What Is "The Law of Cure" ?

This is a critical concept in the field of holistic healing, also referred to as "Hering's Law of Cure", first elucidated by the U.S. homeopath Constantine Hering, MD, in the mid 1800's. My personal and professional experiences have proven to me that it is timeless and essential in every instance of truly effective holistic therapy. It is the healing force in nature and - like the law of gravity, we ignore it at our peril. I'll explain this, but first consider...

 

"Why settle for treatment when healing is your goal?"

While treating disease symptoms is a well-worn practice of modern scientific medicine, healing the diseased state of the person is a practice rarely spoken or heard of today. Is there a real difference? There is a world of difference! To begin with, though simply slowing the disease process may often buy a patient more time, it will unfortunately also slow (or even stop) the healing process. This common focus on the disease process alone will often lead to a lifetime dependency on one or more medicines. Instead, however, if the diseased state is healed, the patient is truly cured, and no longer has the need to take medicines.

 

It is the person in their ill state who needs healing, not their symptoms.

True healing is a holistic process, not an organ specific process. The symptoms of disease are important as they indicate how a person is ill, but they are not a complete picture of the illness itself. Attacking disease symptoms solely - as is the common approach in medical practice today - is incomplete, resulting in only apparent healing.

 

This type of non-holistic treatment leads its patients into lowered states of overall health & vitality. Often these patient's symptoms have only been temporarily palliated, or worse, suppressed... whereby their sickness actually retreats into deeper levels within them, inevitably reappearing later in other much more serious expressions of disease.

 

Often after such non-holistic therapies, patients are left with just a memory of what it was like to feel really well. Such patients usually don't understand why they have lost their edge, why they feel more limited, why their energy isn't what it once was. If they complain about vague senses of anxiety or fatigue - which will often appear in the absence of true healing and recovery - it may be suggested that such ailments "are all in their heads". Anti-depressants may be prescribed, often portending a continuing downward spiral, further distancing the patient from true holistic cure.

 

Concept of "The Law Of Cure"

Through a career spanning 5 decades of treating thousands of patients homeopathically, Herring formulated his concept of the Law of Cure. Three of the primary points of The Law are:

1.) The body naturally attempts to defend itself from illness in "layers" of self-defense, as in the layers of an onion. At first, there is the most external and least significant layer, the skin. Eventually toward the center we reach the most internal and significant layers of what it means to be a human. When an illness first asserts its power against the natural defenses of a healthy human, the body will attempt to stop this aggression at it's outer most first lines of defense... the skin. Oddly, skin ailments are often a sign of a very healthy "first line of defense".

2.) The path of aggressive disease against the human body is through these layers, from outermost superficial organs & physiology, to innermost critical organs & physiology. By assessing the patient's previous illnesses and present ailments, the healer can approximately determine how deep an illness has passed through the levels of these natural layers of defense.

3.) In order to help a patient return to a true state of wellness, to reach the stage of true cure, the healer must help them expel their illness backwards... back through the body's previous passed levels of natural defense, which were previously breached. The disease course must be stopped and changed in direction: from progressing inward toward the center of the body's defenses, to regressing back outward toward the body's more superficial earlier layers of defense.

 

In holistic therapy, when a patient complains of earlier less significant symptoms returning to replace recent deeper, more significant, symptoms, the healer has effectively reversed the pattern of illness. Stepping backwards and repeating these earlier ailments, the body is speaking loudly that it's resolving the illness and is working towards returning to it's earlier state of good health. The healer's mission is to help this natural process along.

The "Medical Model" compared to the "Holistic Model"

Holistic healing practices as prescribed by the Law Of Cure are a forgotten Art. Such true healing is a subtle, time-consuming practice. Nowadays, patients demand relief NOW!

As a result, our fast-paced establishment therapies are dominated by the use of powerful, fast acting drug medicines. It is important to remember that in this therapeutic model, medicines work mainly by their power to produce change. Nowadays this power is, unfortunately, all too quickly and easily prescribed - often to the inevitable detriment of the patient's true cure.

The direct actions of these drugs do not consider the existence or effectiveness of the body's own healing response. They rather work against it and even replace it.

These medicines attack expressions of disease by attempting to directly produce specific contra conditions themselves (referred to in the establishment literature as "side effects"), thereby replacing natural symptoms with artificial ones! The true expressions of illness - the natural symptoms - are not yet cured, and go into a kind of latent, suspended state, anxious to again reappear as soon as later conditions allow.

In the holistic model, however, remedies work mainly by their similarity to the disharmony. Finding this "similar" always requires great skill - because a person’s total symptom picture is always as individual as their fingerprints are. With thousands of remedies to choose from, finding the most similar match is a time consuming task. The more similar the remedy is to the natural illness, the less powerful (and gentle) it needs to be to activate the body's own natural healing response. As the person is effectively healed, symptoms - not needed by the body anymore - truly disappear.

 

Use it or lose it.

If the function of an organ falls into disuse, it degenerates. It loses it's ability to perform correctly. If muscles go unused, they will atrophy. If one's innate healing capacity is circumvented or weakened by the frequent use of such direct-acting drugs, a similar thing happens to our body's own healing abilities. Weakening this capacity to an extreme, the organism also losses it's ability to distinguish "self" from "not self" and begins attacking itself. This is witnessed increasingly via occurrences of auto-immunity diseases. At a time when the body most needs help in healing, non-holistic therapies impose significant assaults against the body's own natural healing abilities . This is at the root of many illnesses, from allergies to AIDS.

 

Respect the person, Heal the person.

As noted above, true holistic healing is a difficult and time-consuming Art. It is not for everyone, neither patient nor practitioner. It requires patience on the part of the one, and skill and patience on the part of the other.

Simply put, natural healing is a correct organic response to some trauma or stress. The appearance of symptoms is the evidence that the body is attempting to naturally heal itself. Holistically speaking, symptoms are the body's best attempt at trying to heal, both in acute and chronic illnesses.

Rather than attacking symptoms, assisting the healing process requires being willing and able to gently experience these symptoms as they disappear toward true cure. Understanding and accepting the implications of this Law Of Cure will begin a change in your life style that will lead to significant improvements in your health and vitality.

Accepting this level of involvement in your own cure promises you all of the wonderful true healing gifts of Holistic and Natural Medicine.

May I help you along on this journey ?