The Alternative Healer

A Remedy for Grief

The other night, over dinner in New York, a friend described being at a zoo years ago and standing in front of a lone elephant.  There were two fences separating her from the elephant; and it reached its trunk out towards her, stretching its full length, trying to touch her.  She described this in vivid, heartfelt detail (my friend’s remedy, not surprisingly, is from animal source), feeling this elephant’s loneliness across the years.   

Elephants are gentle, magnificent animals.  Nevertheless, gentle though they may be, last time I was in Africa, a bull elephant chased my party a half mile.  Best not to threaten them or approach a male feeling a bit rambunctious.  Highly cooperative and communal, elephants are known to gather for celebrations.  Mating is one such occasion.  The main one comes once a year, at the time of the rains, when the water holes are full.  Groups of elephants come from all over, congregate and have a party.  There may be as many as 2000, whooping it up and celebrating life. 

In homeopathy, the remedy associated with grief is the plant Ignatia.  The animal kingdom also has a remedy that some have come to associate with grief:  the elephant.  It is obviously not the only side of this remedy.  There is a huge capacity for joy; yet Nancy Herrick’s proving (see her book Animal Mind, Human Voices) of the milk of this animal brought out the incredible sadness it can have.  Elephant herds are extremely close.  Ultra-attuned to one another, when the herd is on the move and one elephant encounters a problem, the entire herd will stop.  Undoubtedly it is this interconnectivity that creates such a tremendous susceptibility to grief. 

Think of this interconnectivity, and then imagine what it must be like to watch as poachers decimate the ivory-bearing members of the herd.  They are shot with high-powered rifles, and the rest of the herd must watch as their tusks are cut off.  Mortally wounded, they do not die right away.  They slowly bleed to death as the surviving members helplessly watch.  In the proving, there were many images of brutal beatings, blood, and gore. 

Poaching did not come into full swing until the 1960s and 1970s.  Nancy Herrick did her proving relatively recently, after poaching became a horrible reality.  One could ask, if the proving of the elephant were done 500 years ago, before poaching was significant, would it have been different?  Of course, there is no way to know for sure, but my answer would be probably not.   As I understand it, the violence and grief must lie deep within the pattern of consciousness of this animal.

The natural world has many mysteries.  It is the privilege of the homeopath to explore them.  I wonder, is the elephant’s huge capacity for joy set off by its capacity for grief?  I think so.  More difficult for me to understand is the tragedy that has befallen the elephant herds.  They are so few in number compared to years ago, with all the elderly members of their herds lost, which apparently is causing many problems for the socialization of the young.  Why, do you suppose, that Ganesha, the elephant god in India, has to do with good fortune and the removal of obstacles?   

Yet, for those humans who need and take the homeopathic remedy made from elephant milk, going from dark back into the light can be profound. 

Dr. Chhabra's San Diego Conference

Last week I was in San Diego at Divya Chhabra’s four-day conference.  I have been busy ever since integrating new information, which Dr. Chhabra tends to supply in abundance. I have posted a few pictures from the event in a photo album below, including pictures of Dr. Malcolm Smith and Dr. Robert Gramlich, the colleagues I spoke with at the Beverly Hills event a couple weeks ago. 

Dr. Chhabra presented information on many new remedies.  In the animal kingdom, she covered lizards, turtles, crocodiles, tortoises, and birds.  She also presneted information on radioactive remedies, including Radium, Francium, the Actinides and Lanthanides.  This is important information, because people that need these remedies are not uncommon.  I have found her material medica (i.e. information on remedies/substances) to be second to none.  I use her information daily in my practice.   

Dr. Chhabra practices in Mumbai, India.  Her ideas, in conjunction with Dr. Rajan Sankaran’s, have formed the basis of my professional life.  Most of my close colleagues use Dr. Sankaran’s casetaking method.  I am somewhat unusual in my choice of using Dr. Chhabra’s ideas as the basis of my casetaking.  Dr. Chhabra is somewhat “famous” among her homeopathic colleagues for her patience and long cases.  Dr. Sankaran’s method has a reputation of being quicker, which attracts many homeopaths.  I am doubtful whether speed is a good criterion for casetaking.   Yet even Sankaran, when he has a difficult case, can spend hours taking the case.  There are no shortcuts in homeopathy.

