VFNW Spring2014 Transcript Lesson2

This is one of the philosophy books we read in school. It's free on the net...happy reading on this one! http://www.homeoint.org/books3/kentlect/index.htm This is another of absolutely required reading when we study...Kent was a medical doctor in North America and he is considered one of the biggest contributors to homeopathic philosophy and practice in the last 100 years. http://www.simillimum.com/education/little-library/homeopathic-philosophy/chd/article.php This link will take you to Can Homeopathy Be Dangerous? Great philosophy introduction!David Little has an extensive online library about homeopathy...you may find his stuff interesting to read...it's very thorough. For a very small fee, you can get access to all his archived material. It is well worth the investment!

By Donna Powers RCSHom, CCH, RSHom (NA)

VACCINE FREE: Now What?

HOMEOPATHIC PHILOSOPHYCall #2 Transcript

Donna Powers: Welcome to the Vaccine Free: Now What? 12-week teleseminar course. This is class two where we will be talking about homeopathic philosophies, its beginnings, and the main differences with allopathic or what we understand as conventional or western medicine.

DP: Homeopathy is a new, relatively -- it's actually 250 years old plus -- paradigm, for many in terms of being energetic medicine. So it differs greatly from our understanding of conventional western medicine. It is energetic medicine and we'll be talking about that today. So just be gentle with yourself if it's a bit confounding. And today, also, we'll be talking a little bit about vaccine history. I include this because I was teaching at the Western College of Homeopathic Medicine, teaching about homeoprophylaxis which is using homeopathic remedies to prevent infectious illness.

DP: And I learnt that the whole idea of vaccines almost parallels exactly Hahnemann's work in homeopathy, it's in the same time frame. So I'm going to introduce you a little bit to that because what we're talking about overlaps so closely with vaccinations, conventional understanding of medicine, and the idea of energetic medicine, homeopathy and prevention of infectious illnesses with homeopathy and to help support healing in infectious illness.

DP: So we have all levels of homeopathic experience here today. So please feel free to share or ask questions as we move along. And we have so much to learn from each other. Especially when you start using homeopathic remedies in the home or you're seeing a homoeopath and you're seeing results of homeopathic support.

DP: So the idea of homeopathic philosophy is the work of Samuel Hahnemann. Samuel Hahnemann was, in his day, a very talented young man but he was born to a very poor family. But his brightness was picked up by some of his teachers. So he was sponsored and given an education. He was born in April 1755. And I forgot to get the year that he died, but that's okay. He still lives on with his work in quite an amazing way. Hahnemann himself became a doctor. He was very skilled in Latin and Greek. He was fluent in seven languages. And he was also a master pharmacist. And in his work, in the Organon of the homeopathic medicine... He actually wrote it, The Organon of the Medical Art, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. He was one of the first doctors of his time to recognize that so much of good health was about hygiene, sanitation, healthy eating, clean air, and if his work had stopped there, he would have probably been promoted as one of the greatest minds ever.

DP: He was also the founder of the idea of the minimum dose, we'll talk about. Which is still in use with conventional medicine, you get antibiotics for 10 days. So he introduced that as well. He was also know as the first psychiatrist. He would actually go into the insane asylums of the day and he was one of the first medical doctors and one of the

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first people who treated people with mental disorders in a humane and compassionate way and he actually used homeopathic remedies there, as well. And was able to actually cure some people there.

DP: He was a great observer. This is probably Hahnemann's greatest gift. He was always questioning and always open and curious about what was health, what was illness, what was disease and what was cure and he paid attention to what was happening in his time when he was practising medicine. And all that he could observe was that people were actually dying of the "cures of the day." So in his time, syphilis and gonorrhoea were two of the chronic illnesses that were great killers. And one of the medicines that was used was mercury, and the saying of the day was "Salvation by Salivation."

DP: So in fact, yes, there was no gonorrhoea or syphilis anymore because of the mercury treatments, but what happened was that people died of mercury poisoning. Oram, or gold, was one of the remedies used in his day to treat arthritis, joint and bone disorders, and some of that coming again through syphilis and gonorrhoea. And what happened with those people is they got terribly depressed and suicidal. So he felt that his oath as a physician to first do no harm, he felt that in fact the medicines of his day were doing more harm than curing. Maybe people died without the affliction that they had or the disease that they had, but they were dying definitely of poisoning of the substance.

DP: So he left medicine. By that time, he was married, had several children, and he needed to make a living to support his family. So he went back to translating the medical texts of the day and a lot of them were based in verbal Materia Medica. As he was translating, he happened to cross a statement that said, cinchona or China or Jesuit's bark cured malaria because it was a bitter herb, and he just thought that was the most unscientific thing he had ever read and thought, "How could that be?" He could think of hundreds of bitter herbs and they did not necessarily cure malaria. So what was happening?

DP: So what he did was he experimented on himself, and he did this throughout his lifetime, experimented on himself, his friends, his students, and his family. And he took cinchona or China or Jesuit's bark, as it's called, and he took it as a tincture, almost like a tea, until he started to develop malaria-like symptoms. He came up with the idea that this actually is what's at work. The reason that China or Jesuit's bark cures malaria is because it is similar to the the disease malaria. So what the substance itself could create in the humans, it could cure in an infectious illness. They learnt about malaria and Jesuit's bark through the South American native population, so of course, the import of Jesuit's bark became a very lucrative business in Europe. There's a wonderful book








out now by Elizabeth Gilchrist called The Signature Of All Things and it talks about that in there. It's quite a lovely book, it's quite a profound book, actually.

DP: So this is how Hahnemann stumbled on one of his first principles of homeopathy and that it is the idea of like curing like that makes something work, and this he called homeopathy, similar, like curing like. So the other thing that he observed, he also wrote in his book, so The Organon of the Medical Art. The other thing that he was frustrated with is medicine of his day, seemed to just change. They would try something and say, "This is it, this is it." Add then, more poisoning or it didn't work and then they had to redo it or rethink something else. And there were no principals or guiding ideas behind cure, behind illness or disease, or about medicines.

