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. 



 

Cellular Memory--and its Relationship to Classical Homeopathy

I heard a true story recently that brings insight into life and healing.  It is about an eight year-old girl who had a heart transplant.  The story is related by members of her transplant team.  Malcolm Robinson has written about it, Case 6 in his studies of cellular memory. 

The donor heart for her transplant had become available with the sudden death of a woman.  The transplant went well.  The only hitch in her treatment came a few months later.  The girl began having vivid nightmares.  In these terrible dreams she was being attacked and stabbed to death by a man.  The dream would repeat, revealing a new detail.  The panic, and the being stabbed remained the same. 

This waking up at night in abject fear was traumatic for the girl.  Moreover, it was unusual--the girl had never had nightmares like this before.  They were entirely new and out of context.

Members of her team, which included psychiatric care, puzzled over this, and finally, as the girl continued to have these disturbing nightmares, one of them delved deeper into the matter.   What turned up is both astonishing and, in the end, the most “logical” explanation. 

The woman to whom the heart originally belonged was the victim of an attack and had died suddenly:  she was stabbed to death.  The dreams of the girl who had received the transplanted heart exactly reflected her violent demise.  Based on the details of these dreams, the attacker was caught and tried.  In some way, the cells of this woman’s heart carried the memory of her traumatic, violent end, and this cellular memory was transplanted with the heart.  

Cellular memory is some form of energy--an energy powerful enough to stir up intense fear and nightmares.  This energy is not yet measurable by any machine yet invented by biomedical technology--and without this “proof” many scientists would deny its existence.  Nevertheless, almost all of us have experiences that are difficult to explain in any other way.

Cellular memory has a close relationship to classical homeopathy.  The preparation of a homeopathic remedy involves extensive dilution and shaking of each dilution, leaving no trace of the original substance.  There is only the “memory” left in the triple distilled alcohol of the original substance.  This leads me to believe that homeopathy works on a similar energetic plane as cellular memory.  In the same way as the cellular memory from a transplanted organ can disturb a woman’s dreams, a small, infinitesimal dose of substance in a homeopathic remedy can energetically match and shift an ill patient to health.  

Classical homeopathy likely affords the deepest  energetic therapy we have. It is able to reach places and heal problems where everything else has failed.

How In-Tune are You?

My practice has a new member:   a machine to measure the acupuncture meridians.  I have thought about naming him--or her.  I welcome any suggestions.

This machine, developed by a chinese medicine doctor,  gives an accurate read of how “in-tune” or “out-of-tune” the energy of your body is.  More than that, it will tell about what internal organs are imbalanced.

This, of course, has to do with chinese medicine, and it may make you wonder what is an acupuncture meridian anyway?  We could say, “It’s a pathway of vital energy that runs along certain points of the body.”  That’s true, but it doesn’t begin to answer what a meridian actually is or why they are important.  

When explaining a meridian, It is easier to take an entirely different approach.  Say for example, someone close to you dies.  You grieve, and this affects the energy of the lungs.  The vital energy of the lung emerges from the lung and runs  along a pathway of  points on each arm, ending at the thumbnail:  the lung meridian of chinese medicine.  

Why, you ask, does grieving affect my lungs?  It’s somewhat of a mystery, but not entirely.  There actually is a deeper reason too complicated for this newsletter.  For the moment, it is easier to convince you that it is true.  

If you think back to a time when you lost someone or something you loved, you may remember feeling a heaviness on the chest, needing to take deep breaths.  When you cry uncontrollably, your lungs are very much involved.  You breath irregularly, and if you tune in closely, you will feel a need to suck in air:  you sob.  

If, in dealing with a unexpected loss, you are able to sense a heaviness in your chest, you have just tuned in to a change in the vital energy in your lungs.  That change will be reflected in the energy of the lung meridian.  

But say, for some reason, the energy of your lungs is chronically low.  Feeling that way day in and day out, not having anything to compare it to, how would you ever know?  That’s the problem, you don’t know.  And it’s important.  

Why?  Because energy imbalances in your body have everything to do with the symptoms you are having--or about to be having.  By measuring the meridians with the machine, we can use this information to evaluate your current health as well as to track your progress and fine tune treatment.  

This is fundamentally different than the laboratory measurements we MD’s typically perform.  The problem with these lab measurements is that they only show up after the underlying energy has been messed up, and likely messed up for a significant amount of time.  

A vital energy pathway in your body can be messed up in one of two ways: It can have stagnant or toxic energy, or it can have too little, deficient energy.  

Perhaps you have heard of a case of someone who had lung cancer who felt a “coldness” in the chest.  People who are sensitive to energy could actually feel this lack of vital energy by putting their hands on the lung area and sensing that it is devoid of vitality.  What is this saying?  It is saying that the vital energy in the lungs is profoundly deficient in this case of lung cancer.  With the capacity to precisely measure, this lung energy deficiency would have shown up before the cancer actually emerged,  Now we are talking good medicine.  Why do you want a test to discover your lung cancer AFTER it is growing uncontrollably in you?  That’s the best you get right now.

