The Alternative Healer

Myths about Weight Loss

When it comes to dieting and losing weight, consider the following, and mark True or False:

1.  Overeating, i.e. taking in more calories than one needs, causes weight gain.   
2.  If you restrict your calorie intake enough you are guaranteed to lose weight or at least stay the same.   
3.  Exercise regularly and you will lose weight. 
4.  Eat a low-fat diet and it will help you lose weight. 
 
Let’s examine these in order.

First of all, many people overeat constantly and never gain weight.  Conversely, many people restrict calorie intake--even severely restrict it--and still gain weight.  Both #1 and #2 are false.  Overeating is not the cause of becoming overweight.  Under eating is not the cause of slimming down.

#3 and #4 are a couple of the more astonishing myths of the last-half century, only this time they have been spread by experts who are supposed to know--doctors.  Have you gone to your doctor recently, complaining that you want to slim down?  What does he tell you?  He tells you to eat non-fattening foods and exercise.  What has been the outcome of these recommendations?  All but the lucky few have gotten fatter.

So why do we persist in running the same old treadmill?  Why not call a failure a failure? 

It is difficult to argue against the obvious:  of course eating too much makes us fatter, particularly too many fattening foods.  Everyone knows this.  The only problem is that it is wrong. 

Money has to be another part of the reason.  Somebody has to be making money on these myths.  The first culprit is the food industry.

Let’s be accurate:  overeating does not cause weight gain, fat production does.  The two are different.  Some people can overeat like crazy and their fat cells don’t get very excited.  They stay slim. 

What causes fat cells to produce fat?  This is the billion dollar question, which no researcher has been able to exactly answer.  What can be said is that fat production and becoming overweight is a hormonal problem.  If you are more than 25 pounds overweight, you have a hormonal imbalance, and likely multiple hormones are involved.  

A major hormonal player is insulin.  Insulin has been called “the hormone of abundance.”  When abundance comes into your life you can become a “fat cat,”  and this is what tends to happen when your body produces a lot of insulin.  Once you get to be 25 pounds overweight, the insulin system gets stuck in overdrive.  Because you are fat, you produce more insulin.  Because you produce more insulin, you crave sugar, and because you answer the cravings with eating more sugar, you produce more insulin.  This vicious circle causes the fat to get fatter.

I have been working on treatment regimens to interrupt this vicious cycle and correct the underlying hormonal imbalances.  Patients are already doing it and finding success.  Feel free to talk to me about it.  For right now, just a few pointers about the protocol:

1.  Don’t buy any foods that say “low fat.”  Low fat means “high sugar.”  Avoid milk, but if you have to use it in your coffee, use cream instead.
2.  In general, avoid ALL processed flours and sugars.  In fact, avoid all processed anything.  That’s 80% of what is at your grocery store.   
3.  Get to sleep at night early and sleep long.  (Staying up too late aggravates the hormonal imbalances.) 
4.  Eat lots of good fats.  These include olive oil, ghee, coconut oil, avocado oil, and flax seed oi. Unless you take them with gobs of sugar, they will help you slim down.  When you fry foods make sure you match the oil to whether you are cooking low, medium or high heat.  And don’t be overly scared of butter, which although not in the category of “good fat,” it is in a neutral category, i.e. it won’t in itself cause you to get fatter. 
5.  Exercise in moderation.  Realize that it will cause you to become hungrier, but not thinner.  I prefer activities where deep, rhythmic breathing are key.  Yoga is a great example. 



 

How NOT to Get Cancer

Recently, Newsweek published a sobering article about cancer. In spite of billions and billions of dollars spent on cancer research, the results were shown to be disappointing. The article found that although initial treatment has had an increased rate of success, cancer still tends to come back, often ravaging the system with renewed vigor.

I recently asked a patient to tell me about his cancer, a brain tumor diagnosed as Grade Three. This is what he told me:

I had conventional treatment and I believe it made it worse. It initially killed most of the cancer cells, but it came back as Grade Four. I hope whatever I’m doing holds it at bay. The headaches are definitely controllable with the steroids.

My reaction is to fight it. I know that there are people that survive this and I hope to join them. I’m not going to go down without fighting for it. I’m fighting for my life.

The way the Newsweek article described it, cancer cells act as if they have a strategic plan to outwit even our most ingenious treatments.

Now listen to the words of another patient, who had bladder cancer:

It was like I wanted to get out of here, but I can’t. It was just there constantly. I just wanted to empty myself out. It got increasingly hard and painful for me to urinate. I had to push a lot, to really try and get the urine out.

Even though these are entirely different cancers, you may sense a similar theme. Take the words of another patient with cancer; she describes this feeling again, but from an entirely different perspective:

I can’t seem to control my children. I was making them feel awful for their transgressions –not finishing food, not finishing homework. I would tell them, “I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you.” I didn’t know what was going on. I feel like I’m being run by these feelings.