On Being Conscious

A patient I treat who I know well has been in relationship crisis. She told me, “I went into a place where I was closed off and couldn’t ask for help.”  This is important in follow-up to homeopathic treatment.  People who have a high level of consciousness are immediately able to discern when they need a repeat of the remedy.  At the other end of the scale, people slip back, needing a repeat dose, and are not able to pick up the phone to call you.  As a doctor, it is important for me to know the difference.  Thus, in treating people, I tend to make a judgment on the level of consciousness the patient has.   

As I have mentioned, treating both mental and physical disease with homeopathy has to do with consciousness.  I had a case years ago of a woman who panicked whenever she was riding in a car.   In fact, just getting in a car could make her panic.   She had no clarity with this.  She simply got in a car and found herself in a “fog of panic,” so to speak.  Her heart started beating rapidly.  She started sweating.  She felt out of control, and so on. 

If someone pulls a knife on me when I’m walking on the street, and I panic, this would be appropriate.  However, to get in a car and panic as if someone is pulling a knife on you is not appropriate.  This is a “lack of being conscious,” specifically she cannot differentiate between what is truly dangerous and what is low risk.  To give the correct homeopathic remedy, the woman comes back and says, “Oh, I can ride in a car now and I feel fine.”  That is to say, “No more fog.  I can see clearly now.”   From a place too deep for her to see, this directly links to physical symptoms; that is, her heart no longer beats crazily; she no longer sweats, etc.

I first began to think deeply about this when I had a case of the homeopathic remedy from rabies.  I gave the patient the remedy; she did not know what it was.  All her physical and emotional symptoms improved dramatically after the remedy.  Two months later, when she was in my office, while talking about something completely unrelated, she blurted out, “Oh, you mean like a cat with rabies?” 

This took me off guard.  I stared at her for a moment and simply said, “Yes.”  Here, out of the blue, without any direct knowledge from me, was the image of rabies, coming from her unconscious mind into her conscious.  This was a marvelous sign.   It signified her coming into a fuller state of consciousness.  Through taking the rabies remedy, she was able to become more conscious of its deep relation to her emotional and physical symptoms.  She was, in a manner of speaking, “coming out of the fog.”  Becoming conscious coincided with her becoming fully well. 

We observe this every day with people.  We will be interacting with someone and we start to see that they have a peculiar point of view that gets in their way.  We all have a peculiar point of view.  Problems occur when we get lost in the fog and assume that everyone else has—or should have—this point of view as well.  Problems also occur when we get so sunk into a point of view that we lose perspective entirely.

If you see someone like this, consider calling a good classical homeopath. 

Diabetes and Homeopathy

This blog might be subtitled, “Getting the sweetness out of life.”  Here’s hoping you find the sweetness in life this holiday season.  If you do, it seems your blood sugars are more likely to stay normal. 

Diabetes, as many people know, consists of two different types—as well as some confusing variations between the two.  Type 1 is often called “juvenile onset” because generally it occurs in childhood.  The insulin-making cells in the pancreas suffer an attack and the child loses the ability to produce insulin.  Insulin allows sugar in blood to be transferred into cells for use as energy.   Without this, the sugars in the bloodstream rise.  When blood sugars rise to high levels, the sugars start spilling into the urine.  The untreated type I diabetic typically gets thirsty, urinating a lot in an attempt to clear the high blood sugars.

Type II occurs in adulthood and is associated with insulin resistance.  Commonly this occurs in overweight people over 40.  Their cells become insensitive to insulin, and the blood sugar levels rise.  High blood sugars and insulin resistance set people up for a host of nasty health problems. 

Type I can be difficult to cure with homeopathy, although I have so few cases of it in my practice that I cannot speak with authority on this.  Type II, however, is relatively easy to benefit and cure with good homeopathy.  In my experience, if a patient’s blood sugars are high and unstable, give the patient a good homeopathic prescription and the blood sugars fall into the normal range and stabilize, often very rapidly.   

