The Alternative Healer

The Tunnel Vision of Ill Health

A friend of mine, over sushi, told me that his father spent $5000 a month on his nursing home.  He commented that the extra money he spent on health--in this instance eating sushi--was a great investment, because if he stayed healthy just one month longer, he had just saved himself $5000.

It’s food for thought. 

Often, when it comes to our health, to use an old phrase, we are “penny wise and pound foolish.”   How to go about undoing dysfunctional patterns that lead to $5000 monthly nursing home stays and general poor health? 

One thing I have come to believe is that without growth, without education, we develop tunnel vision.  The challenge is that we do not know it is tunnel vision until we emerge from the tunnel.  We are experts at first building our own cages, and then living in them.  Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to disease.  The problem is that the restricting cage of disease develops at a deeper level than what our conscious mind can access.  A mentor of mine told us, “Find out what the patient’s disease is preventing them from doing.”   This is an important idea:  we develop our diseases for a reason. 

If you are not feeling well in a chronic way, it is good to non-judgmentally ask, “Where do I have tunnel vision?”  What deep, inner stream has come to the surface with this ill health? 

If you can sit with the discomfort of this, some answers may emerge.  Keeping in mind that you cannot make clear separations between poor health and dysfunctional patterns in other areas of your life, you can begin to make out the bare outlines of ways of being that do not serve you. 

What beliefs do you cling to that perpetuate your poor health?  Do you believe that you are beyond help, that you are “incurable”?  If so, why do you cling to these beliefs?   

Not infrequently, in this process you will encounter emotions that are uncomfortable.  If you immediately shut down, this is a clear sign that you need help.  Without it, you could easily stay stuck and feeling rotten.  What kind of help, though?

The medical profession has been the traditional answer, yet you have to wonder if that 10 minute encounter with your doctor is going to help you overcome your tunnel vision, or simply perpetuate it.  Perhaps your answer is to keep your doctor, but find another sort of mentor or therapist.  Let’s say you do this.  Recognizing your troublesome relationship patterns, you find a therapist and do some work.  You make some definite progress.  Your relationships are better, but you still feel lousy.  What next?

A reasonable next step is to find a mentor that deals with both the emotional and the physical.  For women, a favorite of mine in this category is Laughing Sage.  Check them out at Laughing Sage's website. .   Formed by Alisa Vitta, Laughing Sage offers counseling for women that includes body, mind, and spirit.  The accumulated knowledge at Laughing Sage in the realm of women’s health impresses me.  In particular, if you have hormonal issues, Laughing Sage is a good place to seek understanding, knowledge, and recommendations.   

What if, however, you have tried such holistic mentors, and you still are not well?  Your level of stuckness requires a healer and mentor that works a level deeper.  You may choose to enter the realm of high-level homeopathic casetaking and begin the search for the pattern in your deep consciousness that expresses itself through chronic mental or physical disease.  You may also seek out other sources of deep knowledge, perhaps with eastern roots.   

If you send your intention out to the universe to move through your blockages, then believe it will come to you.  Open your mind.  Take a seminar.  Do something different.  You will meet new people with new perspectives.  New insights will come.  These necessarily must lead you a step closer to feeling well.   Health, ultimately, is freedom--and, above all, that includes freedom from your own restricting beliefs. 

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.

Medical Advice: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

The twin disciplines that build the foundation of our health care system are pathology and epidemiology. Pathology studies the actual diseases, such as an erosion in the lining of the stomach (ulcer) or a growth on the skin (skin cancer). The classic instrument of this study is the microscope. The pathologist learns by cutting away a piece of tissue, e.g the stomach or skin, observing it under his microscope, and categorizing it based on what he observes. Note the act of “cutting away.” It’s an important idea, because the piece of tissue is now separate from you, sitting under his microscope. In non-diagnostic systems of medicine (traditional chinese medicine, classical homeopathy, Ayurveda are examples), this concept of “cutting away” does not exist.

