Category — Articles - General

Blood Pressure

The key to understanding the blood pressure issue is that blood pressure is a biological marker, a non-specific indicator, not a disease or an entity to treat. But what we have is the treatment of abstractions, numbers that mean very little by themselves. It’s similar to the way that the public education system “teaches to the test” — we have medicine treating to the test, by the numbers.

The reference range for what’s considered “normal” is arbitrarily defined and keeps narrowing so that just about every adult can fit into some category of hypertension or pre-hypertension and given drugs. The “diagnosis” of hypertension rarely even includes any understanding of causative factors which might indicate different treatments for each individual, but the drugs are usually given in a rather hit-or-miss fashion.

There are so many factors that can cause false high readings, so the measurement itself isn’t reliable even if we were to assume that the test might be meaningful. We’re not cookie-cutter people, and blood pressure naturally fluctuates throughout the day under normal circumstances, and is supposed to rise under stress. But the one snapshot reading while under the influence of white-coat syndrome doesn’t represent anything that can be interpreted meaningfully.

Killing the messenger by lowering blood pressure usually doesn’t accomplish anything, and creates iatrogenic disease. Although sometimes the messenger itself can become dangerous and needs to be dealt with while the source of the problem is also being addressed. When blood pressure drugs are used judiciously in this way, they can be useful, but the majority of blood pressure lowering drugs are given irrationally.

Cholesterol

“The diet-heart idea (the idea that saturated fats and cholesterol cause heart disease) is the greatest scientific deception of our times.” –George Mann, MD, former Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee; heart disease researcher

The cholesterol deception is politically driven like the blood pressure issue, and the cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are among the most expensive drugs on the market. No wonder it’s so important to get everyone on them! The studies that the medical establishment have used to connect high cholesterol to heart disease were flawed, and there’s really no evidence that high cholesterol is a medical problem.

Cholesterol is actually needed for hormone production, brain and nervous system function, and low cholesterol is much more of a problem than high. Cholesterol is protective of the artery walls, and the notion that the buildup of plaque causes atherosclerosis is unfounded. There’s never been any correlation seen between high cholesterol levels, even the dreaded LDL, and athersclerosis.

There’s a hypothesis that atherosclerosis is infectious in origin and that LDL cholesterol helps to inhibit dangerous bacteria. I would look to the reason why the bacteria are there in the first place and not blame the bacteria necessarily, but it’s clear that LDL is no culprit.

So when blood pressure or cholesterol are thought to be high, first we need to look at whether it really is high enough to be a meaningful indication, or whether what we’re looking at is normal fluctuation. When blood pressure and cholesterol are elevated beyond normal fluctuations, this is really an indication of the body’s effort to maintain homeostasis in the face of certain underlying disturbances. So neither “hypertension” nor “hypercholesterolemia” are actual diseases, but rather they should be seen as signs of some underlying disease(s) or imbalance that need to be addressed. Bringing the numbers down without addressing the underlying cause is often unwarranted.

The problem with statin drugs

The cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, besides depleting needed cholesterol, deplete many other important nutrients. The main nutrient depletions are COQ10, essential fatty acids, folic acid and vit B12.

CoQ10 depletion weakens the heart muscle, and can lead to congestive heart failure, angina or myocardial infarction. CoQ10 improves the efficiency of the heart and reduces hypertension, so CoQ10 depletion could have a range of adverse cardiac effects, as well as weakness of other muscles.

CoQ10 deficiency can also lead to gum problems (and gum health can improve amazingly with CoQ10 supplementation!)

In addition to the CoQ10 depletion, the bile acids are also reduced, so that the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, F, K) may not be able to function properly. Lowering of cholesterol could lead to deficiency symptoms of those vitamins as well.

The bottom line here is that statin drugs interfere with the metabolism of ALL fats. The essential fatty acids are necessary for so many hormonal functions, bone health, the nervous system, etc.. And fats in general are necessary for brain function - no wonder that so many people on statin drugs are declining in cognitive function.

If you’re on these drugs and you want to come off them, work with a skilled naturopathic or nutritional physician to do this safely and assess your individual needs. Professional support is advisable, but you can be part of the decision making process and ultimately make your own choices. There’s more to the issue than “The number is high; we need to put you on a drug!”

For more information:
Cholesterol and Health
The Benefits of Cholesterol
Cholesterol Myths
Why the Treatment of Hypertension Has Become Such a Deplorable Fiasco

We’re hearing more about “Morgellon’s” these days - the mysterious condition in which the skin seems to be infested with foreign fibers. Current efforts to treat it amount to an attempt to get rid of the surface expression of it in any way possible, and give the person some symptom relief.

Certainly people need that relief, but in order to get to the bottom of the problem, we need to look at the issue from a higher perspective. Otherwise, all we can do is continue to throw the pasta against the wall and hope something sticks. And if it sticks in one case, will it stick in another case? And for how long? We’ll never know, that way.

As I discussed in my article on the Educate-Yourself website, what needs to be understood is that Morgellon’s is a description of symptoms, which can have multiple underlying causes.

Symptoms are effects of causes, so treating symptoms alone is what in homeopathy we call palliation, not cure. To be curative, a treatment must eradicate the underlying disease entity that is giving rise to the symptoms.

