In a work on healing that I presented two years ago at the International Congress of Homeopathy in Buenos Aires, I defined the word healing as the restoration of health and curing, through the application of medicines. Today I want to expand on these concepts after having researched the work of healers with great healing power. In aphorisms 288, 289 and 290 of the Organon, Hahnemann recognizes the usefulness of magnetism, a healing force denied and despised so stupidly for a century, according to his own words. Hahnemann points out the existence of magnetizers (healers) endowed with great natural power, able to cure old ulcers, amaurosis, partial paralysis, etc. One of the purposes of this article is to establish the relationship and points of contact between healing and the results achieved with homeopathic treatment.
Cure and Healing – Similar and Simillimum
According to modern concepts of healing, illness is cured, whereas the sick person is healed. Healing means to heal the body, the mind, the emotions and the spirit. The similar homeopathic remedy cures (although in some cases suppression and a morbid metastasis that deepens the disease, occurs), while the simillimum heals, since healing implies a permanent or at least lasting recovery, a psychological maturation and spiritual growth.
Cure by means of a similar remedy, the removal of a tumor or any palliative means, are not enough to achieve healing, but they can initiate or facilitate the action of the self-healing mechanisms. I emphasize self-healing because there are no healing therapists, there are only therapists who stimulate the patient’s own healing. In the same way, the only thing that the homeopathic medicine does, is to stimulate the self-healing mechanism. Hippocrates wrote: “The natural healing force residing within each of us is the greatest weapon we have for recovery.”
Master Paschero insisted in his classes that the prescription of the homeopathic remedy is not sufficient, and that it is necessary to generate a cordial climate in the context of the consultation and to guide the patient in the sense of being an active agent of his own cure. There was no patient who left his office without hearing his affectionate greeting and the words: “You are going to be very well.” A contemporary homeopath to Paschero decided: That, what healed the patient was the “medical remedy” or “Paschero in ten thousand.” But far from reducing the merits of Paschero’s attitude, he has been denominated as a whole or complete physician who was aware of the immense importance of the doctor-patient relationship.
Jorge Carvajal, the father of a new synthetic medicine, sintergetics, holds that that what heals is our energy field. Edward Whitmont writes in the same sense in his work on “Health and disease“: “When two or more fields interact, the areas of resonance or similarity influence each other. The weaker field will be dominated and led by the stronger field. ”
While we can testify to spectacular cures with the homeopathic remedy, in many cases of small children, animals or mental patients, it is no less true that factors associated with the remedy act synergistically and enhance its effect. There is no doubt about that if the patient believes in homeopathy, the treatment will be more effective. Energy follows thought. Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.”
The healing act of the therapist or the profound action of the constitutional simillimum constitute the second stage of a learning process that began with the illness. The disease has a sense and a meaning, it is the true teacher in the evolution of the human being, a message that tells us that we have deviated from our true path. The goal of healing is to make the patient aware of his shadow aspects, so that he accepts them as his own and can express them, to be an integrated human being. For Joan Borysenko healing means the rediscovery of who we are and who we have always been.
In the same way, the patient is consciously or unconsciously to a high degree responsible for his illness. He also has to actively participate in the healing process. In most cases it will be necessary to change habits, lifestyle, and to change the attitude toward life and the world view. The change of the attitude towards life will almost always be the necessary condition for healing and especially to sustain healing in time. In a research paper carried by Elmer and Alice Green of the Menninger Clinic, it was found that patients who had spontaneous remissions of cancer had in common, that they had changed their attitudes before their spontaneous remission occurred.
The placebo effect?
Recent studies attribute up to 40% of cures to the placebo effect. Perhaps most importantly, is that such healing of diseases is achieved for which there was no treatment available. No less important is the nocebo effect of the physician‘s authoritative words, which may kill all hope, sentence the patient to death by telling him, for example, that he has six months to live, thereby accelerating the disease process or preventing a recovery.
Prestigious authors from different areas of medicine reduce the benefit of homeopathy to the placebo effect, as if this were the only element involved in healing. Fritjof Capra writes in his book The Turning Point: “The homeopathic interview resembles an intensive session like those performed by Jung. In fact I would be tempted to wonder, if the essential effect of homeopathic therapy is not caused by that which happens between the patient and the homeopath and the remedy is only a resource“. It is important to emphasize that the placebo effect occurs in all specialties, even in surgery.
Other authors speak of the placebo effect as a means to deceive the patient, ignoring that the placebo effect involves the positive expectation of the patient and the interaction with the therapist, which joins the faith in the physician and treatment.
Symptomatic Treatment versus Treatment of Totality
Not every homeopath takes the totality of the symptoms into account, or hierarchizes the symptom picture to direct their treatment to the deep energetic core where the cause of the illness lies. Paradoxically, authors in other fields of medicine warn about the inefficacy or inconvenience of symptomatic or partial treatment of the patient. Maimonides wrote: “The doctor should not treat the disease but the patient who suffers it.” Jorge Carvajal warns about the treatment of lumbago cases with magnetotherapy, because that what must be treated is at a much deeper level such as the limbic system or the foci of Hammer. He also argues, in relation to flower treatment, that “to give willow to sadness is to take the teacher away from the patient who needs the necessary sadness to develop, which constitutes allopathic treatment. We must transform the emotion, not suppress it.” Don Campbel, author of the well-known book “The Mozart Effect” wrote:
“Music improves anxiety, pain, loneliness, but there are no recipes for symptoms, for example a Mozart concert, ten minutes twice a day. The Mozart effect cures, but that does not lend itself to recipes. The curative power varies according to the composition of the interpreter, the listener, the posture and other factors. Instead of focusing on symptoms and disorders, one has to consider the importance of treating the whole person“.