Epidemiogy statistically applies what the pathologist finds to a population of people.  We could do a survey of people older than 50 years and conclude that 3% of them develop a condition that looks a certain way under the microscope--colon cancer for example.  This type of information forms the basis of the many health recommendations you hear from your doctor and read in the news.  For example, after finding that 3% of this population has colon cancer, the epidemiologist might then find that 95% of  this colon cancer population happened to eat beef every day, as opposed to the non-colon cancer population, 50% of which ate beef each day.  So then the recommendation might come to you, “avoid beef to avoid colon cancer.”  This might be worth considering.  Nevertheless, the question remains... on the whole, is this good information?   In other words, does it apply to you.  The answer, unfortunately, is often “no.”  Read this paragraph from an article Sunday in the New York Times Magazine ( Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?):

“Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.”

A recent example mentioned in the Times article is the “estrogen debacle.” When I was a medical resident, I was told that giving estrogen to menopausal women was good for them. There was solid evidence for this, information I could depend on. Did I believe it? No, but being a good medical resident at the time, I did what I was told. Then medical researchers released studies contradicting this. One of the hallmarks of our age is there is a wealth of information, but little true knowledge. “Here today, gone tomorrow” is not good enough advice for my health. Is it good enough for yours?

The article cautiously suggests that this situation is “part of the natural rhythm of science.” In other words, this is the way medical science is, and the medical advice “given with confidence one year and reversed the next” is something you are going to have to accept. I disagree. Let’s not beat around the bush. Any science of medicine where you can expect to have yesterday’s advice reversed tomorrow is bad science. Fine, it makes people nervous to realize that a good portion of the medicine they place their faith in is built on sand, but it’s the truth. What it means is that much “standard advice” your doctor gives you can calmly ignore. It means that when your doctor gives you advice, it makes sense to ask, “Is this benefitting me or is this benefitting the pharmaceutical company who funded this statistical study?” Of course, you will drive your doctor crazy by taking this stance, but it’s not your fault.

In the end, you as an individual are not a statistical study. You can expect that the recommendations that are good for Jane Doe are not necessarily good for you. It makes sense to delve to find deeper truths about health that you can live by. That may mean developing your intuition about what is good for you. It may mean branching out to seek the perspectives of different types of healers. It may mean reading this blog.

The crisis in our health care system isn’t just a financial one. It’s a crisis of real knowledge. Perhaps more accurately, it is the triumph of technology over knowledge. Medical researchers tend to disavow anything spiritual, energetic, or immaterial in what is human. The system that cuts their weekly paychecks is based on certain ideas of reality. In certain health conditions, that might not be a big deal, yet the more chronic a disease is, the more problematic it becomes. Let’s begin to change those ideas, trying to learn and understand about health from a broader view of what it means to be human. What is true often takes time to emerge. When we live with those principles in mind, we we will not wake up one morning and find out they have suddenly changed.

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.

A Medicine of the Void

In his book Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love, the author, Daniel Odier, tells the story of his guru, Devi, who, before becoming a tantrika, was a potter. When Devi took one of her ceramic jars to the master, she recounts the following:

The master, amused, asked me if the inside of the jar was empty or full. I answered that it was full of emptiness. Immediately he took me on as a disciple.

Devi continued with this comment:

The void no longer obsessed me, I had realized that the void is the bone and the marrow of each being, of each thing. Without the void nothing would be possible. If you read the Vijananabhairava Tantra, you’ll understand that all it talks about is the void.

This story relates to the relationship between conventional medicine and alternative medicine, specifically classical homeopathy. Conventional medicine concerns itself with the jar. Classical homeopathy, in some real sense, concerns itself with the emptiness within the jar, “the void,” and the void’s relationship to the jar. That classical homeopathy can so efficiently heal physical symptoms only tells us that there is a strong relationship between the jar and the emptiness it holds.

Of course, this points to exactly the conflict. Because in preparing a homeopathic remedy, the substance is diluted beyond the point where a chemist can find any molecules of the substance, homeopathy becomes a medicine of “no substance.” It is not a medicine that acts on the physical or material plane, i.e on the jar. Because conventional medicine acknowledges no reality outside of this, it ignores any and all successes of homeopathy throughout the last 200 years. Yet by denying that homeopathy is possible, conventional science essentially says, “It doesn’t hit me between the eyes, therefore it cannot exist.”