I asked her where she thought these feelings originated.

I think that rage was pretty prevalent when I was little. Until I was 8 years old, I was definitely run by rage.

This woman had uterine cancer. Notice how her rage focused on her children, and then think about the childbearing function of the uterus. She got cancer of her uterus for a reason.

In my experience, cancer goes hand-in-hand with feelings that cannot be contained. I invariably see the attempt to maintain control in patients who have cancer. Everything about the disease leads to emotional turmoil, its relentless course, the pain, the loss of control that happens when one enters the medical system, the hair loss, struggling through exhaustion and so on. This does not mean that all patients struggling to “maintain control” get cancer, but my sense is that the risk goes up.

After I treated the patient with uterine cancer, this is what she told me:

I can still lose my temper, but it definitely doesn’t feel as out of control as it used to. I would say that even when I get mad, it feels like I quickly have a choice to back down or make my point. Internally, I feel much more in control when I have that choice.

It may not seem so dramatic, but exactly this “having a choice” is what I see as critical. She initially felt no choice, she simply lost her temper.

I cannot take credit for a cure of her cancer because it was conventionally treated. However, I do believe that if she would have been in the space where this remedy put her, she would have never gotten cancer in the first place.

This, in my understanding, is one reason why people should seek treatment with classical homeopathy. No other modality brings such inner peace and leads to such deep energetic balance. You need that before you end up getting cancer.

My homeopathic colleague, Dr. Alize Timmerman, gave an interview about cancer in 2006 in which she said that cancer was “a hardening of the body” in response to some emotional trauma the person was unable to handle. Although I am not convinced that this explanation covers all cases, 90 percent of cancers seem to fit this model.

I am also reminded of a quote from Dr. Yongli Ni, a Washington, D.C. acupuncturist: “Traditional Chinese medicine’s idea is that Western treatment blasts the cancer but fails to adjust the underlying qi or energy issues, thus leaving a potentially fertile field for future malignancies.”

The experiences of my patients provide clues of why the current chemotherapy craze is unlikely to lead us to the Promised Land.  Cancer is more than physical cells growing out of control. An underlying toxic energy drives the physical illness, and at the emotional level, this translates into tumultuous feelings.

Steering clear of cancer means also steering clear of toxic emotions – in particular it means dealing with traumatic emotions rather than burying them. That’s easier said than done, of course, because these feelings so often come at us from an irrational place that’s difficult to understand. Cancer, from one perspective, tells those who have it about their search for inner peace.

 

The Return of Old Symptoms: A Case of Ulcerative Colitis

I recently treated a man with ulcerative colitis, a case that illustrates some important concepts of healing.

Ulcerative colitis and its twin sister disease, Crohn’s, cause the lining of the colon to become inflamed and bleed. My patient described his symptoms like this:

My guts go into powerful spasms. After you have to go to the bathroom five or six times, it feels like you’ve exhausted a lot of your energy. It sort of tears the guts out of you. It takes me out of commission. Even for a short period of time, the spasms make it difficult to participate in things I have to do during the day.

In the world of conventional medicine, doctors treat these powerful symptoms with equally powerful suppressive medications, either steroids or strong anti-inflammatory medications injected into the bowel. But these do not resolve the underlying energy driving the disease. As I have mentioned before, this underlying energy is directly in line with the emotional energy of the person’s body-mind.

This man told me he was extremely sensitive to his environment.

Everyone said I had high standards for myself when I was younger, probably impossible standards. I would lose my temper because I wouldn’t be able to do what I thought I could. I still feel like I lash out at people for no reason.

Then he gave an important clue to the underlying energy of his body-mind disease:

I just feel like I’ve got a lot of pressure in my body somewhere that I don’t know about; and for some reason it will blow off, and I’ll say something inappropriate. Something will snap.

Of course, the same thing happened at the level of his colon. It’s as if the pressure would keep building up and building up inside him and then finally explode in bloody diarrhea.

It is interesting to follow what happened when I gave him a deep-acting remedy prepared from the element Antimony.  He healed both at the emotional and physical level. The first and key sign was when his ulcerative colitis disappeared.

I’m not having problems anymore with my bowels.

And as this happened, old symptoms that he hadn’t had for years came back. The first was a rash on his foot.

It was almost like an eczema outbreak. I first got that right around the time I started having the ulcerative colitis, or even just before that. All of a sudden I had this eczema over the arch on my foot. They were teeny little blisters and they were itchy. I had them occasionally on my hands.  They would just come up for a week or two, be itchy, kind of break open and then heal over and be gone.

Now, years later, the rash made its reappearance and then disappeared again, this time likely for good.