DP: So he set out and wrote this book, The Organon of the Medical Art, and Aphorism 9 is one of the ones that I truly love, always. It sort of has become a way of life for me. In it he says, "In the healthy human state, the spirit like life force," and he called it autocracy, "that enlivens the material organism as dynamis." So what he's saying there is that when we're alive, when we're in our physical form, there is a spirit-like part of us, a force, that is organizing.

DP: So there is this force, that we would know it now as energetic medicine. This is energy and it's what organizes us. And the reason we know it's energy that organizes us is when we're dead, the body just decays. It just completely goes in on itself, there's no life, and it's gone. So when we're alive, there's something else just besides our physical form, and this is what he's talking about. And this invisible spirit-like life force, he calls it vital force, governs without restriction and keeps all parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious, vital operations, as regards both our feelings and functions, so that our indwelling rational spirit can freely avail itself of this living healthy instrument, for the higher purposes of our existence.

DP: So we are governed by this vital force, but we are in a physical form. And this vital force is what organizes and we perceive as health, as good health, because we're free to be able to do what we want to do. When we're sick, we're limited, we have symptoms. The only way we know we are sick or something is out of balance, is that we have symptoms. This is the only way the vital force actually has to communicate to us, to say something is off, something is not right. And the vital force has a wisdom all of its own in its organizing features, in that if there's an imbalance, the first place it's going to be expressed is on the skin. It's the largest, safest organ. So we'll often start with things like a rash.

DP: And then if that part is not allowed to express the imbalance, then it moves into a deeper part of the organ. So, even conventional medical doctors will know that if you








suppress the skin rash with corticosteroids, then you end up with asthma. Children who have asthma and eczema, they often alternate between the two. When the asthma is really good, then the eczema is really really bad. So the cortisone is put on, the eczema clears up and then the respiratory stuff starts again and so inhalers are given, steroids are given internally. And it can go back and forth like this.

DP: But the vital force is keeping those lungs and those internal organs as safe as it can by putting out a skin rash. And so, just keep that in mind. And then the last area that becomes disturbed, the vital force works very diligently on our behalf to ensure that the imbalance is not expressed in the mental and emotional sphere. And when it reaches that level, then there's... A homeopathic remedy will still be helpful. So one of the things I'm going to suggest, that may be relevant for all of us as women and women who have had children, is that often after childbirth, it's exhausting. It's a physical stress on the body, mental, emotional. You have lack of sleep. So, this is not a judgement. This isn't good or bad. It's simply the vital force cannot keep up with that kind of stress and strain and we can end up in a postpartum depression very easily.

DP: And that's a hormonal imbalance sometimes, and homeopathically we can address that without anti-depressants and what you will see is the body begins to feel itself and mentally and emotionally we feel better, even if we get more skin stuff. So, we just can cope better with our situation. So, nothing has changed in the environment but who we are has changed energetically so that we can cope and feel and move on.

DP: So, that's the aphorism and that was part of Hahnemann putting together these aphorisms or truths about what is cure, what is health, what is disease and what are medicines. And this is where he really separated himself with the conventional medicine of the day. So, at this point I also want to point out because the Organon, if you are interested at all in philosophy and in the richness of Hahnemann's thinking, I would encourage you to buy the Organon by Wenda Brewster O'Reilly. She's edited it and annotated it. There's also Kent's Lectures on Homeopathic Philosophy and there's a few other really good authors from early medical days who are practising homeopathy. But if you have an interest in philosophy, I would encourage you to read about them.

DP: In the Organon you will actually find, and this the learning I would like to share with you because infectious disease at the time of Hahnemann... Remember this is with bloodletting, heavy doses of mercury and gold, this was also at the time when sewers were just out on the street, hygiene was not that great, nutrition was very poor, over crowding industrialized kinds of things, families were poor as a rural and with children all lived in close proximity. So infectious diseases were prevalent.








DP: Armies, Napoleon's time in the bunkers, again living in closed quarters, poor nutrition, stress, poor sanitation. These were all prevalent in the day, so everyone was looking for cures for infectious diseases that were killing people. In particular, the big one was smallpox at this time. And right around Hahnemann's days... Hahnemann was born in 1755, and he would have been 20, 30 years old when he was starting to develop his ideas around Homeopathy and in 1796... So at this time there was smallpox variolation going on. And smallpox, the Latin name is Variolinum.

DP: And what they were doing, this Lady Montague came back from Persia and she said what they're doing there to treat smallpox is they take the pus of somebody who's infected and then they just insert it into a person and then that prevents them from having smallpox. Well, of course, there were some risks and hazards with it because they were putting the real smallpox virus into people who may or may not have been ready to have an experience of the smallpox disease. So, the cure, or the prevention actually, of smallpox by variolation in the early 1700s was possibly as deadly as having smallpox itself.

DP: So then Jenner, who's considered as the father of vaccination, was paying attention to the milkmaids and there was... There were stories around that milkmaids who got cowpox from cows did not get smallpox and this was the idea that he based the idea of using cowpox to inoculate people. And they would actually scar them, draw a line, and then they would inject the cowpox. So this is the pox from the cow into a human person, and that's where we get the word vaccination from, vacca is Latin for cow.

DP: And so the idea was he only tried on one person, and then from that, he developed the idea of vaccination. And in the Organon, you will read where Hahnemann thought that this might possibly be an idea that would connect with the law of similars. That the animal disease was close enough that it would in fact be like a simillimum or similar, so remember like curing like, that it would possibly prevent smallpox.

DP: It wasn't until some of Hahnemann's students later on observed that those who were given the vaccination or the cowpox vaccine then developed problems, suppression of the immune system. They were developing chronic effects, and they called those miasms at that time, of having vaccination. In that time and day... So Compton Brunett is the homoeopath who observed it. He still supported the idea of giving this cowpox, but what they thought and also Hahnemann... So Hahnemann would see that there were ill effects from this cowpox, and he recommended sulphur to deal with the side effects of the cowpox vaccination. Brunett found that what worked best with the cowpox was the homeopathic remedy cilia.