Two key words in homeopathy are unity and totality. The fundamental symbol of the whole is the mandala. And the most encompassing and totalizing of the mandalas is the cross inside the circle (Cross Orlada). The Circle symbolizes the sky, the infinite, the amorphous, the absolute, unity, perfection. The Cross represents the finite, form and matter. This symbology refers to the “square of the circle”, enigma of the ancients that consists in transforming the infinite into the finite, Heaven on Earth. According to the laws of the mandala there is a center and a periphery or different concentric peripheries. The center and the periphery are the same, just in another state. There is an unfolding of a center in a periphery and that what is in the center implicates that what unfolds in the periphery.
The drama of the human being, the origin of the disease, lies in the separation, in the division and fragmentation of the different energies that make up his energetic system. Even though all the remedies in the materia medica represent this problem, the remedy that most clearly expresses this is Thuja, whose imbalance leads the patient to divide at all levels, bifurcating the hair, his stream of urine, causes the sensation of being double, or that the soul is separated from its body, and as a reaction, the pursuit of perfection, walking in a circle or seeking in mystical attitude to dissolve in Neptunian totality, listening to classical or sacred music.
If we can perceive by some method the energetic totality implied in the center of the mandala of the energetic system of the human being, we would be able to prescribe the most complete, comprehensive and profound remedy for the patient. But at the level of our evolution, we must be satisfied by working with the mental correspondences of that energy nucleus. We said earlier that in the mandala there are multiple concentric peripheries and that closest to the center, the most hierarchical to which we have access as homeopaths, is that which corresponds to the level of mental symptoms. Kent wrote in his book on Homeopathic Philosophy:
Hahnemann made use of the information thus obtained when he stated that the mind is the key to the man. The symptoms of the mind have been found by all his followers to be the most important symptoms in a remedy and in a sickness. Man consists in what he thinks and what he loves and there is nothing else in man.“
Eduard Whitmon opined: “The individual psychological reaction is the most expressive and encompassing of the whole individual.” In the same sense, Paschero repeated incessantly in his classes: “The unity of the symptomatic picture only occurs in the psychic.”
Time and Health
More and more authors attach importance to the misconception of time as a germ of disease. In his book Time, Space and Medicine, Larry Dosey describes “hurry sickness” whose fundamental symptoms are the excess of ambition and need to achieve. These characteristics are accompanied by hypertension and hypercholesterolemia, factors that can lead to a heart attack. For this author, this picture in particular and “the majority of diseases might be caused in whole or in part by our mistaken perception of time […] by perceiving it as a linear, unidirectional flow.”
Eugene Carutti says in “Man as an Energy System” that the idea of linear time produces a distortion in the direction of energy. The movement of energy is circular and spiral. He adds that, if one’s life is not ordered by this way of movement in every aspect there is a great loss of energy causing profound deterioration and illness.
About Healing
Regardless of the intention and the technique used in healing, the indispensable conditions of any healer are having certain energetic abilities that allow him to be a channel of cosmic healing energies, and empathy and compassion that allow him to get in resonance with the patient. The common denominator that underlies all healing is love. Without love, healing is neither complete nor true. In the footnote to aphorism 288 of the Organon, Hahnemann emphasizes the great kindness, the abnegation and philanthropy of magnetizers (healers) whom he had known personally. The results of healing are influenced by the patient’s confidence in his own self-healing power and by the confidence that he places in the healing power of the therapist. They are also influenced by the patient’s profound will to be healed, coming from the desire to continue enjoying life and the ability to learn the lesson of his illness to implement the necessary changes of attitude toward life.
Healing through imagery or visualization is not always profound or complete. Dr. Simonton recounts the cure of a case of laryngeal cancer with visualization. Later the same patient consulted him for arthritis, which he cured with the same technique. Here we can see partial healing or cure directed to the disease. Not always does the disappearance of a symptom or disease mean true healing. On the other hand, healing does not always mean avoiding death or prolonging life because true healing goes beyond symptoms. There is no medicine that is a panacea, nor is healing. There are cases where it is impossible to cure the patient because his illness is irreversible or terminal, but he can be healed emotionally and spiritually thus moving away from suffering.
References
- Carlson y B.Shield, (1994) Espíritu y Salud, Nuevas vías de curación. Ed Kairós, España
- Hahnemann, S. (1967), Organón de la Medicina, Ed. Marite, Argentina
- Kent, J. T. (1926), Filosofía homeopática. Ed. Bailly-Bailliere, España
- Tomás P. Paschero.(1983). Homeopatía. Buenos Aires. El Ateneo
- Thorwald Dethlefsen, (1990) Vida y destino humano, Edaf. España
- Thorwald Dethlefsen, (1993) La enfermedad como camino, Ed. Paza & Janés
- Betancourt, D. (1985) Vengo a sanar, Guatemala, Ed. Tierra Nueva
- Eugenio Carutti,(2000) Ascendentes, Buenos Aires, Ed. Casa XI
- Eugenio Carutti, El hombre como sistema energético, Buenos Aires, Ed.CasaXI
- Whitmon, E. Salud y enfermedad
- Larry Dosey, (1986) Tiempo, espacio y medicina, Ed Kairós, España
- Don Campbell, (1998) El efecto Mozart. España
- Fritjof Capra, (1982) El punto crucial. Ed. Troquel. Argentina
- Jorge Carvajal, (2000) Apuntes de Sintergética, Curso dictado en Buenos Aires
Translated by Katja Schütt and Alan Schmukler