Our physical bodies are the jar that Devi hands to the master. In this way of thinking, our physical beings are “full of emptiness,” corresponding to the 3rd and 4th dimensions, the emotional body and pure consciousness. The senses we are given are almost completely given over to perceiving the jar. Easy to say “emptiness is merely empty” when our perceptions are made to perceive physical reality. Then again, as we are going through our day, it is easy to overlook that our heart is beating. Then if we lie down in a place of absolute quiet and listen, we begin to tune into its sound.

To perceive the more subtle energetic currents of life requires attention and practice, and, in some sense, “silence.” This points to the use of meditation to quiet the mind and gradually open oneself up to the void of pure consciousness. It is no different in medical practice. To tune into the 4th level when treating a patient requires much practice in becoming attuned to what it is and how it makes itself known. It flows through everything, the words he chooses to talk about himself and others, the way he moves, how he connects to others, and so on; and yet it is nowhere in specific. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Medicine is more straightforward when it sticks to the physical body. We can take rules of physical reality, such as “For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction” and apply it to your health. Thus, you trip, fall and hit the ground, your body records this event with a bruise. Ouch. Yet more straightforward is not more holistic, nor more grounded “in reality.” The roots of most forms of disease are unseen; that is, they belong to the void, not the jar. In this way, it is like all of life, which springs from the fullness of the void. We cannot treat the body in any lasting way without perceiving and treating the unique consciousness that flows through it.

Disease and Resistance to Change

During a rainy few days on Long Island, an idea from my undergraduate years at Colorado College drifted back to me. I had a favorite philosophy professor who used to exclaim, “The only two realities are poetry and revolution.” Sometimes I think it is better phrased, “The only two realities are poetry and transformation,” owing to the politicized nature of the word “revolution,” but I understand the meaning as essentially the same.

To live is to undergo a series of shifting states of consciousness, which we can broadly classify as “joy,” sadness“,” “happiness,” “contentedness” “depression,” “indifference,” and so on. It is the change itself, the transformational nature of our experience, that is remarkable. Disease itself is an entry into a state of consciousness, and it is the peculiarity of disease that our perception of flux and change, the finiteness of our time in our given form, is heightened.

When illness strikes, we simply want to get rid of it, make things go back to the way they were. Still, we have to be fair to illness. To get a cold or a flu is one thing, but when something major strikes, it is like trumpeters line up in the town square and blow a magnificent cadenza, announcing the arrival of a whole new way of life. I once knew someone who suffered through a head injury. She was walking in a Brazilian city and a piece of ceramic tile broke loose from a building, fell a number of stories, and--bad luck--hit her in the head on the street below. She spent the next three months in a coma in intensive care. She woke up, found herself in a time warp, recovered, and, surprising everyone, walked out of the hospital under her own power.

Then she utterly changed her life. She left her marriage--her job had already been conveniently lost--and set in motion a sequence of events that landed her permanently in the United States. Wow, you think, that’s quite a change. Yes, but all illness is like this--the bigger the illness the bigger the change. This woman, we might say, woke up from her coma and read the writing on the wall. She did not dally. She swiftly brought the life she knew to an end. When it comes to illness, this “clean house” attitude is not bad to have. We need to find a way to honor these rites of passage, those times when we are cut loose into new lands.

Our resistance to change, as a rule, is strong. Interesting, in this regard, to think about our medical system. I can’t speak for your experience, but doctors are the most change-resistant people I know. It is a conservative profession. Think of your doctor, wrapped in his white lab coat: changing his view of things is going to take some work. Medical technology and pharmaceutical companies are constantly throwing new material at doctors, but they are careful that the new technology does not challenge the doctor’s paradigm.

Resistance to change in medicine is many times good. If I am in an accident, and I arrive at the hospital, bleeding out uncontrollably, the sort of change this will produce is problematic, and I am resistant to it. I want the doctors treating me to resist it too. This means IVs and blood transfusions and surgeons to sew up where I am bleeding. In the same way, if I blow my knee out while skiing, I will hire an orthopedic surgeon to put things back the way they were. This is a beautiful thing. This kind of resistance to change the medical system does very well, and we love those who help us in this way.