DP: So you'll often still see that a routine prescription, with the idea being that it's going to deal with the ill effects of vaccination, would be cilia which is from the conifer family. And actually we still see, if you work at a case and you're with somebody whose had ill effects of a vaccine, sometimes you can see these conifer remedies being very, very helpful still. But, it's not routine and it doesn't work for everybody because what homeopathy is always looking for is the like curing like. So we'll get to that again in a little bit.

DP: So, in 1802... So again we are still talking about the time of Hahnemann because he lived to be in his 80s which was a ripe old age. So it was still in this time, and Jenner petitioned parliament at that time to introduce vaccination, and he wanted the opportunity to deliver people from the inconveniences, uncertainties, disasters, and horrors of variolation. And so what he did is, he petitioned the parliament, House of Commons, so making it legal in 1802 and in 1807 for large sums of money to promote smallpox vaccination, so vacca from cow, promising that his product had the singularly beneficial effect of rendering through life the person's so inoculated perfectly secure from the infection of smallpox. With by a very small margin that he won that. And he got what would be the equivalent of today half a million dollars. And that's research from Jennifer Craig called Jabs, Jenner and Juggernauts.

DP: So out of this whole idea of Jenner inoculating one child that this was the idea of vaccination being born. So there were no studies. He was not a medical doctor. So just to give you the parallel between what was happening with vaccines and what was happening with homeopathy. And it was the homoeopaths, once Hahnemann died, who started to pick up on what was happening with the immune system and the idea of vaccinations.

DP: I want to just read one little quote because you will see it... Especially with the headlines here in Canada have been about measles outbreaks and now it's in Manitoba. And this is what happened in the day, in the 1700s, 1800s. So, this is from Neil Miller in Immunization Versus Reality, "begin with unsanitary conditions and poor nutritional awareness. This results in regional and self-limiting outbreaks of smallpox." You can insert any kind of infectious illness in there. And the first point, poor nutritional awareness, we have that now. Nutrition has become very, very important, especially for our children, and in the last few years, where we have had so much awareness and awakening to the whole thing around the kind of fats and oils and fast food and junk food and sugar.

DP: So after this... So you have "regional and self-limiting outbreaks, then you conduct human experiments with variolation," and you can substitute vaccination now, "and when this fails, conduct human experiments with cowpox, horse grease cowpox." So








Jenner... They went through this whole thing because what they found was the cowpox inoculations were creating more problems, so then they moved to something else and they would grow this on horses and then start to see the implications of how vaccines, especially viruses, are grown on animal product, human tissue, and then injected into the blood stream.

DP: "When this fails, deny it. When this fails, recommend re-vaccination. When this fails, manipulate statistics by renaming the disease so you have outbreaks now of polio-like illnesses." They're not going to call it polio. They changed the name from polio to acute flaccid paralysis and so then there were no more cases of polio. It's really debatable whether actually polio was eliminated because of the vaccine or because they renamed the disease. "When everyone begins catching on and vaccination rates drop and cases of smallpox dwindle, take full credit for eradicating the disease." So there you have it.

DP: And in Hahnemann's day, 1800, he used Belladonna for scarlet fever which is from the strep family virus. In 1813, which he used Bryonia and Rhus tox in typhus. And that's parasite-borne bacteria, it's actually on lice, and that's not to be confused with typhoid fever or salmonella, which is an enterobacteria. It's got these rosy spots on the abdomen and it might look like appendicitis. It might look like gastroenteritis. You can see from our work last week where we talked about the immune system, having some of these viruses and bacteria in us and when that gets disturbed and out of balance, then we have our immune system responding and eliminating the discharges, all of the toxic stuff that's in there. 1831, he used Camphor, Cuprum and Veratrum for cholera and we still have cholera outbreaks which are endemic in places like Haiti. That was a big concern. So again, poor nutrition, sanitation, sewer issues, hygiene, people living in close quarters.

DP: So just so that you have that idea that homeopathy and the idea of vaccination historically have run on parallel tracks.

DP: So what I'm going to do now is move into more homeopathic philosophy, and just remember this has just been a very quick, fast and dirty introduction to the idea of vaccination, the history of homeopathy, the history of infectious illnesses, and using homeopathy to prevent and to help support healing not only of infectious illnesses but the side effects of vaccination. So it's getting more and more complex. In Hahnemann's day, it was just smallpox. Today, of course, we have a much larger vaccine schedule, and some of these are infectious illnesses that as a child, I had every one of them.

DP: To have these glaring headlines accusing people who... "Vaccine-averse parents put children at risk," those headlines spark fears. What's the other headline? "Vaccine








refusal puts children at risk." I'm encouraging my mother to write a blog article because I keep checking in with her and she said, "You know, Donna, it was just so normal for you kids to have measles. If we found out it was going around at school, we just figured you would get measles." There were five of us kids and it just went down the line. We had all of the infectious illnesses. And her go-to in her day was Dr. Spock. Now, one of the problems during... I was born in the '50s, so we were having those illnesses in the '60s and she did use aspirin and that's the one thing that you wouldn't ever do.

DP: Now normally she didn't use aspirin, she would just work with the fever naturally, but if we moved up to very high fevers, then she would use aspirin. But it turned out one... My youngest sister couldn't take aspirin. She hallucinated on it, so she pretty much took care of her without those kinds of medications. So you're here to learn and to normalize infectious childhood illnesses, but also to help support your children with acute illnesses, which can be colds, sore throats, earaches, coughs, bumps, falls, bruises, all of that. But for right now, it's the infectious illnesses that we're going to concentrate on.

DP: So one of the principles we've already talked about was the principle of similars. The like curing like. Cinchona or China cures malaria because the symptoms it creates in a healthy person are malaria-like. In the same way, a remedy like Arnica, when Arnica is given to healthy people, if given enough of it, the body starts producing bruising, swelling, bleeding, aching, like a bruised soreness, and this is how we know that it helps people who have been in an accident with bruising and swelling and that kind of bruised aching pain. Arnica will work 75% of the time for 75% of the people in a fall or an accident because this is the remedy picture that it has. So it's the like curing like.