It didn’t stop there.  

A few weeks later, I had the leg cramps. I had those when I was a kid, probably six to eight years old. The memory still sticks in my mind. They felt the same.

The leg cramps lasted a few nights and then also disappeared.

For me, there are few things better than the patient saying, “Oh, I’m much better, but this symptom I haven’t had in years came back.” When a symptom resolves in the context of old symptoms returning, it generally means your prescription was a dart thrown into the bull’s eye. The return of old symptoms is deeply healing.

That might not makes sense until you consider the disease from an energetic perspective. Symptoms are the body’s attempt at energetic balance. Shift the energy of the system back towards health, and it will re-wind right back along the energetic path it took as it slid into disease.

Here’s what this patient told me after the remedy:

One of my biggest goals in life has been to not get riled about things; when complications and challenges come up, to not get bent out of shape. I have been able to do that recently. I feel like there is a calmness that’s been building up a little bit in my spirit. I have been able to get back in contact with friends I lost touch with.

You cannot heal the bowel without healing the emotions that go with it.  It is one thing to compensate for disturbing symptoms with harsh medications, and it is quite another to give a homeopathic remedy that mirrors the disease and shifts the entire system.

Multiple Chemical Sensitivities

It burns in my mouth nose and tongue, she said.  It has a burning all the time. It literally has a fire, constantly on fire.  Nothing smells the way it’s supposed to smell; everything smells the same... It’s all the same smell, and it’s to the point of gagging.  At one point I couldn’t eat or drink and went down 20 lbs in one week.  For a while I was excreting it so badly into my mouth, the mucous was so thick that I couldn’t swallow it, and so I was spitting at that point in time.  I spit it out by the cupful.

Crying she told me, I can’t function.  It’s causing me upset from morning to night  This is not me.

The peculiar suffering of people with multiple chemical sensitivities is difficult to witness.  The symptoms would be enough, but then there’s our medical system’s treatment of them, which can produce a suffering all its own.  First there’s the attitude of the doctors, who tend to view these patients as psychiatric basket cases.  Then there is the mad attempt to avoid the offending substances, which in itself can become a full-time, night-and-day job. And then there’s the treatment centers:

I go to the environmental center, thought I was going to die... I was not able to stay on the premises,  I had to stay in this other place. and there were all these wacko people who walked around with masks.  They are all sick and looking at me as if I'm from another planet.  “You are sick  You smell,” ....In a week you can spend $10,000 .  The 2nd day I was there I started crying and I couldn’t stop crying.

Thousands and thousands of dollars later, this woman ended up in the same place.  As she put it, 

I still wasn’t feeling any better.  I was in a horror movie.

The case that taught me just how powerful classical homeopathy can be in the treatment of environmental allergies was the woman who came with the burning mouth, nose, tongue.  It took some work to track her case, but once I gave her a correct remedy in very high (10M) potency, she was cured of the burning and atrocious smells. 

In understanding how this is possible, it is important to not make the mistake that the doctors treating her made, that is, don’t get too distracted by the physical symptoms, which generally are intense and create a cloud of confusion.  Instead, start to look what the outcome of the physical symptoms are.  For example, the woman with the burning mouth told me this:

I used to be very outgoing  It  never bothered me to walk up to anyone. say hi to anyone, meet and greet people.  Some people wouldn’t do that, but I would.

Then, however, she said this

I was kind of raised in a family, what goes on in house stays in house, could never really do that, be outgoing or whatever, could never really, I was always very shy very quiet, kept to myself.  For a long time always real quiet.

There’s a bit of a contradiction here, and when she got sick with the burning, note what happened:  she spent her life locked up in her house.  She couldn’t go out at all, because she would be assaulted by people wearing colognes and such, which would cause her burning to intensify.

Compare this to another case that was also profoundly irritated by environmental substances.  Her symptoms were similar.  Nevertheless. the outcome for her was exactly the opposite:

This is crazy I can't be in the house...I couldn’t stay in my house.   Every time I would go into kitchen-- I like to cook do that for my family and myself--I would get this horrible feeling.  My nose would start running, heart start racing, nightmare tingling; everything feels irritated,  I”m going to die, I'm really scared.  When i would leave the house I would feel better outside.

So, on the surface, we have similar physical symptoms, but in one case the symptoms cause the person to stay in the house, never going out, and in the other case, the symptoms cause the person to run from the house.  How can this be?  The answer is that the outcome is, ultimately, not determined by the offending substances themselves, but by the underlying state, which is driving everything.  We could say the first person is in an “I have to be in the house” state and the second person is in an “I cannot be in the house” state.  They have formed sicknesses that help intensify these underlying states. 