Chronic disease is a different matter altogether. Chronic disease, in my understanding, originates out of a failure of transformation. If you are anxious, have blood pressure that steadily is going up, or perhaps kidney stones that send you to the emergency room for pain relief, a system that resists change may find a way to keep you stuck in the same place. All chronic disease appears to come about because of a roadblock deep inside of us. Hitting this roadblock, it is like things back up, mushroom, and eventually we experience symptoms. We come to know about the roadblock because our symptoms tell us about it. You protest, you have never experienced such an internal impasse. Things were going relatively well when you developed your asthmatic symptoms. But that is the point: if you could see this impasse, you would be unlikely to have gotten the symptoms in the first place.

To understand disease is to understand how our state of consciousness finds itself sailing into stormy seas. It’s a passage, a transformational one, but to where? As I see it, a good doctor of chronic disease is someone who eases you through the necessary transformation, making it appear less rough. In some way, he must accept “poetry and revolution” as the basic building blocks of reality.

On Medical Leadership

I had lunch last week with one of my dear friends, Lu Marchand, M.D. We met at Barriques coffee shop on Monroe St. in Madison, WI. Not having seen her in about three months, we had a lot to catch up on. Unlike me, Lu has attempted to live out her desire to explore alternative forms of medicine within the medical system. Specializing in integrative cancer care, she has been working with a team of cancer health professionals here in Madison. There are problems and frustrations unique to each path we have chosen. I enjoy meeting with Lu to learn about “the path not followed,” among other reasons. Trying to express her unique and vibrant personality in the medical system has often left her feeling stifled.

This time, as Lu detailed to me her life working within the hospital, our conversation followed a different path. In spite of her success in working with cancer patients on all levels of healing, the hospital decision makers continue to be hesitant about offering these services on a larger scale.

Setting my coffee down, I asked “Why can’t leaders in our medical system see things from a wide enough perspective to build a system around patients rather than their financial fears?”

Lu shook her head, disconcerted. “Hospitals plan services often on what will generate revenue, such as surgery and procedures, and essential elements such as attention to nutrition, movement, emotional and spiritual well-being are usually considered secondary.”

“Oh?” I queried.

We can pause for a moment and think about how we ourselves might go about such a process. We would begin with a brainstorming session on the idea “How can we build the best hospital in the country?” closely followed with, “What do patients and families who stay in our hospital need? How can we build a hospital that will truly serve their needs, such that every parent in the country will want to bring their loved one to our hospital?” Sounds like a good way to begin planning a hospital, doesn’t it? Apparently I am behind the times. Here is my summary of Lu’ description of thinking of the medical leadership:

Our health care system rewards surgery and procedures. Hospitals, in their design, function and priorities, calculate what will contribute to the bottom line of finance. Support services to keep patients as healthy as possible as they enter our hospitals for their conventional care are not seen as important or cost efficient. They may be seen as necessary, but since they do not generate sufficient revenue, they are seen as secondary, or less important. Patients and families fall through these huge cracks in the system, and don’t receive the care that leads to total well-being and healing. A quick fix is offered, but this approach misses the mark toward true health.

Do they think about designing a hospital from the point of view of what people really need? Apparently not a lot of thought is given to that. This brings out what we know and love about a level one diagnostic
system: people and feelings get lost, transformed into diagnostic codes, which in turn translate into dollars perconventional intervention such as drugs, surgery or procedures. Voila a health care system run by accountants.. Our health care doesn’t need leaders; it merely needs those with the skill to tally insurance pay-outs and capitations.

I respect the need for hospitals to remain in the black. Nevertheless, in the long-run, such dumbed-down thinking, with service reduced to its least common denominator, can’t be good for business. Our medical system remains shrunk within its own impoverished imagination. The only reason they get away with it at
all is because people are slaves to “free medicine,” willing to accept anything the system feeds them if they don’t have to pay for it. As Lu explained, many people view alternative therapies as out of reach because most are out of pocket expenses, and they view expensive conventional therapies such as medication or surgery as relatively “free medicine” since insurance (if they are fortunate enough to have insurance * and these numbers are rapidly shrinking) will pay for these therapies, but not other more alternative therapies that are less costly and at times, more effective.

