Samuel Hahnemann died in 1844. At the time of his death, miasmatic theory remained incomplete, and was often rejected by homeopaths, or used only as a supplement to practice.

In the early part of the 20^th century, a Dr Nebel added to Hahnemann;s original three miasms, with a fourth, tuberculinism. This miasm was characterized by emaciation, romantic fantasies, exhaustion and chronic lung diseases.

During the long sleep of homeopathy in the twentieth century, very little thought was given to miasms in general, or homeopathy at all. However, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, interest in holistic medicine, and homeopathy began to rise again. At this time, a new group of thinkers such as my own teacher Gerard Geuniot, Vithoulkas, Jeremy Sherr and other began to emerge. Along with these figures came an influx of ideas from german trained nature doctors, who had maintained a more active tradition across the atlantic.

One of the most major ideas to emerge from this period was a reinterpretation of the idea of miasms. In the light of the work done earlier in the century on drainage, and the methods the body had for dealing with toxins (to be explored in another blog).

In this light, the traditional miasms of psora, sycotic and syphilis combine, with the new miasm of tuberculosis, to form an integrated model of the human bodies’ journey through health and disease.

According to this model, most people start life in psora, which is assumed to be the healthiest state. These beings will periodically purge their body of toxins, and disease products via rashes, diarrhea, and other discharges rapidly. These people tend to get short lived violent illnesses, and then rapidly recover, feeling better than before. If the toxic load in their bodies exceeds what they can excrete, they move on into the second miasm, sycosis.

Sycotic patients tend to store their toxins in areas where they cannot cause damage, such as joints, fat and connective tissue. This tends to cause joint pain, and often issues such as water retention and increased weight. Issues with emotions, such as holding onto negative experiences and thoughts, also tend to occur.

If the body cannot store any more toxins, it will begin to cannibalize its own resources, such as minerals to excrete the toxicity. This is known as the tuberculinic miasm, mentioned above. These people also tend towards chronic fatigue, exhaustion, and lung pathologies.

If the body runs out of resources, it moves into the syphilitic miasm, and blow wounds and ulcers within itself. These wounds usually leak fluid, which contains the toxicity that the body is attempting to dislodge. However, since our society does not permit open wounds to leak fluid, these sores and wounds are usually sealed surgically. At this point the toxicity that the body has been dealing with by various means is fully present for the first time. Now the serious degenerative diseases of cancer, mental illness, autoimmunity and death soon result.

In my next blog, I will be discussing drainage, and the relationship of Geuniots miasms to drainage.

Take care of yourselves!

Sources: Geuniot, G. From Natural Medceine to Medecine of the Individual. 2010. Editions Amyris. Brussells..

One of the most difficult topics in homeopathy is the idea of miasms.

Miasma were first described by Samuel Hahnemann in his Book “The Chrnoic Diseases” in 1810. After a period of practice success in treating acute disease, Hahnemann began to find more difficulty in his patients suffering from chronic disease. What had been immediate improvements when treating acute infections became a long and drawn out process with many ups and downs, and many seeming setbacks.

Over time, a pattern to these setbacks was noticed. Hahnemann postulated three deeper chronic patterns of disease, or miasms, that afflicted patients.

The first and most common was named Psora. It was defined as an itching disease and was identified with the vast majority of chronic diseases such as leprosy and cancer. It was normally removed by the body developing an itch disease, such as scabies or psoriasis. The suppression of itches via topical lotions was responsible, in Hahnemanns view, for the vast majority of chronic disease.

The second Miasm was called Sycosis. It was identified with the Figwart disease (not Gonorrhoea as is commonly assumed) a sexually transmitted infection common in Hahnemanns time. In a chronic form it was responsible for a number of symptoms of excessive growth, such as skin groths and tags, as well as a number of urinary issues.

The third miasm was Syphilis. It was identified with the disease we also call syphilis today, and was held to be responsible for a number of symptoms of diseases such as ulcerations, insanity and destructive tissue changes in its chronic form.

