest of the world didn’t follow the AMA model. Many countries include homeopathy in their national health systems, such as: Australia, Brazil, Chile, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Switzerland.⁶ What do they know that Americans don’t?

References
1. https://www.homeopathy360.com/biography-of-prof-dr-george-vithoulkas-an-inspirational-homoeopath-or-a-homoeopathic-legend/
2. https://billgrayhomeopathy.com/dr-bill-gray/
3. https://laurenayers.substack.com/p/conventional-medicine-not-working
4. https://www.homeobook.com/who-report-2019-homoeopathy-practiced-in-more-than-100-countries/
5. https://homeopathic.com/a-condensed-history-of-homeopathy/
6. https://harris-interactive.fr/opinion_polls/lusage-de-lhomeopathie-dans-le-monde-2/

P.S.

I have been trying for over 2 years to be appointed to the Maternal, Child & Adolescent Health Advisory Board. Supervisor Sheila Allen decides who fills the Community Member slots. She’s a nurse, and nurses often know more about the side effects of Pharma prescriptions than doctors. Feel free to endorse me to her:
"Sheila Allen, 4^th" <Sheila.Allen@yolocounty.gov>