In other words, to heal the chemical sensitivities, you have to heal, respectively the person’s need to be in the house, or, case two, the need to flee the house.  If you are successful in this, the sensitivity to chemicals will “magically” disappear.  The treatment of these states is what classical homeopathy is all about. 

Note that each of these respective states could be said to relate to specific insecurities.  In the first case we start to sense this when she tells us  I was always very shy very quiet, kept to myself. This is a person who is shy because of strong underlying fears--fears that make her want to stay home and not meet people.  When she tried to compensate by being outgoing, she developed a disease strong enough to send  her back to the ultra-safety of the parental home. 

The second case has a different underlying energy altogether.  This particularly became clear to me when she said said, in reference to a relationship upset earlier in her life:

I have to get out of this country. I was so upset, I wasn't’ going to school anymore
I was living at home. living two jobs. I wanted to get out of this city, get away from this country,

Further confirmation of this underlying energy came when she described some of her physical symptoms, which were

like a tingling burning all over my body.  it moves around.  It can be in my neck and back, it just like moves around.

So, this is a disease “that moves around.”   It moves out of the house.  It moves out around the body; and when things really get rough, it’s time to check out and move out of the country.  To treat such a disease successfully you need treat this underlying energy.  To be distracted by outer layer of physical symptoms is lose sight of what needs to be healed.

A Case of Kidney Stones

A few years ago, I treated a man who had suffered kidney stones daily for almost 20 years. His problems with kidney stones went back to his late teens. He’d tried every conventional treatment: medications, diet changes, shockwave therapy. But the stones kept coming back.

Listen to him describe his physical symptoms, which began at a time when he was under tremendous stress:

When I started getting kidney stones, it felt like my heart was beating from my kidney. I would pee pure blood two times in one day.  When I peed in the bottle, blood specks came out. The stones dragged and cut me up as they came out. The sharp points on the stone hurt. I could feel one right as it was coming out, slowly coming out, just scraping me. Sometimes they were too big to come out naturally. It's like they were holding on, not coming out. I had to go to E.R.

Hearing his stories reminded me of my time working in an emergency room. I can still see the patients who came in while passing a kidney stone. They writhed on gurneys in intense pain, the nurses rushing in with high doses of narcotics to calm them down.

I could feel my kidney pulsing. I could feel my heart beat in my kidney.  It always feels like a knife just poked right in there.

I knew there was more to his story beyond the excruciating physical pain. Always in homeopathic case-taking there is the outer story, the reality the patient lives, and the deep, inner story that produces their disease. It’s important to look at what was going on in a person’s life when their disease first shows symptoms. The outer reality often triggers something deep in the person’s inner life.

As I asked him more questions, his inner story emerged. His professional career had many ups and downs. He held a top position in his organization, with everyone looking up to him and depending on him. Like many at the top the corporate ladder, he had to work very hard to get there. He started by telling me about his early money struggles.

I think of where I was at in my life. I was financially broke, didn't have any money.   

He went on to describe a feeling that had dogged him all his life:

Nothing I did was ever good enough. If I walked into a room and people were laughing, I assumed they were laughing about me. I would internalize it,

I asked him how this made him feel.

Used. Of no value. I felt like someone was like putting a lot of pressure on me to do something; most of the time they had a motive but wouldn’t tell me what it was.

His feeling of being under pressure came up again at the end of our conversation, when he began to speak straight from the inner life of his disease. I asked him why people snap.

Pressure. Pressure put on themselves or by other people. Pressure to be something they are not, to perform at a level they are not capable of.   

What does it feel like to be under pressure?

Just like everything is closing in on you. The more and more pressure you’re under, either it will make you a better person and create a breakthrough in your life, or it will crush you.    

There emerged from his story images of stones, massive pressure and translucency. His feelings of worthlessness – and its opposite, immense value – struck me as particularly relevant. He talked about control, power, being used and using others for personal gain.

It’s the story of the diamond. Diamond is made of a common carbon, like the ashes in your fireplace, which through time and massive pressure becomes a brilliant, beautiful, translucent stone of immense value. A diamond’s value is maintained by the power and control of the cartels at the center of the diamond trade.

So I gave the man diamond in homeopathic potency. 

And it cured his kidney stones. At the first follow-up he told me, When I took it, my whole body burned. My kidneys have not hurt since

Lance Armstrong's Cancer

Lance Armstrong has my vote for greatest athlete for at least the last 50 years.  I spent many summer evenings watching the Tour de France, amazed by his performance. The Tour de France, the world's premiere bicycle race, has to be the most grueling athletic event in our modern era, requiring incredible effort simply to finish, let alone win.  Winning this event seven years in a row represents a pinnacle of male, warrior energy.