Upon identifying which miasm or miasms a patient suffers from, the doctor can administer the appropriate anti-miasmatic remedy. Miasma ultimately are curable conditions, but treating them requires a small amount of knowledge about thier nature. This will be elaborated in my next blog post.

Take care of yourselves!

Sources:

Hahnemann, S. The Chronic Diseases. 1810. Available online at http://books.google.ca/books?id=wxw4AAAAMAAJ&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=y
.

As many of you who follow my facebook page may know, I recently had one of my patients pass away. My patient was chronically disabled, and was prone to bouts of pneumonia.

When I assumed care of him in august 2012, we was expected to live only a few more weeks. He was socially withdrawn, had no energy, and took no joy in his previous hobbies. Under Quality naturopathic care (particularly an excellent homeopathic) he recovered his energy, zest for life, interest in the outside world, social interactions, and his joy.

He was able to stay outside his hospital until February 2013. At this point he got a mild pneumonia. I was actually leaving town for a small while. I visited my patient, and his mother in the hospital. He was being wonderfully cared for by the nurses and staff of the Foothills hospital. He was very happy, lucid, and looked to be doing wonderfully on IV antibiotics. I made some time to connect to the patient, held his hand for a while, then left, confident that he would receive the best care. Two days later the patients mother informed me of his death from viral pneumonia. He apparently had been lucid until the last several hours, when he lost consciousness, then rapidly passed on with his mother beside him.

In retrospect, I don’t really know why I made such an effort to connect to this patient in this visit. I fully expected to return and continue his treatment. Now I wonder if some part of me knew this would be our last visit together……

This has gotten me thinking. I remember my fathers death from cancer over about 5 months in 2008-2009, and the profound suffering and despair that process caused in dad, myself, and my family. I also have begun to revisit some of the older ethnographic accounts of death, in which very aged individuals simply do not wake up one day, or consciously make their transition ( such as in aboriginal australia).

I also began remembering a few accounts of palliative homeopathic care. Often in these cases, patients would approach a homeopathic physician when a patient was near death, and the proper administration of a remedy would often speed death up, and enable the patient to die in the fastest, least painful way possible. I also began remembering the account of a classmate of mine, who was treating a patient with end stage HIV/AIDS in africa. This patient had been on the verge of death for about 6 months. The administration of a well chosen homeopathic had permitted him to pass that night.

All these stories tend to lead me to a few ideas:

1. Death in a healthy society/culture is short, relatively rapid and painless after a long and healthy life.
2. The long and drawn out process of death that is so common in our culture is not healthy, or natural, but a reflection of profound illness.
3. Natural Medicine, and in particular Homeopathic medicine seem to return people in this society, at least somewhat, to that natural death process.

Im not intending to write a manifesto for Naturopathic Palliative care. I do not have the experience needed for that. But I am increasing convinced that such a thing is needed, and badly in North America. How badly do we need a return to natural modes of living, and how much more badly do we need a return to natural modes of dying when our last months are spent in agony, pain and terror.

I hope I live to see this.

Take care of Yourselves!

Dr Paul.

(P.S. I apologize for a lack of sources for this blog).

Hi Everybody. Happy New Year!

In my last blog post, we discussed the latest developments in homeopathy surrounding the practice of triturations. I did not mention in great detail however, that I myself have become a practitioner within this field.

This brief blog post will discuss my experiences of triturations, and the limited clinical experience I have acquired in using them.

Compared with the popular trituration texts, I have similar experiences in the first through fourth rounds of trituration. The first three rounds of trituration, in my experience, show the conventional homeopathic picture of a substance, usually in a state of crisis. Remedies on this level tend to show a being caught in a state (as discussed in previous blog posts). The fourth level usually contains an insight, which resolves the problems and emotions of that state.

However at the fifth triturations and above, my experience begins to differ from the published versions. The common version is that the triturations access increasingly collective issues. As taken from Hogeland and Schriebman (P 176)

C5: The Individual unconscious and archetypes
C6: The Collective unconsciousness, Humanity as a whole
C7: Global Archetypes and global issues
C8: Oneness, beyond rational understanding.

