The Alternative Healer

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.

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.

Some Thoughts on Gynecological Disease

My friends at Laughing Sage Wellness Group said this in a recent newsletter covering fibroid tumors of the uterus:

Dr. Christiane Northrup (author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom) calls fibroids an "illness of competition." At LSW, we believe that fibroids represent stored emotion - most typically anger or resentment. As modern women, we often don't have an outlet for the stressors in our lives, leaving them to be stored in our bodies as unprocessed emotions.

In this regard, listen to the words of one patient describing her fibroids:

The fibroids, they are that unseen thing. I always feel like I'm stuffed, like I have something stuffed inside of me. It's a heavy stuffed feeling…like bound, just tight.

An hour later in the case, listen to her describe her childhood:

My father raised us like children are to be seen and not heard. If you raised anything contrary you were being disrespectful. You had to keep it inside. It couldn’t be verbally expressed. Total oppression. Like being oppressed feeling that you had to be secretive about what you thought or felt about things. You had to make sure and be watchful to express any idea that might be contrary to a household belief.

When I asked her to describe "oppression" a bit more, she said:

Stuffed, like stuffed away, hidden, secretive, and it just doesn’t feel like anything could be revealed, it’s the opposite of feeling free to be able to express. Keep it all in. Keep it hidden. There is so much that wants to come out, so much that wants to be expressed, feeling of expression; there’s a lid on it. It can’t be expressed. It wants to come out. It just feels like bursting.

Is she talking about the emotions she felt in her household or is she talking about her fibroids? Notice that there is really no difference. This is the nature of what I call the 3rd dimension or level, where emotions and body come together. There is a hint of the 4th level here as well, which is the pattern in consciousness (strictly speaking, the middle and deep layers of consciousness) underlying this mind-body unity.

We might wonder about the "hidden" nature of the female reproductive system and exactly how this factors in with “stored emotion” and disease. I was fascinated to read this in Marnia Robinson’s Peace Between the Sheets:

I visited a community in Germany though whose founders viewed monogamy as an outdated, artificial economic arrangement between men and women. They condone simultaneous liaisons with partners as a welcome historical correction. Feelings of jealousy or resentment are highly censored.

For years they also held workshops to help people explore their sexuality fully and even set up an erotic academy. One told me that they halted that line of development when too many people became ill after the workshops. Incidentally, the women of the community have an unusually high incidence of pelvic inflammatory disease.

Pelivic inflammatory disease is a bacterial infection of the female reproductive tract. Note the line “Feelings of jealousy or resentment are highly censored,” and how this relates to the “keeping inside” of the fibroid case. In this community, with its emphasis on sexuality, it would make sense why these stored emotions would manifest in the sexual organs (2nd Chakra). This is not as clear in my fibroid case.

More of a mystery, though, is why workshops to help people explore their sexuality fully would coincide with “too many people becoming ill after the workshops.” A homeopath like myself could explore that deeply by taking the cases of individuals who became ill after such workshops. The specific conflicts (i.e. 4th level) out of which the disease would spring would be quite individual; nevertheless there is a broader theme here. Always we humans seem to have paid a price from expanding our sexual expression. It might be easy for some to speculate here, but I stop short of even making suggestions as to why, because I feel the issues are complex, and it is easy to see it in terms of our own personal issues.

Bedwetting

Occasionally I get follow-up “through the grapevine.”

About a month ago I treated a patient in his late teens for intractable bedwetting. Scheduling of follow-up had been delayed, and I had made a note to call the mother. Then I got a message from a woman regarding treatment for her grandson who had bedwetting. The second part of the message was that this particular teen had a dramatic response to his remedy and that his bedwetting was gone, therefore the call.

So that’s how I got follow-up on this bedwetting case. It brings to mind a couple important points:

1) People generally cling to a 1st level understanding of how healing occurs. That is, when they seek to understand if treatment in my clinic can restore health, they check to see if someone else with the same diagnosis has had results. From my perspective, the critical factor is whether I can take a crystal-clear case down to the 4th level. Any number of different prescriptions could cure a case of bedwetting. The diagnosis becomes more important when the disease on the physical level becomes severely debilitating or life-threatening, e.g. cancer, multiple sclerosis, lupus, other severe auto-immune disease, and such. At that point, diagnosis becomes more important in prognosis. In general, if a person’s health is not yet severely debilitated, assume that it is curable with good homeopathic treatment. Moreover, many cases of severely debilitating illness can still go to cure.