Much has been said about another battle Lance Armstrong had before he went on to seven consecutive wins:  his fight against cancer.  I find it interesting that his cancer came in his testicle, the source of male generative or reproductive power.  We use the term having "balls" to mean having "gutsy, action-oriented (masculine) energy."  Taking this one step further, Lance Armstrong developed cancer in his male organs, and cancer, in a nutshell, refers to cells of our body that grow out of control, infringing on the body's normal systems.  Where these cells originate gives a particular cancer its name, e.g. kidney cancer refers to kidney cells growing out of control.  The more chaotically cancer cells grow out of bounds, the more dangerous they are.  We might summarize Armstrong's physical disease as "cells specific to male generation growing out of control."

Is this a coincidence that Lance Armstrong got such a disease?  In a real way, some "energetic essence" within Lance Armstrong has to do with "male energy exceeding its bounds."  It is what enabled him to win the Tour de France seven times, and it was at the root of his cancer.  After he began recovering from cancer he began training for his first win of the Tour.  It was as if something triggered this part of him, producing first his cancer and then his seven-year winning streak.  For those of you who followed Lance's racing, think of his control over every aspect of the race, whether it was the training, his pacing and daily race strategy, his food intake, pretty much everything that had to do with the race.  Winning had to do with his ability to harness and control this male energy straining to exceed its bounds.

Lance's case is of particular interest to me, because the relationship between his physical disease and his deeper energies is unusually easy to see.  Conventional underplays any relationship between physical disease and underlying energy.  Everything I have seen in my professional life shows the opposite: a person's physical symptoms connect to every other part of the person--his emotions, his dreams, his way of being, everything.  The development of a chronic physical disease is not accidental.  I believe the future of medicine lies in understanding and treating this connection between the solid energy of our body and the energy of emotions and consciousness.

This is easier to think about if we realize our physical body is energy.  If this is hard to imagine, simply think of electrons spinning within the atoms that make us up.  We are built to perceive our body as solid.  We might call it "solid energy."  There is a smooth, direct connection between the "solid energy" of our bodies and our deeper energies, which include emotional energy and the energy that makes up our consciousness.  Because of this connection, we cannot help but express physical disease in a way that relates to this underlying, "less solid" emotional energy.  This is the deeper meaning of the term "holistic medicine”:  It treats the common energetic source of both emotional and physical symptoms.

I hope that using Lance Armstrong as an example helps you to entertain the possibility more is going on than what the meets the eye.  There is something unusual in his case, something that suggests the presence of underlying energy pattern.  See this and you are on your way to understanding classical homeopathy:  a choice of a homeopathic remedy is a judgment about what the underlying energy of a person is.  The challenge is to exactly perceive it and then give the remedy that mirrors it.  To be accurate in one's treatment is the hallmark of good medicine, whether it be alternative or conventional.

Some Thoughts on Attention Deficit Disorder

Recently attention deficit disorder (ADD) has been much on my mind.  I have had patients come to me with ADD; people with ADD have come into my life; it has given me a lot to think about.

For those who do not know much about this diagnosis, ADD refers to the inability to hold one’s attention.  An ADD person trying to focus finds himself repeatedly getting distracted, often doing things completely unrelated to the task at hand.  They often feel like they are swimming in a sea of random thoughts. 

ADHD is mostly the same but includes an “:H” for hyperactivity, which means that the person is restless, sometimes to the point of being completely unable to sit still.  It is noticeable most in children, because In school they tend to repeatedly get out of their chairs and disrupt the class.

I have done some reviewing of the popular literature surrounding adult ADD, written both for the ADD person and those trying to understand and deal with them.  According to these experts, ADD is a brain abnormality that lands on a person the way, say, a meteor falls out of the sky.  Does it hit Dallas or does it hit Waco?   Who knows?  It’s an outcome of the randomness of the universe. 

I have not seen one sliver of evidence in my practice to support this.

From the cases I have taken of people with ADD or ADHD, I can say the following:

1)  The names ADD and ADHD are tags that only see the tip of the iceberg.  Underneath lie issues entirely specific to the individual.   

2)  A significant portion of the time, there is intense fear at deeper levels, particularly in children. As people grow into adults, the childhood fear remains, but tends to be more difficult to access.

3) In spite of the difficulties it causes, there is always some “gain” for the person in their inability to fix their attention.  By looking at what they tend to avoid in life, there may be clues to this.  However, what is avoided in life may not directly connect to what is going on underneath. 

I can give an example of this.  A number of months ago, a saw a child of 7 for ADD with some hyperactivity.  The child could not focus attention, and, in spite of obvious intelligence, was doing poorly in school.  His mother remarked that the child “seemed anxious.”   As I took this child’s case, the word “murder” came up about seven times throughout the two hours I spent with the child.   This was so even though there was no violence in the child’s history whatsoever.  The most violent incident in the child’s life was a bad knock to the head at two years of age.   What was “murder” doing repeatedly coming up in this child’s vocabulary and in his dreams? 