This is also true in type I.  People with type I, dependant on insulin, may present with wildly fluctuating blood sugars.  The feeling of emotional instability can be marked and if so is important to the case.   Patients will present saying something like, “Doctor, my blood sugars are out of control" and feel emotionally out of control as well.  A good prescription will strongly stabilize the emotions and with it the blood sugars.  They are connected.  Well-treated cases of type I diabetes can be expected to lessen the patient’s need for insulin.  The difficulty is eliminating the need for insulin. 

Another thing I have noticed is that people who need remedies from milk source often are predisposed towards having diabetes.   Being nurtured or, as is usually the case, the lack of it, is a strong theme for homeopathic remedies made from milks.  The theme of “mother,” metaphorically symbolized by the breast, is strong.  Not infrequently, the patient gives the feeling that he nursed at a poisonous breast, taking in bad milk.  “My mother was too busy working to pay attention to me” is a common complaint.  “I didn’t get the sweetness.”  As a consequence, these patients typically care for everyone--and feel completely uncared for themselves.   Another variation is that the person completely refuses to let others care for him, while feeling the need to take care of everyone else.  The tendency for blood sugars to rise—a literal manifestation of an inability to take in nourishment—is strong.  Certainly not all patients needing milk remedies present with diabetes.  I simply see it as a common theme.

Merry Christmas. 

On Responding to a Homeopathic Remedy

A patient recently mailed me the following question: 

Do I read you correctly here per your Sepia blog of 12/6/06 'LoveDeath': "To take a remedy that mirrors this inner conflict is to be CONFRONTED and thereby SPURRED TOWARDS RESOLUTION"?  Is a remedy supposed to work this way? To bring things into direct consciousness? To put things directly in front of you for you to deal with them in a conscious manner?

If we think about the psychological dynamics of “like cures like,” to take a remedy that mirrors our own internal state is a type of confrontation, although a gentle one.  Most of the time this confrontation is not noticeable.  For example, a recent follow-up of a person who needed homeopathic Cannabis indica presented with asthma.  At the psychological level she told me she tended to be “disconnected” from people.  Beginning the day after the remedy, she said her asthma disappeared and that she felt much more “connected” to people when she met and talked with them.  She experienced no obvious confrontation with the remedy.  She simply felt better.  This is the usual response.  There was a confrontation, but the resolution was immediate. 

If you listen to my talk (click on link to left), both patients that spoke presented more complicated reactions to a remedy.  Take an example of a person who craves harmony in his relationships and always “pleases” people to keep the peace.  He takes a remedy and suddenly finds himself rebelling and getting angry with his partner.  In a sense, the remedy confronted him with his own duplicity, and it becomes necessary to right the balance.  For this reason, the homeopath has to be very clear exactly what he is treating, or he may misinterpret the response to the remedy.   It is one of those subtleties that makes homeopathic practice difficult to learn. 

I made reference to the importance of “consciousness” at various points in this blog.  For a homeopath with the intention to treat at the level of consciousness, healing physical disease is not separable from shifting the consciousness of the individual.  As an example, imagine someone who has panic attacks.  Let’s say every time she gets into the car she starts to panic. 

Most adults living in American society on hearing this would stop and exclaim, “Wow, how curious!  What’s wrong with her?  It’s true that driving has potential dangers, but this reaction is out of proportion.”  The woman would probably agree.  Nevertheless, she gets into the car and her heart beats crazily and she starts sweating.  At some level she lacks consciousness.  All she experiences is a blur of fear she gets lost in.  To give her an exact homeopathic remedy is to create consciousness and clarity where before there was only a fog of emotions.  A confrontation must occur at some deep level for this clarity to occur.  This truly is healing.  We might say that all physical disease, at some level, expresses a lack of consciousness. 

Another example that should shed light on this is what I call “the confused case.”  This I will write about next time.