DP: When Hahnemann used Belladonna in the scarlet fever epidemic, Belladonna has the high fever quickly, the pulsating, the throbbing, the redness, the violence and this is why it is so good in a fever. It creates these symptoms in healthy people. So when Hahnemann gave it when there was scarlet fever, to treat those who had scarlet fever with Belladonna, he was also able to look at thousands of people at the time, in an epidemic, and determine that there was one remedy that best suited what was happening. And he calls that the genus epidemicus. And this is what he gave as prevention, was Belladonna. And this is why it worked because the symptom picture of the remedy fit the symptom picture of the scarlet fever disease that was going around at the time.

DP: This is kind of the idea of the flu vaccine. What they do when they prepare that is to look at what's happening in the Southern hemisphere to choose three of the strains that they think are the ones circulating the most and will possibly be what is circulating in the Northern Hemisphere. It's a real crap shoot. And then what they do is they have to grow








the virus on a particular medium, it has to be an animal and now it's insect, and now it's not just injectable, its inhaling it. There are a lot of problems with the flu vaccine but this is their idea of trying to find what would be similar in both the Southern and Northern hemisphere.

DP: Homeopathy has a much more elegant way of doing that. So in terms of a measles epidemic, one of the homeopathic remedies that we'll talk about when we're on our measles section is the homeopathic remedy Pulsatilla. The symptom picture of Pulsatilla which is this beautiful tiny little flower that comes out in the spring, you'll be able to see it, we sometimes call them crocus. There's different varieties but it's this little anemone. It's one of the first spring flowers. And so it grows... Sometimes you can see it in the snow.

DP: And the picture of Pulsatilla, when given to healthy people, ends up looking like a picture very similar to a lot of childhood illnesses and in particular measles. So sometimes in a measles outbreak, you can use Pulsatilla as a prevention. But you can use also Pulsatilla to help support healing with a child who happens to have measles. Some children constitutionally will be Pulsatilla-like and there's a whole picture that goes with that. So we'll get into those pictures. You will see certain remedies over and over and over again with these infectious illnesses and as you're building your homeopathic at home kit, you will find about 10, maybe 20 remedies are going to be really essential and useful in the beginning of all of these illnesses. And you may never ever know what you have short circuited in terms of an illness. So this is the idea of similars, homeopathy, homeo, like curing like. Allopathy is like and not like. It's like a suppression. Sorry, I haven't got that detail in my brain right at the moment.

DP: So I also want you to start thinking in terms of not a disease. So the disease will have symptoms that are common to everybody. So in a fever, everybody will have an elevated temperature. In a fever, what might not be so clear, some people are very very thirsty. That's pretty common in a fever. But if you have an individual with a fever who is not thirsty at all, this is uncommon. This is what we call characteristic. So you have the disease with its symptoms. You have the person and who they are. And then you have the person who has the infectious illness or the disease or the fever.

DP: If you have a child who has a fever and you're concerned, they're kind of clingy and they're not thirsty at all, of course as a parent you're going to start to be concerned about dehydration. But this is a possible symptom of the remedy Pulsatilla. Thirstlessness is characteristic of the remedy and if this is characteristic of your child, and they have a Pulsatilla-like fever, chances are very good that it's not Belladonna that's going to help as a routine remedy to go to, it will probably be Pulsatilla even in the fever stage. And there'll be other things that you want to confirm that with.








DP: So you have the person, their general, say "I feel better in cool air. I feel better walking slowly." Now when you have a pre-verbal or a non-verbal baby, an infant, they can't tell you, "Please rock me slowly," "Please open the window." But what you do as a mom, and you're walking around with a sick baby, you can tell pretty quickly, is this a baby that wants to be joggled and joggled and bumped up and down vigorously? Or is this a baby who does better just by gentle rocking and moving slowly? This becomes characteristic of the child who is sick. Again, this is Pulsatilla. Where the Chamomilla baby, in fever, they'll want... Picking up and put down and they'll have a whole different pace. A lot of anger, a lot of irritability, whereas as the Pulsatilla might be a little whinier.

DP: So these are the things you're paying attention to with the idea of the similars. A Pulsatilla baby, you might just all of a sudden, accidentally, you have to go pick up the other child, and as soon as they get in the fresh air, you notice for the first time, in an hour, they're not crying. You're on to, "Oh, okay. They don't like being warm. This baby of mine does not like being warm or wrapped up," whereas your other child, maybe that's what they want, they get very chilly and they want more and more blankets and they want the hat on, and you can just tell because they're not crying, they've settled down once they're warm and snuggly. A Pulsatilla child, if you get them warm and snuggly, they'll get uncomfortable, they'll get overheated, and they'll get very, very fussy again.

DP: So you're looking overall, what is the baby needing or wanting, that's called the general. And then, particular, are called my feet, my head, it's the body part. So, sometimes when you have a child that says, "My ear hurts," and they point to the right ear, that's their part. So you could look up, "pain, right ear," but you will do better when you find out what's characteristic about that pain in the right ear. Some children will want a heating pad or a wheat bag on it, and they'll want hard pressure. They'll want to lay down against that sore ear.

DP: Or the baby might be pressing that part of their head against you. Of course, they're getting warmed up by having their head against your shoulder. Whereas, another child won't want you to touch it, won't want you to go near it, and they're quiet chilly and very irritable with the pain. So then you have to look at something else, quite possibly. Or maybe they have a very high fever with the pain, and it's more characteristic of Belladonna. Belladonna is a right sided remedy with, it can have those ear infections.

DP: So this is where you're trying to fine tune and differentiate between the particular part that's in pain and how they are feeling overall. And then you're trying to find the remedy that has the overall characteristic parts of it in general, what makes them feel better or worse, and then in particular, the physical part, what makes it better or worse.