2) Many assume that when their physical diagnosis is better, i.e. when they are better on the 1st level, it makes sense to cease treatment. This creates some tension, because from my perspective, treatment should stop when the 4th level has clearly shifted. Often this occurs long after the physical symptoms are improved. Using this case of bedwetting as an example, there are some obvious emotional issues that go along with a young adult who wets the bed. In taking the case, there will likely be issues of dependency and fear. You can usually get a clue to the deeper aspects of the case by asking what the bedwetting prevents him from doing; this often opens a door down to the 4th level.

The important thing to realize is that treatment should conclude when the person is free from the deep fears. Of course, the fears will likely have had a significant shift when the bedwetting resolves, but it is usually not all the way gone. This is to look at health from the perspective of “inner freedom,” rather than simply a freedom from physical illness alone. Physical disease always has certain “inner hooks” within the psyche of the patient. These inhibit at the emotional level as well as the physical. In the case of this teen, there were confidence issues that I wanted to see resolve. Usually it takes a number of months longer for this inner freedom to occur after the physical ailment has resolved.

Treating Autism

Hardly a day goes by where the NYT does not publish front page news on the stormy issues of health care. Recently it published an article Autism Debate Strains a Family and its CharityArticle

The article details how the family of Bob Wright, who control the dollars of the charity Autism Speaks, have been in bitter dispute over the causes of autism. Their opinion of the cause of autism dictates the direction of research and treatment. If you have any stake in that argument, passions can flare.

The argument is between the parents and their daughter, who has an autistic child. The parents believe in the “genetic hypothesis” of autism, which maintains that autism is a disease caused by genetic abnormalities. The daughter believes in the “environmental hypothesis,” that environmental factors can deeply impact a child, collapsing him into autism. Specifically she believes that mercury in vaccines plays a the major role in this.

We cannot have a viewpoint on the cause of autism without a viewpoint on what it is to be human. The genetic model of autism, tenaciously rooted in biomedical science, believes that what we exist in a unidimensional, physical, mechanical (1st level) reality. The environmental hypothesis is trying to break out into a bit broader view, but still remains insecure venturing away from “the accepted science.”

Our pre-conceptions of who we are determine the questions we ask on autism and the direction of our research. As this case shows, research is often tied to the beliefs of those paying for the research. Scientists often believe that research “discovers” reality. More accurately, scientists ask questions in a way that gives credence to certain presuppositions about reality. If one does not believe in acupuncture, for example, one is unlikely to research it, conveniently overlooking any energetic dimension to life. When scientists have studied acupuncture it often excludes the Chinese belief in energy.

The great German poet/philosopher Johann Von Goethe summed up this idea. To paraphrase him, if we assume we live in a mechanical, dead universe, our science will prove a dead universe. If we assume we exist in a universe that is energetic and alive, our science will prove an alive universe. Science cannot exist entirely separate from spiritual development, no matter how much scientists want to believe in their own objectivity.

My current understanding of autism is that it is a curable disease that arises out of the 4th dimension of who we are (see my Levels of Healing on the right). Anyone who cares about autistic children should read Amy Lansky’s book, The Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy. Ms. Lansky, in vivid detail, describes how her child went from autistic to normal under the care of a homeopathic colleague of mine in California. It is an important story to read.

The following sums up my approach to the treatment of autistic children with homeopathy at this time:

--Even though I believe autism is usually curable with classical homeopathy, it is difficult because autistic children cannot talk to the homeopathic doctor, and language is the homeopath’s primary tool. Homeopathic doctors must hunt down clues to how a child’s autism is different than the autism of other children. On the surface, autism looks basically the same. At the 4th level, however, it represents a unique state.

--At deeper levels, autism represents an emotional retreat from the world. In this way it is related to schizophrenia. A basic question I have from 2nd level on down in any autistic case is what peculiar sensitivity has caused the child to escape utterly into an internal world? Even though on the surface autism presents as a child lost in a world of his own sensations, the extreme sensitivity (at the deeper levels) that has provoked this is unique. Irregardless of the scientists buzzing away in their labs, there is a profound spiritual dimension in autism.