Ours is not a system that serves patients. It’s a system that serves bean counters.

On the One Year Anniversary of My Blog

I started this blog a year ago to outline the different levels of our being that different forms of medicines address. This anniversary week I plan to return to the this fundamental question. Last August I began by listing the levels of therapeutic intention that various healers can have. In other words, what is your healer trying to do. I saw this as an important question that all who seek health care, whether conventional or alternative, should understand. I outlined the levels as follows:

1) Intention at the level of diagnosis, i.e. fix the abnormal number or test

2) Intention at the level of feeling, i.e. fix the pain or discomfort.

3) Intention at the level of vital systems, i.e. fix the energetic imbalance.

4) Intention at the level of consciousness, i.e. shift the pattern of perception underlying the expression of physical and mental disease.

These I called the four basic levels of healing, seen from the point of view of any given healer’s therapeutic intention.

Around that same time, while reading in ancient Egyptian medicine, I had a realization. The medicine of ancient Egypt divided the human being into seven different dimensions:

1) the physical body (The Khat)

2) The vital or energetic body, also called “bio-plasmic body",   (The Ba, the soul of breath)

3) The emotional body  (The Khaba or astral body)

4) The intellectual body which consists of the lower and middle states of consciousness  (The Khaibit)

5) The spiritual Self, or Higher Mind (The Ka)

6) The Super-consciousness. The plane where Universal knowledge is available to those attuned to it.  (The Sekhen)

7) Pure spirit, or divine mind (The Ren).

What I noted in looking at these seven levels was the strong similarity they had with my levels of therapeutic intention. The only difference was the ancient Egyptians viewed the emotional dimension as deeper (i.e. further from the physical realm) than the energetic dimension. Levels two and three were switched around. I agreed with the ancient Egyptians. My levels of therapeutic intentions, in contrast, addressed the way healers in our society actually work. It might be worthwhile to put another level of intention between my 3rd and 4th levels. I have found healers with specific therapeutic intentions at the emotional body to be relatively uncommon. They do exist however. For example a shamanic journey has as its intention to retrieve lost or traumatized parts of our emotional selves--an intention specific to the Egyptian emotional body (3rd dimension).

I have since decided to use the word ”levels“ when I am referring to healers and their intention and ”dimensions“ when I speak of the actual layers (dimensions) of human energy. They are not exactly the same. As it turns out, you can numb the 3rd dimension by addressing the physical body (i.e. a 1st level intention), for example the use of prozac, tranquilizers, or pain killers. Therefore, 2nd level intentions are close in character to 1st level intentions in the physical dimension. i.e the 2nd level usually addresses the physical, although in a different way. The 1st level intention addresses an objective finding or diagnosis; the 2nd level intention addresses the unpleasant feelings the person is having, both working through the physical plane. People for millennia have learned to numb the emotional body (3rd dimension) through substance use (acts through the 1st dimension), whether it be alcohol and drugs or simply overeating. It’s the realm of self-medicating the emotional body through the material or physical dimension. Today’s medicine simply does this in more sophisticated ways.

Some people wonder whether the physical and emotional might not be two aspects of the same dimension, like their doctor tells them. But they are not. Energetically they are different. The emotional body appears to be a field of energy that exists in and around the cells of the body.

Because we as humans necessarily process experience through the physical body--e.g. the stress (emotional dimension) of the office today has landed in your tight, aching shoulders (physical dimension)--all experience from deeper dimensions will impact our physical dimension. It does this in ways that are predictable with knowledge with what is happening at deeper dimensions. For example, grief will energetically affect our lungs. In the same way, experience that impacts the physical realm (e.g. eating, sleeping, sex, accidents, exercise) will affect the deeper layers of who we are. These are more difficult to predict. For example, a person sensitive to fright (an issue that goes into the 4th level and dimension; note how 4th dimension is the same as the 4th level) has an accident on their bicycle and goes home and dreams of being chased for the rest of the night. Any aggravation at the physical dimension can aggravate specific, idiosyncratic 4th dimensional issues.