Are there any questions with that part of it, the idea of like curing like? Okay, we have a hand up. Okay, Sarah, I'm taking you off mute. Go ahead, Sarah.

Sarah: Okay. I apologize if you did say this, but one question I have... Like when you were discussing the Pulsatilla fever, do you find that a child tends to have that type of fever repeatedly? Like, my oldest child might have a Pulsatilla fever, where the younger one might tend to have a Belladonna fever. Or is it specific to each illness?

DP: It can be and it doesn't have to be. The beauty of getting an individual constitutional remedy for a child is that you often find that that is the remedy that they need for their chronic state but also when they have an acute flare up. So yes, in a family, you may have a Belladonna like child, and that remedy just works beautifully for chronic and also for acute. Whereas you may have another child that's more Pulsatilla like, and then you have a Pulsatilla-like acute situation come up and it works well in that. Now also, you can learn this as a parent, doing acutes, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end, that you may need to change remedies throughout the progression of the illness, and we'll get into that with some of the specific infectious illnesses, because they have different stages.

DP: But, also, there's what we call a relationship of remedies. So you may have a child who is kind of stubborn, and obstinate, and won't try new things, kind of small and lean, and nutritionally just isn't getting what they need from their food. They might need a remedy called Silica. But the acute of Silica is Pulsatilla. So when they're sick, they might move into a Pulsatilla state. But you learn this as you go along.

Sarah: Okay, thank you.

DP: Yeah. Does that answer your question?

Sarah: It does. One other thing, my girls are doing constitutional treatment now, if you... Say you have a Pulsatilla child, if you have treated them constitutionally, then you would expect... Maybe not the same fever symptoms every time?

DP: It's possible. It's possible.

Sarah: Okay.

DP: So, yes, the idea is to approach every illness with an open mind, without judging, without automatically giving something.

Sarah: Okay.








DP: So, they may possibly need something else for that kind of thing. Now, also, if children have had a series of vaccinations and had illnesses since then, never been well since, sometimes that whole layer has to be addressed constitutionally, and by that, for everyone else, I mean... Usually a single remedy. And then once that's resolved, another picture may show up. So, you're always paying attention to who the child is, but also what are the symptoms that this vital force, this energy, is communicating to us.

Sarah: Thank you.

DP: Yeah, does that make sense?

Sarah: It does, yes. Thank you.

DP: Yeah. So, the constitutional remedy isn't always the same forever and ever, amen. That can change, and we have to be paying attention to what this organizing, invisible energy is communicating to us through the symptoms. And sometimes you have a beautiful remedy that's been working and going along, and then you're stuck. And something's not working. And then, sometimes you need what we call an intercurrent remedy. So, again, it's just about paying attention. This is why being under homeopathic care is important, and then for these acute kinds of illnesses that come up, you just work with your homoeopath, and if they're comfortable with you using acute remedies for colds, sore throats, that's great. Some homoeopaths prefer you don't do it on your own. But I like you to have that information so that you know what's going on.

DP: Okay. Alright. So, we will continue on. So, that's that particular principle. There's four main principles with homeopathy, so that's the first one, the law of similars. The second one, we started to talk about that, is the single remedy, which is individualized, which is sometimes known as the constitutional remedy. So, with some children, it can be a very complex picture, and we're always trying to look at the child with this particular set of symptoms. So, sometimes you get a single remedy that really covers a tremendous amount of the symptomology. And you see your child start to get better.

DP: Now, generally, again, with the organizing energy principle, called the vital force with homeopathy, you may still have a physical problem, or with your children, they may still have chicken pox, measles, whatever it is. But what you find after you give the most or best indicated single remedy is that they either fall asleep or that their mood changes. So many, many parents will tell you, "Boy, after we gave Chamomilla while our youngest was starting to teeth, completely different child." They're still teething, but you've given the vital force the support that it needs to move through that whole process without having to create the pain and without creating the irritability. So, they're still teething. That hasn't changed. But their mood and emotions have changed, and they're playing, they're laughing.








DP: And so, with babies, with children, with adults, this is always what we're looking for first, are changes at the mental and emotional level. Or, if sleep happens, that is always considered a good option. Now, the other response that we look for is a discharge. So, remember from last week when we were talking that what is happening is the virus and bacteria are feeding on the cellular debris, they're having a party, and then they're dumping their toxins into the body. And you only have illness symptoms when the immune system has kicked in and needs to lend support, its support as well, to getting rid of these toxins. So, it's not... It's creating an environment that is uncomfortable, where virus and bacteria just cannot survive anymore. So, it does that, but it's also setting up a whole cascade of events so that discharges will take away... They're the garbage cleaners. So, they're cleaning up the cellular debris left by the virus and bacteria and getting rid of it.

DP: So, if after an acute remedy, your child seems emotionally better, or is sleeping but wakes up and you have snot coming out, you have maybe diarrhoea or loose stool, or if they cough and now instead of being stuck in the throat, the congestion is coming out, the expectoration. With ear infections, sometimes it might start draining. Any time there's a drainage... Urine. Apis. Homeopathic apis is a great one. You know that you're on track is if you pee lots and lots and lots and lots. That's a discharge. Sweat. You'll see children's fevers break after you give a homeopathic remedy. That is spot on. I've watched my granddaughter, gave a little bit of Belladonna, break out in a huge sweat and then she's just fine. It's like she was not sick before. And prior to that, she was just an emotional mess.

DP: So these are the kinds of things that you can expect when you give a single remedy and you've gotten as close to the Simillimum as you can. You will see these kinds of results, and you know that you're on the right track. At this point, I encourage parents to just hang in there with that remedy. Especially if, you know... They call but I'm not... There's so much diarrhoea or there's so much vomiting, or there's so much nasal discharge. I always ask, "Well, how is their mood?" "Well, they seem to be fine. But there's all of this stuff coming out." That's where you just, sort of, hang in there and know that the remedy is supporting the vital force to heal itself.