--For any new autistic case, I recommend that I first take each of the parent’s cases fully to the 4th level. I also carefully examine the mother’s pregnancy. Then I take the child’s case and compare to both parents. Not only will this likely yield clues to the source of the child’s autism, one of their remedies may cure the child. If research dollars were being wisely spent on autism, money should be spent on having some of the best homeopaths take the mother’s case (I find the child’s state more often relates to the mother than the father) and then treat the child with multiple potencies of that remedy to see what kind of results are obtained.

--The nature of autism suggests homeopaths may need high homeopathic potencies (10M and 50M) because many autistic states are likely to be extremely intense. This is another area where we need focus and research. If you want to know more about homeopathic potencies, my post on homeopathic remedy preparation Link is important initial reading.

--It is likely that vaccines trigger the collapse into autism in certain cases, but I think it is highly unlikely that this applies to 100% of cases. There are likely many different triggers. We need to understand vaccines as “morbific influence.” See my recent blog on the HPV vaccine from a week ago (6/11/07).

--The 1st level dynamics surrounding autism are mysterious and intriguing. I suspect that “leaky gut syndrome” and mal-absorption of nutrients in the gut can often play into the expression of the disease in certain cases. Malnutrition may interfere with brain development.

The Alternative Treatment of Cancer

I have had some inquiries about my approach to cancer. It is a good question, because there needs to be an alternative approach to cancer. Let me give an example of why:

A few years ago a woman in her 80s presented at my office for treatment of her fatigue. I gave her a homeopathic remedy, and over the space of a couple months, her fatigue was gradually improving. Her progress was interrupted. Her allopathic doctor discovered a large mass in her lung. A biopsy was taken and a diagnosis of lung cancer came from the pathologist. Her doctor immediately sent her to the oncologist. This oncologist ended the appointment by telling her—the way a family member tells it he practically called it out over his shoulder while walking out the door—“You’ll start chemotherapy on Monday.”

After the first chemotherapy treatment her fatigue not only returned, it markedly increased. A month after starting chemotherapy she was dead. For me the most problematic part of this is that she did not want chemotherapy. I know this because she told me. A few members of her family urged her to have it. Her personality was such that she followed the oncologists’s order and bowed to the wishes of desperate family members, who were unable to deal with her—or their own—mortality. Not everyone in her family wanted her to have chemotherapy; it became a family deeply divided. After her death, there was anger and bitterness to process along with the grief. It was a disaster, medicine at its worst, and it all came with a million-dollar price tag. Perhaps needless to say, my opinion of oncology, never good to begin with, darkened, and has never quite recovered.

As this story suggests, chemotherapy is often an "eyewash," which does little to cure the cancer. There are some very important exceptions, of course, and it is important to know what these are—and to have a doctor who will tell you if you are unable to dig to find out for yourself. There are situations where I would choose chemotherapy if I had cancer, but not many. Given how debilitating chemotherapy tends to be, its low probability of cure in most instances, not to mention its enormous cost, alternatives are necessary.

From my perspective, cancer arises from deep, 4th level (if not even deeper) dynamics, and I can always see what is being expressed by the cancer after taking a good case. The problem is that cancer arises from the 4th level but soon becomes an overwhelming 1st level (physical/material) reality. Overwhelming 1st level problems (a broken bone, e.g.) need an approach at that level. Thus, even the best homeopaths have had difficulty treating it from the classical approach, because shifting the 4th level with an accurate prescription usually does not allow the 1st level disease to shift. It seems that cancer cells ignore the message to heal. It is because of this that an aggressive, often toxic 1st level treatment can be effective in many instances and needs to be considered.

For some time now, there has been a non-classical approach homeopathic approach to cancer. The approach has been more multiple-remedy homeopathy focused straight at the 1st level physical disease. Because I have strongly focused on 4th level treatment, I was not keen on hearing about it. I did have to admit that some of the stories of success may have been true. As I have come to acknowledge that cancer needs a 1st level approach, I have shifted my perspective. My current approach to cancer is as follows:

1) Take the case deep (4th level) and give the appropriate 4th level homeopathic remedy

2) Go after the cancer itself (1st or physical level) with low potency homeopathic remedies, taken on a daily basis, that equate with the physical disease.

