Knowing Materia Medica

If you are to be a good prescriber, by the way, your drugs have got to be people for you, with whims, fancies and terrors; with tempers and idiosyncrasies and characteristics: you have got to see them stalking about the world, speaking and moving and halting, with the bodies—minds—souls of men. You have got to travel with them in tram or train, and they will betray themselves, buttoned up and shrinking together, or loose and jolly and open; fidgetty, restless, fearful; dull and inert; quarrelling for an open window, growling at the draught with windows closed. You have got to dine with them, and they will reveal themselves in their relation to food and drink, and in the mental revelations such convivial moments of relaxation call forth. You may spot them, standing for preference, or sinking always into the nearest seat; stoop shouldered and drooping, or erect and full of “go”; depressed and querulous; restless and anxious, as their deeply lined faces testify; smooth and smug; dirty complexioned and careless of appearance; chalky faced and flabby of superlative tissue; compact and hard as nails; fault-finding—affectionate and mild—responsive to every wave of sentiment and emotion—dull and indifferent. Look for them everywhere, and learn them, and they will betray themselves at every turn; and you will often save yourselves hours of solid work, by spotting them as they enter your consulting room.

From REPERTORIZING by Margaret Tyler and John Weir

How many years will I study materia medica before I am so fluent with the knowledge as to see the remedies everywhere? Hmm, time to get those flashcards organized and start carrying them everywhere.

Philosophy through Medical History

"But every tension of opposites culminates in a release,

out of which comes the 'third.' In the third, the tension

is resolved and the lost unity is restored."

Carl G. Jung

As the first part of my course in homeopathy, we’ve been studying the History of Medicine, from Hippocrates to Hahnemann and a skim over the last two hundred years. It was a whirlwind tour through the millennia. Viewing several thousand years through the narrow window of two weeks’ study gave me the unique ability to perceive the extremes of medical philosophy without getting unduly bogged down in the details of each individual theory to gain or lose prominence.

What struck me most strongly were the repeated polar shifts from vitalist to materialist thought in all the arts and sciences. Is the basis of all life a spiritual/energetic dimension unknowable to human or technological observation (although indirectly perceptual through watching effects)? This view is the foundation of the science of Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Copernicus, Goethe, Einstein, and Oppenheimer. It is the difference between Newtonian and quantum physics.

Or, is all life basically a mechanical question? Is there a physical, quantifiable material at the root of it all? Galen, Paracelsus, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton worked from this theory. Most medical practitioners today hold a materialist view: that the body is inherently a machine with replaceable, discontinuous parts.

Medical science has always followed the philosophical trends of its day—although usually lagging behind the theoretical pioneers by about a century. When science believed in a material, atomic universe, the medical contemporaries treated disease as a noxious matter to be removed (materia peccans, germ theory, slash-and-burn healthcare). When science taught non-material energies, fields, and forces, medicine defined disease as a dysfunction of auras, mistunement of the vital force, lack of faith, or having pissed off the gods.

The polarities are clear: mind or body? Matter or energy? Germ or susceptibility? Sin or miasma? The pendulum of trendiness has swung from pole to pole through history, each camp arguing vociferously, violently, and irrationally with the other. Both sides have a lot of science and tradition on their side—especially if you pick and choose your research and traditions carefully.

Homeopathy, however, like the grandest of all gestalts, embraces both poles and then some. It works from a premise that the Whole is greater than any Sum of the Parts. No dichotomy will ever resolve itself by arguments from one side or the other. Resolution never results from an Either/Or but always from a Both/And proposition. Homeopathy presupposes a unified bodymind, infectious disease agents and individual susceptibility, material remediation of physical dysfunction and energetic realignment of fields and forces.

My whirlwind tour of medical and scientific history functions as a metaphor for most of the issues we face: philosophically, politically, socially, personally. How often are we entrenched in an extreme position on one side of a polarized issue or another? Compromise—a middle path that denies the Truths found at both extremes—satisfies no one. Resolution is not a middle path. Resolution of a dichotomy encompasses all the points of view and then some. There is always more—a Unified Field Theory of ideas, perhaps.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement;

the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

The Courage of His Convictions

Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, was born 1755 into an artistic but impoverished family. He himself had talents for language and scholarship that were not much fostered by his father. He had to fashion a clay lamp with which to read and study in the attic so that his father wouldn’t notice a missing candlestick or lantern. The local school offered to educate him free of charge in return for his tutoring the younger classes in languages. He paid his own way through secondary school and university by tutoring and later translating medical and scientific texts.