As well often at these higher levels, in addition to sensations and states, a large amount of conceptual information, sometimes in the forms of ideas, other time in the form of verbatim texts.

My own experience differs from that presented above. While I do experience the ideas and texts in the triturations above C4 but I notice a polarity occurring in those rounds as well. The odd numbered rounds (C5, C7, C9, C11) tend to present me with a problem. The solution to this problem is present in the even round following (C6, C8, C10, C12 respectively). I go to higher levels of trituration than the germans do, but I also find greater and greater levels of significance to the data received as the rounds of trituration increase.

As of the date of the writing, I have preformed a number of triturations on a variety of substances. I do plan on publishing these triturations at some point in the next year or two.

Clinically I have begun to use these remedies. I have noticed so far, that administering these remedies from higher triturations leads to a slow adoption of the insights described by the trituration in the patient. More on this topic will be forthcoming, as it becomes available.

Take care of yourselves.

Dr Paul.

References:

Hogeland, A. & Schriebman, J. The Trituration Handbook: Into the Heart of Homeopathy. 2008 Homeopathy West: El Cerrito, CA.
.

In my previous posts, we discussed the earliest ideas around the infinitesimal dose. In recent years, these ideas and the pharmacy techniques stemming from them have been advanced considerably. This advance has mostly stemmed from the work of a German, Witold Ehrler (1)

Witold was a german student who was dating a homeopathic pharmacy student in the 1990s after a period of spiritual growth and exploration. After reading one of Catherine Coulters books (2) he became fascinated by the idea that substances had psychological profiles (as described in the last post : The state). Using his girlfriend’s homeopathic pharmacy textbooks, he began making a well known homeopathic remedy, called calc-carb.

Little did he know, Witold was using a textbook that had a minor error specifying four rounds of grinding and scraping with milk sugar (known as trituration), rather than the three specified in the organon (3). As he began the trituration, Witold began experiencing a number of unusual mental symptoms, such as fear he was going insane, all of which were quite typical of cal-carb. Homeopaths have known since the 1800s that people who triturate a remedy will often prove it ( see previous post on provings). The first example of this was that of the great homeopath Constantine Hering, who triturated and proved the remedy lachesis in 1828 (4). Up until Witolds triturations however, homeopaths usually stopped at the third round of trituration.

As Witold began the fourth level of trituration ( or C4 level) he began noticing that he developed an insight into the delusions and symptoms that had occurred in the previous three levels. He specifically described moving to a place where the conflicts in the mentality of the previous levels (C1,2,3) were overcome, and no longer an issue.

Witold repeated this process a number of times, finding the same pattern again and again in the experiences of triturators in each of the following levels:

C1: The physical symptoms, aches, pains and syndromes

C2: The emotional symptoms, angers, sorrows, hurts

C3: The mental symptoms, delusions, thought processes and ideas
C4: A new level, resolution of the previous levels, and an awareness of the lesson behind them.

Over time, Witold and other people (myself included) began doing these triturations at higher and higher levels, noticing subsequently broader and more advanced levels of sensation, which will be described in subsequent posts.

Most interestingly, when people are given remedies from C4 and above, they tend to pick up the awareness of the solutions to conflict that the higher levels of the remedy embody. The clinical use of c4 homeopathics is still undeveloped, and will itself be a topic of a future post.

Take care of yourselves!

1. Hogeland, A. & Schriebman, J. The Trituration Handbook: Into the Heart of Homeopathy. 2008 Homeopathy West: El Cerrito, CA.
2. Coulter, C. Portraits of Homeopathic medicines. Vol 1-3. Ninth House: Arlington: Mass.
3. Hahnemann, S. The Organon of Medicine. Trans O’Reilly, WB. 1996. Birdcage: Palo Alto, CA.
4. http://www.homeoint.org/clarke/l/lach.htm

.

As discussed in previous blog posts, homeopathic medicines go through a process known as proving. The proving will show us what symptoms the remedy can produce in a healthy person, and thus what symptom complex they will be able to cure.