3)  Give a well-honed, immune-boosting nutriceutical protocol. 

4)  Give a nutriceutical detoxification protocol 

5)  If available, use an acupuncturist who knows how to unload the tremendous toxicity that develops in the meridians (3rd level). See my following blog from last year to read about this: Detoxification and Cancer

The HPV Vaccine: Why the Bad Effects?

Not surprisingly, we are beginning to see reports about harm from the new human papilloma virus vaccine (Gardasil). I recently came across the following: ( Judicial Watch Link )

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released documents obtained from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, detailing 1,637 reports of adverse reactions to the vaccination for human papillomavirus (HPV), Gardasil. Three deaths were related to the vaccine. One physician’s assistant reported that a female patient 'died of a blood clot three hours after getting the Gardasil vaccine.' Two other reports, on girls 12 and 19, reported deaths relating to heart problems and/or blood clotting. . . Indeed, 77% of the adverse reactions reported are typical side effects to vaccinations. But other more serious side effects reported include paralysis, Bells Palsy, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and seizures. . . 'The FDA adverse event reports on the HPV vaccine read like a catalog of horrors,' stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton." etc.

This is no great surprise, but it raises the question why are vaccines capable of causing harm, and why is this so strongly downplayed by the medical establishment? After all, a vaccine contains infectious agents in a dead or highly weakened state. A dead virus in itself cannot produce disease. Nevertheless, a vaccine is what Dr. Samuel Hahnemann initially termed a morbific influence. Morbific means “capable of causing harm or disease.” Let’s think about this broadly.

On the physical plane, we can divide disease-causing influences into two general categories. The first is infectious agents such as viruses and bacteria. I do not include vaccines in this category. The second is toxic substances that we come in contact with, by accident or by choice. Drinking too much alcohol could be said to be a morbific influence.

There are also morbific influences that are energetic (i.e. affecting the Qi carried on acupuncture meridians), and, closely linked to these are emotional influences that strongly impact our energetic system (eg. grief, which may energetically disturb the lungs so much that it triggers disease). I would include exposure to electromagnetic energy here, which if strong enough can significantly disturb us.

Anything injected into the body has an effect both on the material and energetic planes. The immune system of the body can—and does--react to the injection of a foreign substance into the body. Yet, vaccines are also energetically potent. We know this because they are capable of producing “side effects” that have nothing to do with the nature of the infectious agent they contain. If a child gets a vaccine and the next day ends up with seizures or is partially paralyzed, unable to stand, this is because the child’s energetic system is profoundly disturbed.

Disturbing the energetic system of a person is quite a different matter than the physical plane after effects of drinking too much alcohol. Too much alcohol can cause vertigo and vomiting—a direct result of the alcohol itself. Disturbing the energetic system can cause disease to occur in a way specific to the individual. In other words, if a child ends up with paralysis of muscles after a vaccination, it is because the child has a deeper susceptibility to weakness (i.e. 4th level, see levels of healing on right) that disturbing his energetic system brought out. Thus, when physicians argue that the HPV vaccine cannot cause paralysis because it is "not part of the side effect profile of the vaccine," they miss the point. Vaccines disturb our system to a lesser or greater degree. What the establishment does not acknowledge is that certain individuals will have reactions to specific vaccines that lie on the “greater” end of the reactive spectrum. That this makes no sense based on what they learned in medical school only means that their understanding of what is human needs to broaden.

The Unhealing Wound: The Patient's Story

In my last post, I briefly described a case of homeopathic Agathis australis (the New Zealand kauri tree). I gave the doctor’s side of the case. Today I am posting the patient’s side. As promised, she sent me her detailed account of what happened after she took the remedy. You may want to review my last post, The Unhealing Wound, before continuing.