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting home alone at night.  You are doing your taxes.  Suddenly you hear footsteps in the house.  You fear the worst, a man with a long knife has found entrance.  You are not alone. 

Question:  Would you be able to focus on your taxes? 

if you answered “no,” welcome to the inner life of this child.  There are no murderers hanging around this child, yet the child is living life as if there were.  This child had intense fear of violence, of monsters, of large things in general, of being hurt and having to go the hospital.  Fear was all over this case.  Almost nothing else came up in the two hours I spent with the child.  This child’s inability to focus was not the  outcome of some random act of the universe, causing a chemical abnormality of the brain.  The inability to focus was a direct result of living constantly in fear. 

Let’s fast forward 20 years. Let’s say this person presented at my office at age 27 rather than 7.  The anxiousness and restlessness have never gone away.  Now, though, when I take the case, the word “murder” does not appear.  As an adult, this person learned that expressing irrational fears is not acceptable, thus this person learned to eliminate  “murder” from his vocabulary.  For me as the homeopath, however, the key issue “fear of murder” has to be found all the same. It didn’t go away; it simply was repressed.  This person still needs a homeopathic remedy that will take away the irrational fear of murder.  This is the amazing thing about homeopathy:  pin the issue (e.g. fear of violence and murder) and the state it represents, give the exact remedy that mirrors that state, and poof, the fear evaporates and the person relaxes and can focus.

There are many completely different issues that lie underneath the letters "ADD."  I remember one case of a child who appeared very sleepy and whose ADD had to do with this sleepy relationship to life.  Even in his dreams this was the case.  In one dream he was being attacked by something scary--and he fell asleep.  Imagine that, falling asleep in your dream!  I gave him a homeopathic remedy that mirrored this sleepy, scared state; and it cured his ADD. 

Human beings are remarkably integrated.  It is doubtful that anything that happens to us is truly random.  Every physical or mental disease we have expresses something integral about us and who we are.  The difficulty with diagnoses such as “ADD” is that they may hide more than they reveal.

Treating Depression, or, Un-leashing the Life Force

Anger has been a bit of a theme in my practice recently. I find anger--or the lack of it--to be a major issue in the of treatment of depression. I had one patient tell me she had been depressed all her life, admitting to having suicidal thoughts around it. LIfe for her had been overwhelming, and sometimes her response was to say “it’s not worth it.”

I gave her a remedy and kept close watch on her. Her response about 3 days after her homeopathic prescription came via email:

My mood is different.  Less hopeless.  More pissed off.  Definitely not wanting to die.  More wanting to kill someone.  

...Sometimes I patiently sort through things and get to what needs to be looked at and done,  and other times I want to light it all on fire and have a bonfire.  All over the map...

What does that tell you?  Definitely something is shifting.  Hang on and put on your seatbelt.

What does this tell me? It tells me that there has been a dramatic release of life energy, i.e. I made a good prescription; wait and watch.

Sometimes I become part of a patient’s inner drama, with the anger directed at me. The reason for the anger is not the main issue. Mistakes, delays, frustrations occasionally occur. What is important is the patient’s perception of what has occurred. Invariably, if there is a dramatic unleashing of anger towards me after taking a remedy, it is an important step in the treatment of the patient. I take a close look at the words the patient uses and the feelings they express. If they match the remedy I gave, and the person was previously in a place of inhibited life force, this is a beautiful sign.

What is depression? In my practice depression can lead to hundreds of different prescriptions. In this sense 'depression' is a vague term. Is it a mental or physical disease? Or is it both?

A patient once told me

It seems impossible to separate the fatigue and lack of interest and discouraging feeling.

Everything I have seen in my practice suggests that separating the emotional and the physical is a convenience rather than a truth. If there is a depression at the level of the mind; there is a depression at the level of the body. I feel it fair to say that the life force is inhibited in the depressed patient. Exactly what is inhibiting the life force is different in every case, but to treat depression deeply, this is essential for me to know. My task is to see exactly the state in which this suppression of the life force exists.

To take a closer look at this, let me explain the initial case--the patient ready to light a bonfire--in more depth. The remedy I gave her was Formica rufa, the ant. The words of the state of ant are “helpless,” “dependent,” “crushed,” “imprisoned,” “put down,” “humiliated,” and such. People who exist in the ant state might be described as feeling as if they are a prisoner of war, dependent on their captor for food, water, and shelter in enemy territory, and yet terrified of being crushed and annihilated by them at the same time. They feel like a slave, forced to work by the more powerful entity, who is ready to crush them at the first sign of rebellion or exhaustion. In this state, people naturally tend to suppress their anger. This suppression can manifest as a low-grade depression, or even turn into an all-out suicidal depression under certain conditions.

