The Alternative Healer

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.

Some Thoughts on Attention Deficit Disorder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tunnel Vision of Ill Health

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

It’s food for thought. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treating Depression, or, Un-leashing the Life Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A patient once told me

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

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

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

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

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

An Aggressive Form of Rheumatoid Arthritis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medical Advice: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heart Arrhythmia

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

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

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

Listen to her talk about it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Medicine of the Void

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

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

Devi continued with this comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disease and Resistance to Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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