For people unfamiliar with classical homeopathy, I should mention that intense reactions occur to a correct remedy less than 5% of the time. I do not often see it. Nevertheless, this is such a case. Realize that taking a homeopathic remedy does not produce anything that is not already there. If the body (and mind) has held on to a lot of toxicity, a good remedy helps in expelling it. Realize also, in relation to this case, that classical homeopathy is the best way to cure someone of herpes outbreak. This patient is very unlikely to see an outbreak of it again. Her outbreak, in some mysterious way, needed to occur for her to heal.

Detoxifying reactions exist, and this is such a case. This patient’s reaction to the remedy was dramatic in a holistic way; that is, both the mind and the body reacted vigorously. In spite of its difficult content, I am happy to post what she has to say, because it shows first, just how complex healing can be when it is deep, and second, how profound classical homeopathy is when the healer hits the mark. The point is that the emotions life brings to us can be terribly complex, and healing may take us straight into them. Those who are interested in an unvarnished look at the complexities involved are in for a treat. I thank her for her candor. Her story follows:

The night I took the Kauri remedy was like any other night. Nothing stood out of the ordinary. In fact, I dreamed nothing and, upon waking, I still felt the same. Perhaps this day I woke up feeling more tired than usual. What I did know was that it was still very wintery cold outside and I was slightly depressed.

Another day passed and I still felt bad. I found myself wading around in a thick soup of emotions surrounding an incident with a minister who I had seen for spiritual counseling. It was nearing the one-year anniversary of when I filed paperwork that would start another difficult ethics investigation into his sexual misconduct. During the investigation, this man had promised the Ethics Committee that he would set up a meeting so that he could apologize to me face-to-face. Said meeting never happened. This man and his ethics violation robbed me of four years of my life and vitality. I was angry that I never got an apology.

The third day greeted me with an overall sense of fatigue and lethargy and a menstrual period that arrived a week and a half early. I dragged myself out of bed (like I usually did on cold dark mornings) and managed to get myself to work on time. Mid-morning, I felt as though I suddenly hit a brick wall. My joints ached and every bone in my body hurt. Then the chills emerged. The rigors I experienced nearly shook me off my chair. These symptoms manifested so quickly that I at first thought it was a nasty case of influenza. To be safe, I phoned Dr. Branch to let him know what was happening.

The drive home was long and painful as the intensity of my physical symptoms brought me to tears. I felt as though my joints were filled with searing hot liquid and that they would explode if I exerted myself too much. Strangely, I also felt as though all my bones where completely separate from my joints and that everything was stacked on top of itself with only my skin holding everything intact. Once home, I piled blankets on top of my bed and crawled inside and shivered myself to sleep. By evening, my fever burned brightly and continued for three days. I slept a lot and ate little.

During this time, my body started expelling all kinds of toxins. I was constantly changing my bedclothes as “night sweats” soaked the sheets. No longer able to smoke cigarettes because I was so ill, I was coughing up mucus continuously. And then I was coughing so hard that I discovered what “stress incontinence” was all about. My urine smelled like horse urine and stung like acid every part of my skin that it touched. My throbbing lymph nodes were nearly the size of large marbles. I had never been this sick in my life but I also knew that toxins and built-up stress chemicals were exiting my body. I began to marvel at my body’s healing ability until I got out a mirror and discovered what the stinging urine was really trying to tell me. I was horrified and repulsed by what I saw.

Herpes.

Intuitively, I knew what it was even though I had never before seen it on my body or anyone else’s. I didn’t even know where it came from. I had been in a monogamous relationship for the past two years and both my partner and I thought we were clean. In disbelief, I sat down and cried—my head started to spin from all of the emotions I was feeling. After confirming with a Nurse Practitioner that it really was Herpes, I called Dr. Branch to fill him in on this latest development. In his usual inquisitive fashion, he asked what I was feeling.

One word came out of my mouth: “SHAME.”

“…Now everyone will know what I’ve been doing. I am dirty and tainted. No one will love me ever again.”

After hanging up, I started to cry again and once these tears started, they flowed for three days. I never felt more alone and abandoned in my life. I felt such overwhelming emotional and spiritual pain as though I was facing complete annihilation. Shame poured out with my tears and continued to flow out of every pore in my body. Then the grief came.