After receiving his medical degree in 1779, Hahnemann married and settled in to practice but was very soon disillusioned by the limitations of his science actually to heal the sick. Indeed, he comes to see that most of what passed for medical care did little to cure and much to injure patients. In 1784, he resigned from all practice of medicine, instead resorting to translation to support his growing family (ten children eventually). The position he gave up was not just a simple village doctor, rather the prestigious appointment of Stadtphysikus—a prominently placed doctor who oversaw all the pharmacists of the region, in addition to his private practice.

This career change led to some rather extreme poverty for Hahnemann’s family, who followed him from place to place while he pursued his own studies by day and translating by night. He lived in fourteen different towns in the twelve years between 1777 and 1804, following educational and employment opportunities. By his own record, he took up smoking tobacco in order to stay up the whole of every other night translating in order to feed his family, while continuing his own research during the day.

By the late 1790’s, Hahnemann began practicing medicine again according to the principles he developed during his wandering research years: prescribe single remedies in tiny doses according to similarities between the patient’s symptoms and the changes aroused in healthy drug-testers during the testing. Then, as now, such methods were diametrically opposed to the standard of care and provoked extreme ire from his colleagues. The more so when he began to have better outcomes than other doctors.

After a scarlet fever epidemic ran through town, showing the efficacy of homeopathy in both treating and preventing scarlet fever, Hahnemann was run out of town ahead of the law. Over the next twenty years, he continued to engage in verbal and legal combat with the medical and pharmaceutical community of the German states. By the end of that time, he was barred from practice through the enforcing of a law that prohibited physicians from mixing and dispensing their own prescriptions.

Hahnemann eventually found refuge under the patronage of Frederick Ferdinand, Duke of Anhalt-Kˆthen. He became the personal physician to the Duchess and received the right to practice and dispense medicine as he saw fit. For the next fifteen years, he published and continuously revised his masterpiece works The Organon of the Medicine and The Chronic Diseases. He refined his theories through his busy practice.

By 1835, the conditions of Hahnemann’s refuge had changed after the deaths of his wife and his patron. He remarried and moved to Paris, the home of his new wife. His marriage did not find favor with his family or many in the burgeoning homeopathic community. During these last years, he made further radical refinements to his medical system and prepared a sixth edition of his Organon. Unfortunately his death forestalled the publication of this final work, despite his having completed his revisions. It was not published until 1920.

Hahnemann died in 1843 at the age of 88.

The life of Hahnemann was fraught with turbulence, persecution, passion, conviction, and most of all courage. His endless search for the truth about the nature of healing cost him a great deal but his continued engagement with the search to it is a testament to courage. As a study partner of mine said,

It seems that in order to find wholeness and healing it takes the commitment to meet the challenges again and again. The destiny is to find ourselves. I feel grateful for the work the Hahnemann did. We are all blessed for it and I want to honor it by moving forward meeting my own obstacles.

Do I have the commitment to meet my obstacles head on? Do I have faith in my own journey for Truth? Do I have the courage to uphold my own convictions?

Why I Study Homeopathy

When I was five years old, I decided to be a doctor. After a deep gash on my knee, which I was left to attend alone with only a wet cloth and a bandage, I discovered beneath the flowing blood and assorted gore a hard gleaming white thing that I decided must be my knee bone. This sight, an inner mystery of the body revealed, awoke in me a fascination with how the body works that has never left me, although it has deepened and broadened to include the mysteries of the whole of Being—body, mind, and soul. I decided then and there, in the attic of my grandmother’s house, that I must study medicine and be a doctor; I must bring this fascination with healing mysteries to the world.

Forty years later, I still have a scar across my knee and I still feel that breathless awe in the presence of the healing work. My family culture, learning differences I had not yet accommodated, and just plain life intervened and I never made it to medical school, but I have never stopped being fascinated by the healing process, by health and wellness, and by the myriad ways to affect it. I have been studying this process informally although seriously since my early teens.

