Introduction to Homeopathy

Health has its origin in the verb "to heal". Health is partly secured by keeping illness and death at bay. But healing, in fact, is completed when we are returned to earlier and earlier periods in our lives when we looked and felt healthier. This means, we recover our youthfulness and re-experience the energy and vitality we had when we were younger!...

Dear Unsuspecting Reader :

I ask you a question...

Given the fact that heart attacks are the #1 killer of Americans, what is the best predictor of a first time heart attack?

I asked this deceptively simple question to two MD heart specialist friends of mine. They didn’t know the answer! Do you?

My two MD friends answered tentatively in turn:   Hypertension, high cholesterol, smoking, diabetes, heredity...

Curiously, while all good answers, all are incorrect. This is because the medical model that spawned them is fundamentally flawed: it defines and treats disease in purely mechanical and material ways. That is, the model views people as machines and disease as an entity, a thing: some measurable abnormality of tissues, cells, bacteria, viruses, genes, etc., as in the MDs' answers above.

From a holistic perspective, these entities are never the cause of disease, but rather the result (product) of some weakness or symptom process already in progress. In an ironic twist, Louis Pasteur - a pioneer in the germ theory of disease - admitted to this alternative conclusion on his deathbed. He confessed his belief that, “The terrain is everything; the bacteria nothing.” (Hume, Ed., Pasteur Exposed: The False Foundation of Modern Medicine, Australia: Bookreal, 1989, as quoted from Beyond Antibiotics, Schmidt et al, p. 14). Tragically, his reward for this revelation was to be thought quite mad.

Illness - acute or chronic, is never simply local, nor measurable in material entities. It is a systemic disharmony at the core, hidden in the field dynamics of our lives!

The correct answer is job dissatisfaction.

Fact : more fatal heart attacks occur on Monday around nine a.m. - the beginning of the workweek - than at any other time of the week. If going back to work on Monday morning means facing the stress of another week of suffering, a heart attack may be produced ‘in self defense’ to prevent it. Dossey (Meaning & Medicine. NY: Bantam Books, 1991), called this the Black Monday syndrome.

So, if we ignore the earlier - less dangerous, warning signs of stress, like carpel tunnel pain - which stops us from typing or writing on our job, or the lower back pain - which stops us from sitting on our job, or headaches, high blood pressure, etc., than we may be facing a warning sign we can no longer ignore, a heart attack.

Moreover, if we treat the carpel tunnel pain, lower back pain, headaches, etc., as local or isolated physical symptoms or events, apart from the larger and deeper dynamic life stress - namely, job dissatisfaction, we are still ignoring the real core problem which is shouting to be heard !

Another dynamic life stress is separation. When one’s spouse dies, it means you will never see each other again. If you cannot tolerate this idea, your mind and body will strive to join the deceased and your death will follow in a short time. The fact that people can ‘will’ themselves to death, suggests that it is not the event itself that is particularly injurious, but the way each of us ‘respond’ to the event. To be precise, symptoms of disease – even when life threatening, are a protective response to some life stress and a map indicating (to the keen observer) the organism’s best attempt at healing itself. What Hippocrates called, the vis medicatix naturae (the healing force of nature).

Appreciating this healing force of nature is absent in the medical model. Disease symptoms are seen as an acute attack by an invading enemy – separate from and isolated in the person - so the healing power must reside in the treatment, not in the person. Therefore, disease symptoms must be countered swiftly, directly, powerfully, and heroically. The true chronic disharmony of the whole person is never addressed, and can only worsen.

Samuel Hahnemann, M.D., in his Organon of the Medical Art (6th ed.), reminds us that the physician’s highest and only calling is to make the sick healthy; to cure the whole person rapidly, gently and permanently, by finding a resonance between the disharmony and the medicinal substance

It ought to be understood that all medicinal substances affect living beings by shear power. The medical model relies on this power to alter and/or mask existing symptoms, creating and labeling unwanted (and unavoidable) effects, "side effects". However, cure can occur only by accident, because the principle of resonance has not been applied. That is, a medicinal substance restores health by its similarity to the illness, not by shear power alone !

There is only one curative law in conformity with nature, similia similibus curentur (let similars be cured by similars). Alternatively fighting, cutting, and killing the acute expression of disease gives only partial and temporary relief.

Hahnemann, always careful with language, was free with his use of musical terms to be taken literally, not metaphorically. What is called diseased is a mis-tunement of our vital life force. This suggests that our organism has a vibration that can - when altered by stress, play out of pitch, making noise, not music. In the hands of a qualified homeopath, the most similar remedy is the tuner.

‘Every illness is a musical problem – the healing is a musical resolution. The shorter and nevertheless the more complete the resolution – then the greater is the musical talent of the doctor. Illness allows a variety of resolutions. The selection of the most appropriate determines the talent of the doctor.’ (Novalis quoted by Appell in Homeopathic Links, Vol. 15, Autumn 2002, p. 152).

A scenario comes to my mind:  Say you are an accomplished musician. You find an old violin in a flee market. Curious, you pick it up, and begin playing it. Dissonant noise, not harmonious sound, is heard. You quickly realize this violin is simply out of pitch. After tuning it, it begins playing harmoniously. The dissonance heard, however, was a symptom that this singular violin simply needed tuning! So, you tuned it up! Would it make any sense to say that this violin had a disease?

So it is with perceptive and skillful homeopaths: as each individual is unique, each case of illness is unique. That is, the appearance of symptoms are unique to each individual, and they indicate—like a road map, the disharmony which is simply in need of tuning! There is no way of lumping people together—as is routinely done in conventional medicine, and giving "medicine x" for "condition y."

After a lifetime of study on these issues, I’ve reached a simple yet profound conclusion…

"Disease Is Disharmony !"

I hope that my website will help you to recognize and understand these vital concepts of true cure and ever-lasting good health...