At first it was a trickle. Then it became a torrent. Waves of grief poured from the depths of my soul. With my body being so weakened from four days of fever, I could not maintain old defense systems that previously kept these emotions at bay. I cried so freely and easily that for the first time in my life, big wails and sobs came deep from within and shook my entire body. Tears tasted old and mucus ran thick like molasses.

Memories of past sexual abuse floated to the surface. I sat and witnessed myself as a little girl losing my sexual innocence in a swimming pool to a cousin. I mourned lost innocence. I saw myself again being drugged and date raped and sat with myself in compassion despite my poor choices. I sat there witnessing the many sexual transgressions and victimizations that peppered my life and felt myself filling up with love and compassion. I sat there holding myself in the light as I watched how time and time again I put my health and safety in the arms of another man—how I would blindly trust him with my life—how I gave away my power in exchange for what I thought was love. And at the same time, I took a good look at myself and how I used sex and my seductive power to manipulate and meet my needs. I saw victim and victimizer all at once.

The more I watched these scenes float by, the more compassion I felt for myself. By the time that I had no tears left to cry, my heart felt like it expanded three feet outside my chest. It hurt to have a heart this big and to love so much. I felt so exposed and vulnerable. Simultaneously, I felt tender and sweet. Illuminated in pure white innocence, my past ended and my future began. I reclaimed my virginity.

Once I was able to process these intense emotions, I realized how much my toxic shame colored my relationship with the world and myself. I had always felt that there was something inherently wrong with me—that if people knew who I really was, that they would not love me. I was so dirty and tainted that no one could love me anyway. After all, I was an illegitimate child born in shame to a 14-year old mother and given up for adoption. I had experienced sex at a very young age and even then, I inherently knew it was wrong. I remember as a child wanting to become a nun in the Catholic faith that I was raised in—but I sincerely believed that God would not want me because I was sexually impure and, therefore, unworthy. As an adult, I still felt this way. This barrier of shame and unworthiness kept me from loving myself and from truly connecting with others in a positive healthy way. Robbed of my joy, I would attract relationships and life situations based on this woundedness.

I struggled to disown my shame. In doing so, I became even more disconnected from my Self. I felt as though my personality were fractured. As strange as this sounds, I was well aware that different aspects of my Self had never really gotten acquainted with one another. This lack of integration diminished my power while keeping me in a perpetual victim state and more prone to codependency.

Now that I no longer carry this burden of Shame, I cannot believe how my life has shifted. In the week that my body was going through the healing crisis, I lost 10 pounds. (I feel that much of this was actually emotional and spiritual baggage.) Additional weight started to melt off my body because I no longer feel the need to “fill” my bottomless stomach and maintain physical boundaries with a thick layer of body fat. I’ve quit smoking and drinking caffeine as I have no desire to create ill health. I am eating to nourish my body instead of stuffing it with food. For the first time in my life, I feel happy, healthy, and WHOLE!

Interestingly, a wart fell off my left hand a week after the healing crisis ended. And those little ulcers in my nose disappeared.

As for the Herpes, well, the sores healed within three days after they first presented themselves and I have not had another outbreak since. I feel as though I have a platoon of little armed foot soldiers guarding the entrance to my sacred cave. Their presence is assisting in helping me maintain healthy sexual boundaries. I ended the sexual part of my relationship with my partner of two years (who, by the way, tested negative for Herpes) and am going to remain celibate for a while—until I find the man who wants to father my future children and grow old with me. If anything, disclosing that I have Herpes will separate the men from the boys. I am not bitter about this because I feel as though I am blessed and deeply healed. Anyhow, this virus is not who I am. Herpes showed me what I desperately needed to see in myself. I have a feeling that it will go dormant and I will never have to deal with it again. If the Herpes does resurface, it is obviously going to tell me something important.

My experience with the Kauri remedy has been absolutely amazing. I continue to interact with my world in a much more positive and healthy way. I notice little things—like looking in the mirror and seeing a fully-grown woman. To the average person this may not seem important, but I had literally felt like a child much of the time. I have become more grown-up but I have also become younger at heart (people have also told me that I look younger!). I am less rigid and more flexible with my world and myself. I am more capable of forgiveness. My dreams are more vivid and powerful. I am more able to remain true to myself and stay on my life’s path. And I never thought I could honestly say this, but I feel beautiful…and I even love myself!