I discovered nutrition as a way to affect health as a teenager and began a never-ending, always-something-new experiment with foods, eating habits, and supplementation. I continue to learn the food/health connections today with my family and my healing clients. How we nourish ourselves through food, physically and spiritually, is the foundation upon which we daily create ourselves.

Also in high school, I was introduced to psychology—the inner mysteries of the mind—and learned to observe. I continued formal study of psychology through a Bachelor’s Degree, to the offering of a place in a doctoral program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Although I didn’t continue the credentialing process, I have never stopped observing, analyzing the patterns of the workings of people’s inner selves. The incredible drive for wellness and wholeness in all that is alive is astounding.

Not quite ten years later, after dabbling with a few alternative health ideas, I entered a struggle with fertility that finalized my break with conventional medicine. Doctors ignored my plight, my midwife was not trained in miscarriage prevention, and I was left to find my own cure. For three years in the mid 1990’s, I researched reproductive endocrinology and alternative therapies, diagnosed my own problems and prescribed my own treatments. My midwife was my connection to therapies to which I had no access. Her trust in my work and willingness to learn as I learned was the first indication that I had something to offer the world through medicine. Her suggestion that I become a doctor made me realize that I had forgotten my childhood dream.

First, though, we had the joy of homebirthing my first daughter. Homebirth pushed me firmly into the alternative health world—as if I had that far to go! But it was during my pregnancy that I realized the power of homeopathy: Sepia 200C saved my marriage and my sanity during my second trimester. My midwife gave me some of her own personal supply, which worked the miracle. I still have that little bottle of Sepia grains and for years turned to it in times of need.

Since then, I have devoted my life to mothering and the study and practice of holistic healing methods. I have raised my children exclusively with vibrational medicine. In addition to homeopathy, other modalities I use are kinesiology, flower remedies, aromatherapy, botanical medicine and direct resonance healing.

So why, now that I have the space in my family life to consider medical school, am I wanting to study homeopathy? I have become more fascinated with the facilitation of healing through working directly with vibrational energy. Of all the modalities of vibrational healing, homeopathy seems the most inclusive of the body, mind, and soul in equal measure.

Homeopathy is a study of the whole human Being: from the physics, to the psyche, to the soul, acknowledging that there is no body without soul, nor mind without body. Homeopathy is poetry and science, psychology and theatre, cosmology and philosophy, and all at once.

And, lastly, I choose the homeopathic path because the formal study and credential will allow me to be what I already am—teacher, mentor, healer, parent—in a deeper, more profound way. As a Wholistic Kinesiologist, I am fairly certain to select a healing remedy if I have a sufficient pharmacy from which to choose but, without a thorough education in homeopathy, I don’t know why it will work or why it is the right remedy. I want to understand the homeopathic paradigm of disease and healing. Without that understanding, I am still only able to offer superficial knowledge to others and that is neither sufficient for me nor for those whom I seek to help.

Aude Sapere

The motto, the call to arms, of the Enlightenment. Most commonly translated "dare to know" or "dare to be wise", the phrase connotes ideas of courage, stepping forth, moving through, individualism, and thinking beyond what's right in front of you. Personally, I like the translation "have the courage to think for yourself".

Knowledge is a terrible thing. A powerful thing. An idea once known cannot be unknown. It can be denied; it can be condemned, ridiculed, or ignored. But knowledge is forever. The knowing of something obligates the knower to accommodate the idea. The easiest accommodation is to follow the crowd, maintain the conventional wisdom. The hardest accommodation is to think your own thoughts and dare to live by them.

Samuel Hahnemann lived at the height of the Age of Reason and certainly took seriously the new ideas of scientific proof. He took our dictum a step further, however, when he came to see that the medical protocols of his day did not hold up to the new standards of science. He thought for himself and developed a whole new medical art.

Naturally, his knowledge, once made known, was and continues to be denied, condemned, ridiculed and ignored. Most of his professional life was a struggle against the medical establishment. He had the courage to continue on thinking, researching, teaching his own thoughts.

Those individuals with the courage to look unprejudiced at new ideas, who dare to hold conventions to the same scrutiny he used, who can see the essence behind the ideas, are the intrepid architects of the future. May more of us be willing to think for ourselves.

Aude sapere.