After I gave her the ant in homeopathic potency, there was a dramatic release of energy in the form of anger. This concept of “life force” is an extremely important idea. Hahnemann, the founder of classical homeopathy, felt that all disease was the result of a mistuned life force. In other words, all disease comes about because something is inhibiting or binding the life force, and one way the homeopath traces this is through the patient’s peculiar beliefs and notions, as they express themselves through both mind and body.

It was a bad day for medicine when science rejected “life force” as a false idea, replacing it instead with a mechanical understanding of the universe. The result is that, if your doctor adheres to strict biomedical technique, he diagnoses and treats you in a similar way to how a mechanic diagnoses and fixes a lawnmower. The idea of a "mechanical universe" is a prejudice that most scientific disciplines have doggedly held on to. Fortunately, we do not have to agree with science.

An Aggressive Form of Rheumatoid Arthritis

Recently a patient I had not seen in some time wrote with a question. When I wrote back, I asked how she would feel if I wrote about her case. She had been a joy to treat, and her case held much interest for me. She replied with this precise summary:

“Please note that I was told by two rheumatologists that I have a diagnosis of Psoriatic Arthritis, which is more aggressive and crippling than rheumatoid, and that I would be a cripple in a wheelchair if I didn’t take the Enbrel and Methotrexate. (both medications have side effects as bad as the disease even though they don’t admit it). I began my doses of remedy in August 2006, off Methotrexate in November in 2006, and off Enbrel February 2007. Currently, I have the normal and some abnormal aches and pains of a 62 y/o female in menopause, and actually painting all the rooms in my house. I am able to live with the pain and work through it since taking the remedy. Also, you are the best that has happened to me for a long time and I appreciate this “thing” that has brought me out of a very black period of life and maintained my sanity.“

This was a woman with a particularly aggressive form of arthritis indeed. Without the immune-system-suppressing regimen of Methotrexate and Enbrel she was practically frozen, her joints ”stiffening up in excruciating pain.“ How to explain how one good classical homeopathic prescription changed her life? As I briefly explain her case, remember the rule ”like cures like.“ The remedy must mirror the overall state of mind and body. Forget any ideas you have about what types of substances may or may not be able to heal disease. A substance that heals someone may be quite unexpected and outside the realm of what we consider "medicine."

Note her use of the word ”aggressive“ in describing her arthritis. ”Aggressive and crippling,“ she says. This word came up repeatedly when I took her case. It is not stretching things too far to say that ”aggression“ is a certain energetic reality for her. When she described a co-worker she said this:

She was an extremely evil, aggressive person. She used any method to be underhanded and pretty much push me out so she could take control.

Here we get a sense of what she means by ”aggressive." It is an ”evil, underhanded...take control“ aggression. Thus, we have ”aggression“ at the level of her joints and we have ”aggression“ at the level of her co-worker. Whenever we see a word like this repeating in entirely different circumstances, then the chances are good that it is coming not from an outer reality, but from a deep inner perception of reality, the energetic pattern of consciousness within the person (i.e. 4th level). You cannot truly cure the aggression of the arthritis without dealing with the inner perception of aggressiveness. They are one and the same.

Repeatedly she made note of people who were ”cruel“ and would ”cheat“ on her. There was a certain need in her to develop independence. When she had become dependent on people, they would ”betray“, ”cheat,“ or just plain turn ”cruel.“ As she put it,

They are so ruthless; they are so cruel. They are like lions in a den. If they could they would devour your flesh...They treat you like a piece of meat.

Faced with such an unpleasant reality, you would develop independence too. Note that the core issue is one of survival in a world of aggression and competition. Understand this in a deep way and you understandt the essence of an homeopathic animal remedy. This is what cured this woman’s aggressive arthritis.

What sort of animal reality did she need? The key word for me in her case was the word ”dependence,“ because once I knocked open this door, it took the case straight into the realm of parasites. If you think about it, there are different types of dependencies. There is the dependency, for example, of the baby on the mother. There is a dependency of one who needs knowledge on the guide or teacher. There is the dependency of the addict on the drug. The dependency of the parasite on the host is a different matter. It is an animal relationship characterized by a lack of mutuality. The parasite needs the host to survive, and thereby takes from the host, not caring whether the host suffers harm. The parasite treats the host literally like ”a piece of meat.“ In this case case, the peculiarities of her state and ideas of ”sucking of the blood“ led to the homeopathic prescription of the Hiruda medicinalis, the blood-sucking leech. I have had two cases of this in my practice. and they both have had arthritis. Hiruda is apparently an important remedy for arthritis.