Unexpected circumstances and disappointments may still catch me off guard, but I bounce back and regain my centeredness much more quickly. Recently, I found myself reacting to a situation where I felt betrayed by a spiritual teacher I had studied with for two years. The feelings and emotions were so intense that I found myself back in my old depressive pattern of negative rumination and irrational thinking. At one point, fear gripped me when I thought I might get stuck feeling that way. Those little nose sores even returned. I called Dr. Branch to let him know I relapsed and he instructed me to repeat a dose. Within two days, I was laughing at myself and pondering, “What in the world got me so upset?” I was able to ground myself so that I could see the truth in the situation and realize that it had nothing to do with me. How powerful and liberating that was!

I am still baffled at how quickly things shift for me every time I take one 30C dose of Kauri. I have been through years of therapy and I am certain that many more years of therapy would still have not gotten me to the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual place where I am today. When I first met Dr. Branch, I knew that Homeopathy stimulated the body’s natural healing response—but I did not fully understand that an immune response could actually heal a wound (shame) caused by abandonment and betrayal. I am so grateful that Dr. Branch found my matching remedy before I developed any physical manifestation of disease. Now that I know what it actually feels like to be happy, whole, and healthy, I can only imagine what diseases I would have suffered had I continued to trudge through years of dark and putrid toxic shame.

The Case of the Unhealing Wound

I have one case particularly useful in educating people on classical homeopathy, and specifically, what I mean by “4th level” prescribing. I have included a diagram of the levels below to help bring understanding. There is an added opportunity, because the patient in this case is writing about her experience and will make an appearance on this blog. My explanation, the diagram, and the patient's input taken together should provide a deeper look.

She presented with depression, low self-confidence, inability to concentrate, and complained of being “whacked” emotionally, by which she meant being “super-emotional” and “frequently on the verge of tears.” Easily “knocked off her base,” she found it increasingly easier to stay alone, mainly because of her tendency to change herself to fit her idea of what other people wanted of her. Even though she had plenty of friends, she felt alone anyway. She described her aloneness as “the empty set…emptiness.” She also told me

I have gone thru periods where you eat because you feel better, where you just keep eating until you can’t eat anymore…knowing you have something you need to fill.

Another important part of her case was a strong need for connection. She had been adopted and felt that she had “never bonded with her mother.” She romanticized about finding a soulmate and being “at one with the universe.” Describing herself as “mystic”, she had an intense searching in a spiritual direction, for union with God. On the other hand, she had reached a point where she felt “cut off” from other people and God. This experience of being cut off she also described as “disconnected” and “fractured”:

Just the fluidity of who I am is not there... all separate pieces but nothing really melds together.

On the basis of these feelings I gave her a homeopathic remedy from the conifer (pine tree) family of remedies. It didn’t work. It took me a while to figure out that I gave the wrong tree in this family.

Over the time I treated her an important part of her story was a romantic relationship that had developed with a minister she had originally sought out for spiritual counseling. She came out from this relationship feeling “betrayed” and “wounded.” Every time she came back there was no change in this. Early in each follow-up she returned to this same story and the wound it had opened in her.

I became more determined to hunt down the specific conifer she needed. In reviewing everything in detail, I found it notable that a main remedy for “longing for a soulmate” was the huge tree Sequoia. I considered giving her this remedy, but parts did not fit. I went over her physical symptoms again, looking for clues that would mark a confluence point. I then looked closely at these words of hers:

I have always had these little ulcers in my nose, worse in winter, but they never heal, little ulcers, like little cuts, and they hurt. They sting. They are painful
It’s just like a wound. Open and raw skin, when the air is dry, my nose bleeds. It always reminds me that they are…
Open wounds, every time you blow your nose you are reminded of them, all I have to do is move my mouth, and they are torn open again. A week by the sea completely healed them

This idea of a bleeding, ulcerating wound that never healed began to suggest a 4th level confluence point between her physical symptoms in her nose and the emotional wound she had from betrayal.

Searching in the family of conifers, I found the following excerpt written about a tree in New Zealand, the kauri tree, latin name Agathis australis.