My practice has always been an uncompromising devotion to the best medicine on the planet.  Almost four years in the planning, now I am taking another--vital--step in that direction.  Thanks for sticking around on the journey.  You will be rewarded for it.   

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.

 

Emotional Energy

Recently I met a healer in New York who works in an unusual way.  She moves her hands above her client's body, feeling its energy field.  She tunes into the energy of the person in a way that allows her to pick up on an emotional energy.  She described to me one case where, in moving her hands, she sensed a deep shame coming from a certain part of her client's body.  She worked on this client to attempt to cleanse and remove this shame.  How do we go about understanding what she is doing?.

I think it's easiest to think of this healer as working in the 3rd dimension -- the Emotional Energy Body.  People familiar with my writing know that I have distinguished four dimensions in which healers work:

1) The Physical Body
2) The Vital Energy Body
3) The Emotional Energy Body
4) The Conscious Energy  Body

The 3rd dimension is the level I have had the hardest time understanding.  Nevertheless, I'm convinced it exists, as ancient traditions have suggested, and I would describe it as follows:

Emotions, rather than being an experience "in the brain," appear to run through every cell of our body.  The emotional energy body can exist separately from the body as a type of energy "cloud," and yet it exists within the physical body.

In some real way, this emotional energy carries memories which "lodge" in certain parts of our physical body.  Thus it holds memories of past trauma or pain as well as joy and contentedness.

This directly influences the energy of the acupuncture meridians.  For example, grief affects the vital energy (level 2) of the lungs.

Another example of the emotional body affecting the physical body:

Why, in times of relationship stress, do people often gain excessive weight?

It may be that the relationship stress triggers patterns of old memories at the level of emotion.  In turn, the Emotional Body stimulates the vital energy of the acupuncture meridians, and this triggers the physical body to aggressively store fat.

In such cases, an excessive weight gain may be, literally and metaphorically, the patient's body responding to a call for protection - or increased insulation - in a time of emotional vulnerability.  Thus, to successfully treat the excessive weight gain, healers may need to address the Emotional Body.

Stimulant Medications

What are the long-term consequences of taking taking medications that alter our brain chemistry?  Taking mind-altering drugs such as Prozac, Xanax, and Ritalin has become almost as accepted as pouring milk on our breakfast cereal.  Recently I took the case of a sensitive, intelligent patient, and she spoke to me about taking stimulant medications:

The stimulants...are harsh.  It's euphoria, that's the feeling that people lock into.   You have to be very careful with people taking stimulants, they are so happy and so bigger than life; but it's all a façade.  They stimulate that area of the brain that regulates pleasure.   They stimulate it so much it becomes trigger happy.  Try to taper it off these medications, and  it won't let you.  It gets tired and it stops working well. 
Stimulants limit the highs and lows of feelings.   It's important to be conscious, and to have differentiated levels of feelings, yet stimulant medications cut off those highs and lows, and you become indifferent to lots of things that you shouldn't be indifferent to.  Dexedrine and Ritalin are related to metamphetimines.  Why are so many people hooked on cocaine?  It's along that same thread, except these are probably a little more mild...When I was on them in 1991, I took the Dexedrine, and it took me 2 yrs to get off of them.

In another instance, a woman said this about her stimulant medications:

I really don't know if I can undo what I've done to my brain.  So many years of this really messes with your brain's set points for motivation, reward, goal-seeking, pleasure, sense of values, action, intuition... So many things.  I miss who I was before. How everything felt.  Before everything felt so warped.  Before feeling itself became so warped.

These two accounts are not the last word.  Nevertheless, reading them is enough to make us wary about psychiatrists or school teachers who tell you stimulants--or any mind-altering drug, for that matter--are "necessary."  As soon as stimulant medications are introduced, the child (or adult) has an issue that may grow into a long-term problem.  Taking a drug that alters one's experience of pleasure may not come without a corresponding reaction of indifference.  Such a choice deserves careful evaluation and a plan for how to get off of them.

There is one other important consideration in taking stimulant medications.  I am reminded of a child with extreme hyperactivity that I saw during my residency training.  At the residency, we treated him with stimulant medications to bring down his hyperactivity and help him focus.  The stimulant medications perhaps helped some.  He still remained quite hyperactive.  Around the age of 10, this child died, devastating the family.  Cause:  heart failure brought on by taking high dosages of stimulant medications.  Stimulant medications do just that--they stimulate, and the heart is involved as well.

Stimulants complicate the relationship we have with our deeper self.  Because they act by numbing or cutting off feelings that are unpleasant, they interfere with how we strive for inner tranquility and spiritual wholeness.  This is likely true, to a greater or lesser degree, for all mind-altering drugs.  Stimulant medications, though, bring some of the more difficult issues in the treatment arena.  This makes their increased use, particularly in children, a matter worthy of our concern. 

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.

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.

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.