One of the interesting features noted in the provings was that physical symptoms were not the only ones produced. Often emotional symptoms or mental fixations were produced. These entered into the list of symptoms attributed to each of the remedies (the materia medica), and so became part of the total pictures used when selecting a remedy for a particular patient.

Over time many practitioners using homeopathy used the proving symptoms to treat many emotional disorders successfully, including serious mental illnesses, as demonstrated by the number of homeopathic asylums in the United States in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries (see http://history.tomrue.net/mpc/middletown_homeopathic_hospital.htm for an example).

For much of this period it was simply on the basis of these collections of symptoms that remedies were prescribed. However in the mid 20^th century the insights of psychodynamics began impacting homeopathics. The idea of the subconscious suggested that there were symptoms which patients could not consciously and the increased psychotherapeutic emphasis on mental illness originating from that realm suggested that such symptoms were the key to treating mental illness.

The track record of homeopathic medicine in treating mental illness suggested that homeopathic medicine had an impact there, but what that impact was remained mysterious. However it wasn’t until the early 21^st century that the Homeopathic Doctors of the Mumbai school in India ( particularily Dr. Divya Chhabra, my teacher) began actually exploring this realm. Through her casetaking methods, which disengage the conscious mind and allow the patient to explore what he is subconsciously perceiving, she began to notice that an underlying sensation, or feeling linked all aspects of a patients case together. Their physical symptoms, their emotional symptoms, their delusions, everything about that persons experience matched that core sensation ( see http://wholehealthnow.com/dchhabra-1.mp3 for a podcast of Divya explaining her method).

What was also discovered was that that sensation was identical to the sensations described in the deepest level of provings. This sensation matched up with the characteristics of the thing being proved at a deepest level. The experience of that animal (or plant, or mineral, or other thing) was the experience of people proving that remedy, and it was the experience of people who were cured by that remedy.

So, using this new method, the patients subconscious mind can be accessed, and their state, the deepest inner sensation, can be determined and removed, to the benefit of their mental and physical health.

Now for a moment, lets look inward. Let us look at our own minds. Most of us can in fact identify a feeling, a deep inner feeling that troubles us, that is unacceptable to us, and bothers us. Sometimes hugely, sometimes not hugely.

Imagine this feeling gone.

This is what is possible with homeopathy.

I hope to see you all for a homeopathic visit soon!

Take Care of Yourselves!

Dr. Paul.

Hi Everyone!

Last time we discussed Hahnemanns insights into the law of similars and how this led to the proving, the first systematic attempt to describe the impact of a medicine on the organism and, more importantly, how to apply this information in medical practice.

This contrasts with the practice of allopathic medicine (commonly called conventional medicine in Canada) in which remedies are designed to oppose the disease progress.

This however is not what most people associate with homeopathy. In truth very few people understand this aspect of homeopathy. The idea most people have of homeopathy is that of the ultramolecular dose, or the dose of a medicine that contains no molecules of the substance it was originally made from.

When Hahnemann was in practice (1790’s to the 1840’s), the medicines were generally very toxic, and used in extremely high doses. Typical medicines were Cinchona bark, mercury, tartar emetic and others, most of which had profound side effects and, in the allopathic medicine of the time, very vague indications for use (indications are the reason a physician has for use of a medicine).

Hahnemann equipped with his new discovery of provings now had excellent indications for use of these medicines. But the side effects, even when the medicines were correctly used, still troubled Hahnemann. What good was it to have a patient get better from a medicine if they were troubled afterwards by permanent toxic effects afterwards? In addition to this, he began noticing that a patient was peculiarly sensitive to their similar medicine, and thus would respond to much lower doses than were normally used.

So Hahnemann began using smaller and smaller doses of his medicines. Due to the impracticality of giving microscopic doses of medicines, he began triturating his medicines with lactose and then after 3 triturations began diluting the triturated mixtures with alcohol. In order to provide for an easier administration method, he would drip the alcohol onto lactose pills and administer these pills to his patients.