Psychiatric Disorders in Children

Last month in the New York Times there was an article “What’s Wrong with a Child?  Psychiatrists Often Disagree.”   The article made clear how inadequate terms such as “oppositional defiant disorder” or “bipolar” or “obsessive compulsive disorder” can be:

…And parents of disruptive children in particular—those who might have been called delinquents, or simply “problem children”—say they hear an alphabet soup of labels that seem to change as often as the child’s shoe size.  [New York Times, Nov 11, 2006,  front page]

The article notes, “there are no blood tests or brain scans to diagnose mental disorders.”   That is to say, the issue cannot be found at the physical level (1st level, see my Levels of Healing on right).  Stepping down to the 2nd level, the therapeutic intention can be to numb the child’s emotional pain through psychiatric medications, or helping the child deal with emotions through talk therapy.   

Although taking a numbing approach through medications can be effective, it often disappoints.  Moreover, children, like the elderly, are more sensitive to medications and can react unpredictably.  We have all seen the articles suggesting that anti-depressants in some children can cause agitation, making suicide more likely.   Even when effective, medications only numb.  They produce no fundamental change. 

Although I advocate talk therapy with children, they frequently do not have enough of a cognitive structure to make it strongly effective.  More than adults, children simply feel, and no amount of talking is likely to change that. 

Descending down to level 3, where therapeutic intentions address the energetic matrix of the body, I have seen many parents use cranial sacral therapy and to some degree acupuncture in children.  Acupuncture I have not seen have a noticeable effect.  Particularly in situations where a child suffers from intense emotions, cranial sacral therapy can be beneficial, yet usually only mildly.  I recommend it, but not enthusiastically.   

To truly be satisfied, parents will have to look to level 4.  Classical homeopathy has the ability to produce fundamental and lasting change.  It takes a homeopath with the ability to clearly mark the 4th level, and it frequently requires diligent work.

An example from my practice was a teen whose diagnosis was “oppositional defiant disorder.”  Defiance in this boy was everywhere.  He slammed doors in my office, stonewalled me for entire sessions, glaring at me with hatred.  The situation at home was just as bad.  In his early teens, he was beginning to encounter problems with the law.  It all climaxed with an admission to a psychiatric hospital, which was a horrific story of how psychiatric admissions can go terribly wrong.  Just conjure up images of men in white coats circling you to pin you down and inject you with tranquilizers, and you get the picture. 

It was right after that psych admission that I broke his case.  I gave him a remedy from the insect family, and it utterly changed him. I saw him not too long ago in my office, and his life had turned around.  He was enjoying school, getting good grades; no longer having run-ins with the law; his relationship with his mother was peaceful.  His future was looking brighter and brighter. 

As a patient, he was a headache, but the change was more than gratifying.  Teens can present special problems, but it is an age group I love.  Homeopathy can release a person’s full potential, and what better time than in your teens?  I think of how much easier my life would have been if a homeopath had done it for me. 

LoveDeath

Some time ago a patient happily told me, “I have never been able to have a sexual relationship with someone I have a mind [emotional] connection to.”  I thought how curious.  It makes me wonder about the inner “deals” we humans make with ourselves.  They are important for the homeopath, because all such “deals” come out of a conflict in the deep consciousness of the individual, that is, the 4th level realm of the homeopathic remedy. 

One way to understand the homeopathic dictum, “like cures like,” is to see the conflict in the remedy substance as matching the deep conflict in the patient.  To take a remedy that mirrors this inner conflict is to be confronted and thereby spurred towards resolution.  My problem in this instance was to understand what this patient’s inner conflict was. 

She lived apart from her husband most of the time.  Often I heard her emphasizing her independence, her ability to go it alone.  One other thing I felt was key to her inner dilemma:  she made references to “dying,” as if she would dissolve or fade away in situations of high intensity.  How, I wondered, did this “dying” relate to her inner “deal”?   

I was certain she needed an animal remedy from the sea.  All of the key elements of her state pointed this way.  Which sea animal took some thought.  In reading about some possibilities, one thing jumped out at me when I was reading on Sepia, the Cuttlefish. 

The male & female cuttlefish die of exhaustion following the sexual act.  Parental care thus is not a part of the life history of the cuttlefish.