DP: This is the biggest concept that's different from allopathic medicine. With homeopathy, all you're doing is giving support. You're giving something for the vital force to bump up against, so that it doesn't have to create symptoms anymore. It's called a primary action and a secondary response. And this is in the Organon. Hahnemann observed this all the time and was able to develop a truth from it. So normally, this organizing vital force keeps us all in homoeostasis. That's the medical word for it, homoeostasis.








DP: But sometimes the vital force gets stuck. And if it's stuck, or it can't quite get past, or if we've got chronic stress in our life. Or if we've got, you know... We're living in a closed situation. Or maybe we're travelling somewhere where we've not been exposed to these kinds of things, and our vital force just can't keep up with the organization. It creates these symptoms and it gets stuck there. A homeopathic remedy is introduced at an energy level. There's no material substance. It's what we call nanoparticles. Now, they're actually finding... Dr. Iris Bell is doing research on homeopathic remedies, or substances that have these nanoparticles. Very dilute. So there is something there. And that is being evolved in real time right now. So up to this point, you may have heard a homoeopath say, "There's nothing in it. So it can't... It's all energy."

DP: In fact, that's being corrected now, to nanoparticles. So there is something there. But what it's doing is acting on the energy or the vital force and not the physical substance. So we give a remedy. Energetically, it gives the vital force something to push against. And it doesn't have to create the physical symptoms in the body or the mental and emotional symptoms. And what happens is that the body begins to be able to cure itself, to heal itself. We are self-healing organisms. When people have remissions in very serious diseases, like cancer, you hear of these things. And what people have tapped into is this ability to heal yourself.

DP: And so, I would encourage you not to look at symptoms as good or bad with judgement or anything. They're just communicating and it's something we can pay attention to. So with acute infectious illness in children, they have stress too. You think of birthday parties. How many kids get sick after their birthday parties? After Christmas? After Easter? It's just too much fun, too much sugar. And, you know, it is, it's fun, it's a fun time. But sometimes our body can't keep up. So you can give a homeopathic remedy and know that again, with homeopathy, we take causation into consideration as well. So never been well since the vaccine. Never been well since an injury or fall. Never been well since a birthday party. We can take that into consideration.

DP: So that's the idea of the single remedy. Now sometimes, in serious kinds of state like cancer, you will see some homoeopaths who are using a more than a single remedy. They might be using... So for cancer, let's go with that one, Dr. Ramakrishnan has discovered that for one week, you give one remedy, and then the next week, you give a different remedy, which is different from some homoeopaths, who'll say they're classical and they give a remedy and wait, and wait, and wait. In some situations, you cannot do that.

DP: But you're individualizing still, and it's one remedy at a time. You will also hear of homoeopaths who use CEASE therapy or sequential therapy. And they're using different remedies and several remedies. But as a rule, you give one remedy at a time. A single








remedy. Now, sometimes you go and you get a combination remedy, over-the-counter, for something like teething. And inside or in that formulation, you will see three or four homeopathic remedies. I think it's fine. Whatever gives a baby relief... You send somebody to the store and they come back with a combination remedy and it helps, that's wonderful. You just don't know whether it's the Chamomilla in it, the Belladonna, or the Ferrum Phos 4 coming in the teething formula, or the Coffea.

DP: But whatever it is, has helped. So maybe it's all four remedies all together. We haven't done provings of those. And a proving is where you find out what the symptoms of a substance actually create in a person. This is how we build up our Materia Medica. So it might be that or it might be the individual remedy within the combination. So that's the one time where you will see more than one remedy at a time. But generally, Hahnemann's Principle was a single remedy one at a time.

DP: And the idea also was the minimum dose. So in Hahnemann's day, they gave mercury until people were salivating. They were dying of mercury poisoning, plain and simple. Sure, they didn't have syphilis or gonorrhoea, but they had mercury poisoning. So we see this sometimes with children today who are sensitive to the mercury and thimerosal in vaccines. These are the children who drool. So when I talk about homeopathic proving, sometimes how we know a remedy works is by the poisoning, especially animal poisons like the snake poisons or by the poisonings from Hahnemann's day. He recorded all of the symptoms. And one of the symptoms of mercury poisoning is this excess salivation, bone pains that are worse at night, this violence, this desire to kill, to stab. It's like a mental disorder.

DP: And this is how we know it affects healthy people. So when somebody... So take it to... So you don't have to have all of the symptoms in the remedy, but the symptoms that your baby has or your child has or that your partner has or that you have, your symptoms have to be somewhere in that remedy for it to be a synomone. So if you have a baby, even a vaccine free baby, who is drooling and their breath is smelly, they have a bum rash that is just searingly red because of the teething, their poop really smells, they're sweaty, they seem to be worse at night. And if you have that picture, this is the mercury picture. And in that teething, you don't wanna give Chamomilla, you wanna give mercury or Mercurius or mercore. There's different abbreviations and names. I'll try and give you always the full name, the common name and the abbreviation for it because that can be confusing too when you're starting out putting your kits together.

DP: So that's how we know. So has this child got mercury poisoning? Absolutely not. But this child's picture of the teething and dentition is very similar to what's in the mercury remedy picture. This is the like curing like kicking. And what you want to do is the third principle of homeopathy, is to give the smallest amount needed to support the








vital force at this energetic level to complete the healing. With that little baby, you may only need one granule of a Mercurius in a 30CH potency. I'm gonna talk about that next, the idea is potency. You don't have to continue it for 10 days in a row like you would antibiotics.

DP: So the idea of a minimum dose. So you're not giving it 10 days a row, and in fact what would happen is if you gave a remedy... This happened to my own boys, I didn't know about homeopathy. I went to the naturopath. And both my boys were put on phosphorus and he just gave me a tube and the instruction was just to give it. And I gave it until my boys got, what we would think of as proving symptoms of phosphorous, and I actually wasn't able to use that remedy for a number of years on them. So that would be the only thing I would caution is it's better to give a remedy and then wait and see how the vital force responds to that and if the symptoms begin to clear up. In an acute, you would likely repeat more frequently or if it's more intense, if the intensity is high, you would repeat more often. But if it's sort of sick, again you would adjust the repetitions accordingly. You probably wouldn't repeat as often if it were a slower pace.