Welcome to a new year of my blog. I will continue to define these levels and dimensions in coming weeks.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

There has been a bit more controversy lately over a disease that does not fit neatly into the measurements of the physical plane (i.e, 1st level, see my Levels of Healing on the right). Chronic fatigue syndrome is perhaps best understood as “profound exhaustion” that interferes with living. Strangely, sometimes it can interfere with sleeping as well, yet often people with this disease sleep their life away.

Of course, any deep chronic disease can cause fatigue. Cancer for example, could cause fatigue, as could any auto-immune disease such as rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. Chronic fatigue syndrome, on the other hand, does not have the markers of other physical ailments. For the most part, it is simply fatigue. Often there is a history of mononucleosis in these people; thus the association of chronic fatigue with the Epstein Barr virus of mono.

In June the CDC did a randomized telephone survey using a “less restrictive methodology” (see the New York Times article NYT July 17th article on Chronic Fatigue) and found that about 1 in 40 adults ages 18 to 59 met the diagnostic criteria — an estimate 6 to 10 times higher than previously reported rates.

Here’s the rub, though, quoting from the same New York Times article,

Many patients and researchers fear that the expanded prevalence rate could complicate the search for consistent findings across patient cohorts. These critics say the new figures are greatly inflated and include many people who are likely to be suffering not from chronic fatigue syndrome but from psychiatric illnesses.

Within this paragraph we can find two glaring assumptions:

1) That the physical fatigue these people feel is distinct from what they feel on the mental level, i.e. that it is possible to make sharp distinctions between physical disease and mental disease.

2) That medicine can best serve people who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome by trying to hunt down an objective marker on the physical plane.

I see no evidence for #1, and consider #2 to serve the medical system itself rather than the patients it serves.

A medical illustrator with chronic fatigue syndrome quoted in the Times article says this:

There are many, many conditions that are psychological in nature that share symptoms with this illness but do not share much of the underlying biology.

This man is determined to believe that he has a physical illness, and that what is going on in his psyche is a separate matter altogether. We do not have to believe him.

My latest chronic fatigue case in my practice took me five hours to take. As always, it was a hunt for the deep confluence point where the physical symptoms intersect the underlying consciousness of the patient, knocking through that door to the 4th level prescription.

Here are my general observations about what is termed “chronic fatigue syndrome”:

1) First and foremost, I find it is almost invariably what the ancients would call “a disease of Mars.” (Note that “venereal disease,” comes from the ancients as well, specifically meaning a “disease of Venus.”) Mars for the ancients ruled over aggression, anger, and battle. Mars, coming from the Greek Aries, was a warrior. Without restraints, Mars is a belligerent tyrant that wants what he wants and walks over anybody to get it. On the other hand, if this part of ourselves does not function, we cannot assert ourselves well, and other people tend to walk over us.

The classic situation for problems is if the Mars instinct in us is strong but repressed. Anger is present—often it is outright rage—but not usually expressed. In some real sense, this aggression, this desire to engage life, which requires, at least to some degree, conflict and battle, turns inward in self-destruction. "Chronic fatigue" becomes a code phrase for deeper conflicts of the will.

2) Closely allied with this are the patient’s level 2 words to describe the feelings surrounding the physical symptoms. There often will initially be two separate lines of feelings words: those coming from the physical and those the patient uses in conjunction with his psyche. Examples of the latter might be “indifference,” “numb” “hopeless,” “helpless” and such. This simply means that a practitioner needs to press in deeper in the casetaking to find where the two begin come together. Not always is the case, though. Sometimes patients will immediately tell you “I cannot separate out my feelings of fatigue from my feelings of depression.”

3) As always, at the 4th level the 1st level diagnosis “chronic fatigue” sorts itself out into one of hundreds of different core conflicts at the level of consciousness.

4) It might be thought that having the patient work on expression of underlying repressed rage would help the fatigue. It might, but this would in effect be seeking a 2nd-3rd level solution of the problem, and will likely only partially help if it helps at all. What we have to understand is that 4th level issues are "in our cells." Healing the 4th level requires an energetic approach that addresses the 4th level.

5) It is interesting to note that Mars is also associated with the sex drive. Usually in chronic fatigue syndrome there are sexual issues, generally the loss of the sex drive--just another expression of a loss of the Mars life force.