Sepia is known for its ink, which it releases to escape from predators.  It often strikes me that the most “well-known” remedies in homeopathy are some of the least understood.  Sepia, the most well-known of the sea animals, classically is said to be the worn out, dumpy housewife, indifferent to her husband, her children, and sex.  Could be. Yet in my experience, rarely do Sepia patients present this way.  Closer to the inner truth might be a “sepia-toned,” pre-Raphaelite painting of some gorgeous, white-skinned maiden, frozen in time with parted lips, a blank look of passion on her face. The women in these paintings give the impression that they either died of passion or are about to. 

Always there is duality.  For every panic there is the corresponding calm.  For every dark there is the corresponding light, and for the indifference of Sepia, there must be the corresponding passion, the excitement of mating and sex.  Yet, how would it be for you, if your next sexual encounter was so over-the-top that you died of exhaustion?  Now that would be a sexual encounter worth talking about…if you only could.  You would see it in the tabloids: MAN DIES FROM GREAT SEXUAL EXPERIENCE. 

Any good sexual encounter probably should bring with it the feeling you died a little bit.  For the healthy Sepia patient, a good sexual encounter should feel like death and rebirth.  Yet for most Sepia patients, I suspect the contradiction is simply too much.  Easiest to seek distance, stay alone, brown out, sink into a numbness.  My patient resolved her conflict—at least to some degree—by simply limiting sexual experience to those she felt disconnected.  As far as I could see, it was the same pattern. 

Unfortunately, right after the dose of Sepia, I lost her to follow-up; yet, maybe she will turn up in the future.  Stay tuned. 

Therapy vs Homeopathic Casetaking

One of my patients wrote me an interesting comment after watching my presentation (see link on the left): 

As far as their questions regarding dealing with people as they go further in their state, and the possible reaction, i.e.  rage, I thought about the fact, that you do not offer an opinion or comment for example “ that must have been hard”  etc.  I think these people thought you were/are in essence “doing” therapy to get to these levels.  Given my need for acceptance, I was acutely aware that you did not respond/react to the things I said.  There is no judgment; there just is what was said.

I have mentioned before that classical homeopathy is like eavesdropping.  You gently lead the patient through a series of levels to listen into the deep 4th level state.  In this process, there often are strong emotions a patient expresses.  This was the concern of a few therapists at my presentation.  What they did not understand was that in the process of casetaking, I am always moving through these emotions.  It is as if the homeopathic case is always found in the eye of the hurricane. 

I like this line, “There is no judgment; there is just what was said.”   In a sense, this is also the eye of the hurricane.  It is true; I generally do not reflect back on things patients say with comments like “Oh, that must have been hard.”  It would contribute to getting stuck on the emotional level, which conflicts with my casetaking intention.  The other reason has to do with healing itself.  Homeo – pathic  means “same as the suffering.”  To mirror the disease is to cure it.  You start that process even at the level of casetaking.  You, as casetaker, become a mirror. 

The intention in taking a homeopathic case is different from the intention of a therapist, even profoundly different.  Therapy generally has the intention of processing the emotions, i.e. it is the 2nd level, the level of the patient’s feelings.  Thus, if a patient has a history of abuse, there are usually many emotions held around the events, and these commonly interfere with the patient’s life.  Therapy brings up these emotions and helps process them, freeing psychic energy for living. 

Strictly speaking, a homeopathic case has nothing to do with processing emotions, which is not to say that patients never do that while giving their case.  The case simply never rests there.  The intent is to reveal the underlying pattern of consciousness (4th level) in the patient.  All of us have a certain conflict within our underlying pattern of consciousness, and this conflict often gets in the way of fully healing the 2nd level emotions.  Therapy helps to process emotions and create cognitive structures to contain emotions (.e.g. instead of worrying all night, you write down all your worries on a piece of paper before you go to sleep); but if the underlying pattern of consciousness does not shift, the patient may get stuck in “endlessly processing” these emotions.  That is, the person keeps going to therapy for years and nothing truly changes.  The therapy is unable to reach the source of the problem.   