DP: Okay? So the idea of a potentized remedy. What Hahnemann realized is that people were dying of poisoning. So what would happen... He did two things. I'm always curious. I wonder what sort of overcame him to think about taking Jesuit's bark until he got malaria-like symptoms and then stopped, and of course, the symptoms went away. What possessed him to do that? But the next thing, you wonder what possessed him to do this? He started experimenting with how dilute... So, how often, he reduced that, the repetition, which is carried over into Western medicine. But he started experimenting with what's the minutest amount or most dilute amount I can get away with before it does nothing? So, of course, he eventually diluted it so much that nothing happened.

DP: And that's what you would expect to happen. This was one of the first things that really kind of astounded me when I was learning, before I had studied homeopathy, is that the more dilute the remedy, the more potent it actually is. So what he discovered was... And again what possessed him to do this? He had diluted it, but when he started to do in between the dilutions was to shake it which is called succussion in liquids, or he would grind it which is called the trituration and particularly use that with milk sugar pallets when he was dealing with substances like mercury.

DP: So not only was he diluting it, he was succussing, shaking, or triturating, grinding. And what he discovered was that... And he just called it the animating principle of the material substance that something was released. So he was now moving into the idea of energetic medicine. It was diluted but at the same time becoming more potent. And in fact, he found that these dilutions became more potent in their action at an energetic level than the material dose. This is what makes homeopathy energetic.








DP: And now what we're discovering 250 plus years later that there's actually nano particles of the material substance in it. But what that entirely means is not all apparent at this stage. But just that the act of diluting and succussing or triturating actually releases some kind of energetic force or power that can impinge on the human vital force that organizes and creates health or creates symptoms as needed when there's an imbalance. This is very, very different than our Western conventional medicine.

DP: The only other alternative complementary medicine that works like this is acupuncture that works on meridians and energetic lines. This is why sometimes, when you go to a homoeopath, they will recommend that you stop acupuncture treatment or keep your acupuncture treatment a good amount of time away from a homeopathic remedy, because the energy with energy can sometimes cancel out the effects of each other.

DP: The other thing I want to tell you about the potentized remedy is that the dilution, of course, is what makes them non-toxic. It becomes very safe for them to be used with babies, infants, children, pregnant women. So if you are concerned about flu in a flu season, they're really pushing vaccines even though they've done no research and tests on giving a flu vaccine to a pregnant women and we're actually seeing some pretty serious side effects in clinics, with mums who've been given flu vaccines, you can actually take a homeopathic flu prevention, homeoprophylactically, which may be a better option. So they are non-toxic.

DP: The other thing is they're sustainable remedies. With homeopathy, you just need the tiniest amount of a substance to triturate, to succuss because it's diluted, that's all you need. So in fact, in some of the homeopathic pharmacies, they have the original tinctures from Hahnemann's day and you can still make remedies from those. It's an amazing pharmaceutical process. So, in terms of being green and ecological, it's just one of the more sensible kinds of medicines that are out there.

DP: Our provings, this was when we give a substance that has been diluted and shaken or crushed and we give it to healthy people and then we develop the symptom picture. So, every year there are homoeopaths who take on new provings and usually students of homeopathy participate in them. So for instance, in Calgary, Alberta, the students along with the director of the college of Western College of Homeopathic Medicine undertook a proving of bison's milk and very interesting what has come out, and these then get published and then homoeopaths start to use these new remedies as they come up.

DP: The other system of learning about the action of remedies right now is something called triturations, and there's a homoeopath in Victoria, Dr. Roland Guenther, who








conducts these and he does open these up to lay people and you actually can have an experience of a substance in a safe controlled environment and he takes you through the different stages, and it is one of the ways where you really intimately learn what a homeopathic remedy is all about and how it affects healthy people and then how you can use it when somebody is ill and who has that same kind of symptom picture.

DP: So that's everything I wanted to say about the potentized remedies. So just to conclude there's four main principles. You have the law of similars, you have the single remedy, you have the minimum dose and you have the potentized remedies. Now earlier... It looks like Sarah has had to leave, I think it was Sarah, maybe it was Susan. We talked about Hering's Law of Cure. Now Hering was a homoeopath that came after Samuel Hahnemann and he made the observation that when cure begins, you will notice a reversal of symptoms. So the simple phrasing that we learned as students and that I will offer here, so you'll get it on the recording and in your transcription, so Hering's Law of Cure states "From above downwards, from within outwards, from a more important organ to a less important one and in the reverse order of their coming."

DP: So we'll go back to using the example of the connection between eczema, a skin condition, and asthma. Generally, if the child started with cradle-cap or the eczema was on the head, or say the eczema originally started in the creases behind the knees, in the creases of the elbows, behind the ears, wherever that eczema first appeared in the child, that will be the last to go. Or if the eczema was more on the head, it will start clearing from the head and move down through to the hands and feet. So sometimes in really challenging cases of eczema, the last part to clear up will be the child's hands or feet, and they can be a mess. Or even things like... So from above downward and from within outwards.

DP: I had the opportunity to treat a small child with hand, foot, and mouth disease and the mum got a combination remedy. And it had a remedy in there, antimonium crude, along with Belladonna and a couple of others. And it sort of helped but it really didn't. But the problem was that they were inside the child's mouth. So she couldn't even nurse this little baby. She breastfed, she was under three months at the time. So antimonium crude wasn't quite the right remedy, what was given was antimonium tart. The first thing to clear up was the pain. She was able to nurse. And then inside the mouth and tongue, those sores cleared up first and then the sores on the hands and feet. So the hand, foot, and mouth. The hands and feet were the last to clear up. So that's the idea, from above downwards, from within outwards.