The critical factor here was Hahnemanns methodological rigor in pharmacy. In order to ensure equal distribution of the medicines he was working with he triturated and scraped the remedies, and shook the remedies repeatedly when working with alcohol dilutions. In contemporary homeopathic pharmacy, these two steps are seen as essential to developing the medicinal power of an ultramolecular medicine. This will be discussed further in a later blog.

As Hahnemann began working with these new triturated and diluted remedies, he noticed his patients responded more strongly to medicines that had been through the process of trituration and dilution. Over time he began serial dilutions of his remedies, that is, he began taking 1 part of alcohol from his remedies, and further mixing that one part with fresh alcohol, then using this further dilution of the remedy to soak the lactose pills used in therapy. These new further diluted remedies produced even more powerful responses.

Eventually Hahnemann started using a notation system to count how many triturations and diltuions he had preformed. C referred to a 1 to 100 dilution level. A remedy of 12 C had been triturated, diluted and shaken 12 times, each time diluting it in a 1 to 100 ratio.

At the level of 12C there is statistically very little chance that any molecules of the orginial substance are left in the remedy.

Contrary to popular opinion, Hahnemann was a contemporary of Avegadro, the chemist who determined that mass was not infinitely divisible. In all likelihood Hahnemann was aware of the fact that there was almost none of the original substance left in the remedies. Hahnemann did not ascribe the curative powers of remedies to their physical or chemical properties. In his own words: “Our life force , as spirit like dynamis, cannot be seized and affected by damaging impingements on the healthy organism (through inimical potencies from the external world that disturb the harmonious play of life) other than in a spirit-like dynamic way. In like manner the only way the medical art practitioner can remove such morbid mistunements (the diseases) from the dynamis by the spirit-like (dynamic, virtual) tunement altering energies of the serviceable medicines acting upon our spirit-like life force” (Aphorism 16, the Organon by Hahnemann, Trans: Wenda Brewster O’Reilly).

Hahnemann though disease was a dynamic vital process which could only be cured by the energetic process of medicines on the vital force. The vital force, while present in a crude substance, was vastly developed by the process of dilution and trituration that Hahnemann stumbled upon and later embraced. This idea makes clear that Hahnemanns idea of disease wasn’t dependant upon material or chemical causes, but upon the “spirit-like dynamis” and can only be affected by the dynamis of medicine, developed and amplified by the process of trituration and dilution.

This insight, and the technology that goes along with it are completely separate from Hahnemanns insight into the law of similars. Either discovery on its own would have been impressive, but to make two such discoveries in one life was an amazing achievement.

Now, in medicine, it was possible to both have accurate knowledge of the curative properties of medicines, and to utilize them in such a fashion as to arouse the curative ability of the vital force without the risk of extensive side effects of crude doses.

This principle has become further developed over time through the development of the concept of the state, and in the new development of the trituration movements. Both these subjects will be covered in future blogs.

Take care of yourselves!!!

Dr. Paul

References:

Coulter, H. Divided legacy Volume 4. Twentieth-Century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era. North Atlantic: Berkeley.

Hahnemann, S. The Organanon of Medicine (6^th ed.). Trans by Wenda Brewster O’Reilly. Birdcage. Palo Alto, CA.

 .

Provings are the system through which homeopathy determines the curative properties of its medicines. It is difficult to explain the homeopathic tradition of provings without a reference to the history of medicine from which it emerged.

At the time of Hahnemann there were two great schools of medicine.

The rationalist school of medicine believed that it understood the disease process with its advanced scientific knowledge, deriving from the new fields of physics, chemistry and hydraulics. Thus, the duty of the physician was to determine what disease the person had and, thus, what process within the body was malfunctioning. Knowing this, the physician would administer medicine to oppose the effect of the disease on the body. How instance, if a disease provoked fever, anti-fever drugs were given (antipyretics). This approach has continued essentially to this day. Its descendants are modern day Mds, or allopathic doctors.