If you watch my presentation, in particular, the 2nd patient who speaks gives insight into this process.  This is a woman who suffered abuse and had years of therapy.  Nevertheless, something in her didn’t shift until she received a deep-acting remedy. I address this in the talk. 

View My Presentation

I finally have the link to my Oct 6th presentation posted.  If you look to the left you will see the link Reaching our Full Potential:  The Role of Alternative Medicine. Those who don't know me now have the chance to see me in action. 

In this talk I spoke on the most important topics I have posted to this blog, including the preparation of homeopathic remedies, the Levels of Healing and their progression into increasingly immaterial medicine, the action of a homeopathic remedy on consciousness.  Perhaps most interesting to some will be the two patients of mine who spoke.  Be prepared:  these are fascinating cases that should be provocative to anyone who cares to listen.  What they have to say is remarkable.  For those of you with doubts about the effects of classical homeopathy, listen to them.  They begin speaking at around 47 min 30 sec.  If you put your cursor over the link, you will see a brief outline of my talk appear.

Unfortunately there was not time to delve deeper into 3rd level energy therapies in this talk.  I simply ran out of time.

Feel free to send me questions and comments!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.   

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A Medicine of Enchantment

A friend in New York, Derek Beres, who is a yoga instructor and world music DJ just posted the following to his world music newsletter:

The West collapsed the sacred into the secular, disenchanting everything through materialism,” wrote Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman in Inner Revolution, “while Tibet transformed the secular into the sacred, seeing through matter and discovering the nuclear energy of the mind.” For Thurman, the first American ordained as a monk nearly a half-century ago, Tibet serves as a pivotal example of a community working together, weaving magic into everything. That includes tragedy, as Chinese occupation has shown.

It’s true.  We are a disenchanted society.  Along with this we have as our dominant medicine a “medicine of disenchantment.”  A strong statement.  Why do I say this? 

Not long ago I picked up a book in the health section of a nearby bookstore.  The book was written by an MD, and he divided people into “serotonin types”  and “dopamine types.”  Serotonin and dopamine of course are neurotransmitters in your brain.  He then gave various ‘cocktails” to drink to help your brain if you fall into a certain category.  Is there anything more disenchanting than being a “serotonin type,” perhaps addicted to a serotonin-manipulating drug such as Prozac? 

You have no emotions, really, according to this mode of thinking; you simply have some chemicals in your brain that delude you into thinking you have emotions.  This is a medicine of disenchantment, where life has been reduced to neurotransmitters.  It is why going to the doctor can be such a disenchanting experience.  Your 10 minute follow-up ends up with him adjusting your medicine to tweak your neurotransmitter levels.  A magical experience?  Hardly.

I think it is what I love most about practicing homeopathy.  A good homeopathic prescription so often brings magic back into a patient’s life.  A good remedy is enlivening.  Suffering always brings a certain self-absorption.  It is hard to have space for others in any free way when we are in pain.  Pain fixes our perspective, and any fixed perspective in the universe we live in is a step towards disenchantment.  To be healthy is to be open to being fooled yet again by life.  I thought I had it figured out but, damn, I was wrong again.  The unhealthy person tries to stay fixed in his perspective no matter what.  All fixed perspectives eventually lead to disease. 

Homeopathy enlivens through bringing inner freedom.  Inner freedom means freedom at both the level of the mind and the body.  Often people come back to me and tell me, you know, I have more space for people now.  I used to be so irritated by everything.  Being irritated all the time leaves no space for those you love.  If you spend a lot of time irritated, be clear, a good homeopathic prescription will take that out.  When that happens you find you are not longer bothered by your irritating stomach or your irritating migraines.  To be healthy is to bring things into perspective.  Oh, things really don’t need to be so irritating, and I thought that’s just how life was. 

Take a good homeopathic prescription, and you discover that you were wrong.  In spite of your absolute total conviction that this earth was overrun with irritating people, it turns out you were merely fooled again.  To be willing to be always wrong is to enter the flux of the magical.  To be fully in that realm is to open up to a world of infinite possibilities and to be enchanted once again.  Risk it.