Although this particular case was an exception, the cases in my practice that have cured with parasitic remedies have often presented with an all-consuming ”global“ anger. The feeling that people are betraying you, cheating you, violating you, or just plain ripping you off can feel out of control for these people. We need to always remember that what the homeopathic remedy treats is baggage. It’s a deep perception within us that leaves us unfree. This woman has gradually been discovering more peace inside, even as she continued to have difficulties with those in her environment.

Heart Arrhythmia

The treatment of heart pathologies with classical homeopathy in many instances is not difficult. A case I had a few months ago, which I took in an hour and half (half my usual time), illustrates my point.

It was a case of 16 year old girl who presented to me with a two-year history of what was diagnosed as “SVT” or “supraventricular tachycardia.” She was athletic, engaging in weightlifting, cheerleading, and various other sports, yet was was often held back by her heart. She would be engaged in an activity, when suddenly her heart would take off, beating so fast as to be a blur. She would get dizzy, short of breath, and feel like she was going to colapse. During the initial year or so she had this, she had many appointments with cardiologists. She had EKGs, wore heart monitors, and had a complete work-up every year to the tune of $5000. The cardiologists discussed ablation (destruction by electrical burning) of the tissue responsible for the erratic activity, yet there were two possible locations, and they couldn’t risk choosing the wrong one.

Just how dangerous the condition could potentially be was not initially apparent. That she lived through a couple years of this suggested it was not going to end her life, in spite of what it might feel like. Nevertheless, it severely restricted her activity, and kept her in a state of anxiety during cheerleading routines where she could put her team at risk.

Listen to her talk about it:

“I feel like if I didn’t have it I would have twice as much energy, as in powerful, I could run longer, lift, be more energetic. When I get it, I have to stop, have to sit down.

It’s just frustrating when I’m cheering if I get them, half way I won’t be able to tumble, because I don’t have enough energy. It like swipes my energy. I don’t always get it when I’m working out, sometimes watching TV and I’ll get it. Sometimes they will last 10 hours and sometimes 10 seconds. When I get it it’s hard to breath. I get really really dizzy. I stand up and black out for a second....I lose all my energy and strength.”

A diagnosis may seem straightforward, but a diagnosis is a superficial understanding until we know what the disease is doing. To really understand what a physical illness is doing is to have within your grasp the tools to cure it.

What is her illness, this erratically beating heart, doing? She tells us: it is swiping her energy, her strength. But there is still more. Listen to how she compensates for this problem:

It takes all the strength I have to keep going. If I’m at my [competition] I can’t just stop. I have to keep going. At that time... everything is harder. I did train while having heart problems, my body does build up to it. I need to be able to train my body to keep going. I have to build myself up almost. If I have heart problems I have to push myself the most, until I can’t even go any further. I try to as far as I can.

Just feel the sense of “great effort” in her words. I have to keep going, she says. Deep within her disease is an idea of an almost superhuman strength. What made her case relatively simple is how directly and consciously she speaks of her inner state--a luxury for the homeopath. Now read notes on the remedy I gave her, which I take from the homeopathic materia medica:

Sustains the strength.
Desire for physical exertion.
Increases the bodily activity.
The effects of small doses seems to be to resist fatigue, which I frequently noticed in long walks.
[When ingesting it] they (the Peruvians) can make rapid journeys, without suffering in their respiration, and can take unremitting exercise without being worn out by fatigue.
Soon after [ingesting the substance] a sensible augmentation of force and a general feeling of invigoration were realized, and continued to be felt throughout the game, so that fatigue was wholly, or in great part resisted.

Can you recognize the relationship here? Remember “like cures like,” (read into the category Alternative Medicine Basics“ or ”Homeopathy info“ if you are new to this blog) so the inner nature of the substance must mirror the inner state of the patient. This law may be a bit confusing here, because all substances have a dual action. Under the notes on this same substance you find the following:

General feebleness.
It produces, in large quantities, lassitude and drowsiness.

Working in the playing field of this dual action, in this instance “great strength” and its opposite “feebleness,” is one of the homeopath’s tasks. As an aside, note that “dual action” has a lot to do with what conventional doctors call “side effects.” In this case, however, the dual action exists within the patient. That is, this patient expressed both sides of the dual action, both the sense of strength and the feebleness. If a the dual action of a drug does not match the patient, side effects become a real possibility. If you think deeply into this, you will come to understand why medicine, from one point of view, comes down to exactness of prescription.

So the remedy I gave her was the plant Erythroxylon coca diluted in homeopathic (low, 30c) potency, the leaves of which the Peruvians chew to sustain hard labor and exertion at high altitudes.

This has been a few months now, but it has essentially cured her condition. She has had two doses, and since the first her heart has had minimal erratic activity. Competitions, where she used to have the most trouble, have gone fine. Her days of visiting the cardiologist should be over.