DP: So if you've got a child who's had a history of eczema but has now had asthma and you go to see your homoeopath and you're working with the asthma, and then lo and behold, the asthma's much better, you go off the Ventolin, you go off the inhalers, you








go off the nebulizers, and be darned if they don't have the worst eczema they've ever had in their entire life. It's actually a good sign and the temptation to want to use cortisone steroids at this point is very, very high, but with good homeopathic care, that will eventually clear up as well.

DP: So some homoeopaths, I'm one of them, if it's a skin stuff I just say "Whatever you need to do to keep your child comfortable, just don't slather it on just in the worst spots." And if the vital force is strong enough at that point, it will continue the cure, either with that same remedy or with another remedy that's best indicated for the skin. But what you have is moving from within, the lungs, where it's very serious where you have a breathing problem, to the skin which is a safe large organ for these discharges to happen. And so from a more important organ, like a lung, to a less important one which is the skin. So anything on the skin is a good sign, and in the reverse order of their coming. So generally in that eczema-asthma relationship, usually the eczema has come first and then the asthma. So once the asthma's cleared up, then the eczema starts to clear up and the eczema generally clears up from top to bottom, with the hands and the feet being the last.

DP: So that's mostly what I would say and it also goes the other way. So Hering's Law of Cure, this is how you know that a remedy is either helping or not helping. It will move from more serious areas to less serious areas like the skin. But I am reminded... So if there's suppression, the vital force then has no choice but then to move the imbalance into a deeper part of the organism. But I do want to mention too, sometimes with adults, when it's something like a postpartum depression, it is possible emotionally you're feeling better but then your patient calls back, or what you've experienced is, "Yes, I feel much better. I feel much better in general, but my periods are horrendous. I've never had this kind of pain."

DP: But again you have to remember, as women, we have an opportunity monthly to have a major discharge. So generally under the care of your homoeopath, the next period should be much, much better. So, you sometimes think, "Oh, no, this is worse, this is worse. I've never had cramps like this," but if overall, you're mentally and emotionally feeling better, this is a good direction to go in.

DP: I think that's all I want to say about that. Are there any questions or comments? We might even be able to finish a little bit earlier today or we can talk about whatever is on your mind. There's a few of us still on the call, so go ahead this is a good time. I've given you a lot of information so take a minute or two to think if there's something that you would like to ask or anything you would like to share.

DP: Okay, we've got Rubina, go ahead.








Rubina: I'm just thinking, when I write down the remedy that you mentioned, if you can just mention... It starts with the letter B or V or T, that will be easier for me to understand or write.

DP: Yes, thank you for that feedback. So, yes, Belladonna, started with a B. What other remedies came up?

Rubina: Posta something.

DP: Pulsatilla.

Rubina: Yeah, Pulsatilla. [chuckle] That's right.

DP: Starts with a P. Thank you, this is really good feedback. I appreciate that. So, Pulsatilla is a P. What other remedies? Antimonium crude, antimonium tart, so... So those start with an A. It's more of the potents, I think, that are a challenge.

DP: What other remedies did I mention today?

Rubina: I mean, Belladonna, you mentioned a few times, and I picked that up today, but...

DP: So the big ones, you have.

Rubina: Okay, alright.

DP: And if you go to my website, to the newsletters, I did one newsletter on putting a kit together. So, you can just do the search box and write in "remedy kit," and that will pull up the newsletter. I need... You'll start building up your little kit which, it will be good to have on hand. So, was that everything, Rubina?

Rubina: Yes, thank you.

DP: Okay. So, I think... I'll just finish with... Rubina brings up a nice point, now that I'm thinking of your remedy kits. Mostly with your children, a 30CH potency will be good and what a 30 means is that's the number of times that the material substance has been diluted and shaken or ground, and CH refers to centesimal. Centesimal means 100. So think of cent, we have 100 pennies or cents in a $1. So, when they make the remedy, they put one drop or one particle, one part of the material substance either into... What do you call those things? I can see it. A mortar and pestle or into a liquid, and they add 99 parts milk-sugar or 99 parts alcohol. This is ground or shaken. And then out of that one in 99, they take one drop of that and put it into another 99 drops or another 99








granules. And then it goes from a 1CH, which is one in 100, to a 2CH, and then it goes to a 3CH, three in 100.

DP: At this point, Hahnemann developed late in his career... He was always working toward not having any aggravations. He thought cure should always be gentle and almost unnoticeable. You just move from having your disease state into freedom. But he found that often with these centesimal potencies, that there would be aggravations. So he developed this LM, one in 50,000 dilution. This information did not come out until the 1950s when the 6th edition of the Organon was revealed. Up to this point, it had been hidden by his second wife. There was already controversy around Hahnemann's work, and so she made this decision to set this aside, and in the 1950s, the people who were holding on to his writings made a decision that it could be released.

DP: And these LM potencies have come at a very profound time in history when we have a lot of chronic illness, a lot of aliments from medications, and LM potencies can be taken daily, and they are very very gentle. Again, the repetitions, you make sure it's individualized with it. But this is another potency that homoeopaths have access to. So not only individualizing the remedy, we can individualize the strength and the repetition of homeopathic remedies.

DP: So, for your home kits, a 30CH is good, and sometimes with infectious illnesses, it's good to also have the same remedy in a 200CH potency. So, it's a bit more potent, but it's also more dilute and it is suitable in situations where the intensity is quite high. So, if you start with a 30CH, and you find it's helping but not quite enough, it's possible that instead of more frequent repetitions, you may need a higher potency, and you just need one and that's it. So, thank you for bringing that up, Rubina. That's a good point in terms of potency.

DP: In Calgary, you can buy 30 and 200CH over the counter at Xerion Homeopathie in the Northwest. It looks like that's about it for today, so no questions? Please feel free to join me early next week if anybody would like to have questions or time for a discussion. Anything technical, please contact Casey at [email protected], and you can also reach me at [email protected] if you have any questions or comments about today's class.

DP: Thank you all for being here, and I look forward to seeing you next week, where we're going to dig into the infectious illnesses. Have a great week, everybody.












VFNW Spring2014 Transcript Lesson2

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Transcript of VFNW Spring2014 Transcript Lesson2