The second school, or the empirical school, had a different approach. Rather than focusing on the disease to be cured, the empirical school focused on what each individual medicine could cure. Very detailed manuals were created of cured patients symptoms, and what remedies relieved them. An absolutely exquisite pharmacology was developed, and very intricate indications for the various medicines used were developed.

However, each school had its weaknesses. The rationalist school of therapy was dependant on its theories about the nature of disease in order for therapy to be decided on. If the theory was incorrect ( for instance, as in the theory that syphilis was due to insufficient stimulation of the body) the resulting therapy ( often mercury) would often not help, and at times when medicines were largely toxic, and used in large doses, would often irrevocably harm or kill the patient.

The empirical system, with its emphasis on the actual experience ( ie, remedies that actually had cured things in the past) avoided this problem. However, the process of acquiring this information was painfully slow, due to the need for trial and error in trying out medicines for patients with unusual conditions, or for new diseases. Many times physicians would simply try one remedy after another, with no guide toward what might be useful or not.

This however changed with the experience of Samuel Hahnemann. Hanhnemann was an MD who had removed himself from practice in the late 1780’s due to his disgust at the inability of the allopathic practitioners to aid, or even not harm, their patients.

He made his living at this time as a translator of medical texts. One day he translated a text on the then commonly used cinchona bark. During the translation, he noticed that the symptoms of overdosing of the bark were identical to the symptoms of malaria, which cinchona bark was indicated to treat.

Over a time of pondering this, Hahnemann wondered if these two facts were connected. He began taking doses of cinchona himself, and did indeed experience the symptoms of malaria. Over time, Hahnemann developed the idea that the reason why cinchona was so active against malaria ( which the medical science of his day was unable to explain) was in fact due to this similarity.

Hahnemann suspected that the inherent curative ability of the body (which was a long standing idea within the empirical school of medicine) was aroused by the action of the cinchona bark, and then acted against both the malaria and cinchona bark jointly. The two diseases could be dealt with at once because of their similarity.

This idea of similar diseases became stated as “like cures like” that is, a medicine producing a symptom complex that is similar to the symptom complex the body has will provoke the body into reacting, and purging itself of both diseases, the one induced by the medicine, and the one inherent to the body.

This doesn’t mean, as is often stated, that medicines producing similar symptoms will cure those symptoms. The symptoms complex, or disease as a whole, is the key term here. Hahnemann found that a medicine caused the whole organism to react. Symptoms of any particular part were simply a manifestation of the state of the whole body ( as has recently been confirmed by teh groundbreaking work of Divya Chhabrha, soon to be discussed). As such, the entire picture of the patient, the whole complex of their symptoms, were significant to determining the curative medicine.

Hahnemann began to experiment with more medicines, eventually adopting the term proving for these trials. He indeed began to discover in his restarted clinical practice that these medicines are indeed effective in patients with similar symptom complexes and demonstrated in homeopathic practice, and some of the trials of homeopathy recently published. He named this method Homeopathy, or “similar suffering”, in recognition of the centrality of the law of similars to this practice of medicine.

With this idea and method, suddenly empirical physicians could proactively test medicines, and had reliable methods for doing so, and a consistent theory for applying them. This discovery alone would have been enough to ensure Hahnemann’s place in medical history. However, another discovery of his also ensured his fame, as well and the infamy of his system. That discovery was a technology, the infinitesimal dose. This will be the subject of my next blog.

Most of the ideas written in this blog are the general knowledge of homeopathic medicine and history. The more specific data come from the excellent analysis of medical history, Divided Legacy, by Harris Coulter, listed below.

Take Care of Yourselves!

References

Coulter, H. Divided Legacy, A history of the schism in medical thought. Volume 3. The Conflict Between Homeopathy and the American Medical Association. 2ed. North Atlantic. 1999.

 .

Hi everybody. Just a quick explanation here about my website being down for a day, and slightly different.

It was hacked yesterday, I however backed everything up quite well, and my website is now resurected.
I look forward to continuing our journey together.

Take care of yourselves.

Dr Paul.