The resinous gum…oozes (in the case of old wounds, for hundreds, even thousands of years) from damaged branches forming stalactites aloft and corresponding stalagmites upon the tree's mighty roots and the forest floor below. Indeed this gum, which in the Victorian era had commercial value as a furniture polish, was 'bled' from the trees in the manner of maple syrup, while solidified deposits were dug up from logged forest sites. Lumps of aged resin used to be a common find, washed up on Northland beaches.

The kauri tree has an unhealing wound. I gave her this remedy, and the result was dramatic. I will leave it to her to give the details of her response and post them as soon as available. The chart below outlines how I thought about this case:

click for larger diagram

Adolescent Depression

I enjoy treating adolescents, because to give them a deep-acting homeopathic remedy changes the rest of their life. They often come into my office dressed angrily, ill at ease in their own bodies and in the world. One of my more interesting cases recently came dressed entirely in black, with an occasional skull and cross bones. He stared at me sullenly, wondering why he was here. His mother, of course, dragged him in to see me. He had been suicidal.

I asked him what bothered him. He told me:

Memories that are plaguing me.
People know things about me that I don’t really want them to.
Things that I don’t really want to talk about.

Then he went immediately to his dreams:

My dreams, in most of them I die. I am hacked into little tiny pieces by pirates. I’m somewhere and being shot. Various ways of dying. Maybe falling off of a really tall building.

I asked him what happened in these dreams where he died.

I go through all the pain that would come with the dying. It goes black and I go into a different dream.

I asked him about the dream of the pirates.

I was in a pirate's ship. They found out that I was there and hung me up in the ropes on the deck. Cut me open. It happened a bunch of times. I bleed and fall down, go back to things as usual. Another time, they put me up and sliced open my throat. I was only hanging by a vertebra. The 'me' that was up in the ropes fell down and died. Then I was another person. I didn’t feel much. I didn’t really feel them slicing me open. After I fell down they hacked me into tiny pieces.

Is it surprising he is depressed? No. Most important, look at the form his depression is taking. Every depression is something exactly specific to itself.

Later in the case, I asked him directly about his nature. He told me,

I have a tendency to forget things that matter, like schoolwork.
Things that have been traumatizing in one shape or form

Notice this word traumatizing. It is the key to the entire case. I asked him to tell me more about trauma.

I guess it’s something that happens in a way that you can’t forget. To me it was just traumatizing the way it happened and why.

This brings us back to his chief complaint, about the memories that plagued him. These memories he directly related to trauma. It was a strange, illogical jump. How would we know this without sitting in front of him and seeking to understand his experience, carefully asking him what he felt? It was important to find out specifically what trauma meant to him. He said

The medical aspect of it is a big head injury. Emotional trauma, something that has happened in such away that it hurts.

How does it hurt?

Kind of that burning pain. It’s almost like I want to take a spoon and gouge out that part of my brain that makes me remember.

Not surprising that at the physical level he had a tendency to hurt himself. He would reach a point where the pain would be so much he would hit his head against the wall or even cut himself. When he felt hurt by other people, he wanted to punch them. This is simply the outer reflection of the inner sense of being injured.

His entire case was about injury and trying to manage the pain of a wound. It made no difference whether he was talking about emotional or physical. To him, trauma at the emotional level or physical level were essentially the same. Thus, the physical plane punching or bruising intersected his deep consciousness in the idea of “injury” or “trauma.”

Many people are familiar with the remedy Arnica, from the daisy family, which is used to treat bruises. Arnica is a remedy for trauma. If you fall and hit your knee on a rock, causing a big bruise, taking a dose of Arnica will likely cause the bruise to disappear quickly. Other remedies in the daisy family treat injury and trauma as well. The remedy I gave this young man was a plant from the daisy family, Echinacea prepared homeopathically in the 200th dilution. This is the purple coneflower. Echinaceae has been a hot topic around treatment and prevention of the common cold. The herbal use of Echinacea has never impressed me. However for a case like this one, in homeopathic form, it is a different story.

This patient came back a month later and his entire energy had changed. He was one of those cases that you could tell from the moment he entered the office that something deep had shifted. He had a new lightness and reported to me that he had been happy since taking the remedy. His speech and dreams notably contained much less much less violence. This is the wonder of homeopathy.