And to do that, the disease entity needs to be identified – this is the basis for a true system of diagnosis, as opposed to the allopathic disease labels that are mistakenly called diagnosis.

So, with Morgellon’s as with any other medical condition, we need to diagnose the underlying diseases, which are going to be different for each person who share the same condition. In other words, even though a dozen people all may have Morgellon’s, they all have different diseases, so they each require a different treatment protocol.

This is predicated on the understanding that disease is an energetic disturbance, and can be caused by emotional trauma, physical trauma, poisoning, inherited predispositions, drugs, infectious microbes (less often than is thought), and/or deep fears and false beliefs.

Usually anyone who is chronically ill has many such diseases – and given that many of us have lived close to half a century, we’ve accumulated quite a few emotional and physical traumas over the years. All of these shocks that we don’t completely resolve at the time, in addition to other diseases mentioned above, become lodged in our etheric body and weaken the life force.

Then, according to the person’s particular susceptibility, they might develop Morgellon’s, or chronic fatigue, or MS, or any other condition. But it’s important to understand that the particular FORM of the condition is not so important as the ORIGIN of it on the level where these energetic disturbances are taking place.

We cant’ successfully treat a condition which is the effect of something, without identifying that original something – the true disease entity. And this can and is being done quite successfully using Dr. Hahnemann’s 200-year old blueprint for disease diagnosis and cure.

Even though Morgellon’s is a new form, the true principles of science never change; we only expand our understanding of them. By contrast, everything in allopathic medicine is always changing, because there is no foundational system of principles to hang anything on.

With Morgellon’s fibers or any other entity that doesn’t belong in the body, you have to wonder why the body is holding onto it in the first place. There are many people suggesting all sort of herbs and even crude poisons such as chlorine to drive out the parasites.

But you have to ask, what reason does the wisdom of the body have for holding onto them so tightly? If you can force the toxins out, they’d come right back if the underlying reason why the body accepted them in the first place, isn’t being addressed.

When the body is stressed, it uses common microorganisms like yeasts and bacteria and morphs them into more highly developed forms (pleomorphism) because they are actually needed for the healing process. See my article on the role of microbes in Dr. Hamer’s German New Medicine.

The problem is that when the body produces these pleomorphic organisms, we get nasty symptoms, because the healing phase of illness is more uncomfortable than the disease phase! In the healing phase, the body is a bit like a wind-up toy car that has hit a wall and keeps spinning its wheels trying to get past it.

To get rid of symptoms allopathically is like forcing the wheels to stop spinning, or taking the wheels off the car. That quiets the symptom down, but the blockage is still there, and we still havent’ gone through. Proper homeopathic treatment can actually remove the blockage, so the body doesn’t need to produce such a powerful healing reaction to power its way through.

Then the body is ready to let go of the pleomorphic microbes, and the symptoms come to a natural resolution. Otherwise, there are lots of things that can be done to palliate symptoms (make people feel better, relieve the suffering), but without removing the actual blockage, it’s only a temporary band-aid treatment that leaves the causative agents to continue trying to express the underlying diseases by whatever routes it can.

Temporary relief is fine, but treatments that suppress the symptoms will push them deeper into the system where they will have to emerge again, and usually in a more intense or damaging way.

The various herbal or nutritional “cures” may give temporary relief, but can’t remove the actual blockages. This is understood according to Dr. Hahnemann’s brilliant system of medicine which explains precisely what each treatment does and what it can and can’t address. It’s a system of disease “jurisdiction.”

If you have an issue that by natural law comes under a certain jurisdiction, just like prosecuting a crime, you could have a brilliant strategy for trying the case but if you take it to the wrong court, you won’t get results.

We have to know exactly what we’re dealing with in terms of disease jurisdictions, and mostly in the field of natural medicine it’s just hit or miss, trying to get symptoms to go away without proper understanding to address the real underlying issues.

A proper treatment for someone with Morgellon’s would start by working out a map of the territory – identifying the various disease disturbances that are present for that particular individual.

Remedies might include dynamic (”homeopathic”) potencies of the Morgellon’s fiber itself, which is called a nosode, and works according to the law of similars (which is the curative law of nature.)

Other remedies might include dynamic Silica which works to drive foreign objects out of the body (when the body is ready for it).

Remedies can be given that match the total symptom picture, which is so detailed that it’s actually different for each person even though the symptoms might appear the same. This remedy would annihilate the disease that causes those symptoms. Often it requires multiple doses over a period of time to chip away at some of these diseases which are deeply lodged.

It may be appropriate to remove some of the pathogenic load in the meantime, and that can be done in various ways - using dynamic remedies, using a zapper, etc.

But treatment is approached in a rational, systematic way, rather than empirically trying to get outer results without conscious understanding based on principle. Without principle, we have no idea whether one treatment that worked for one person will also work for another person. We’re limited to the hit-or-miss world of medicine as it commonly exists, without a map. But the map, and the itinerary can all be known.

I would recommend that Morgellon’s sufferers or anyone wishing to address chronic illness more deeply, look at Dr. Hahnemann’s complete system of medicine, as practiced here.

If you had acne and treated it with conventional drugs to suppress it, and now your acne is “cured” but you have allergies that you didn’t have before - did you really cure the acne?

Most people think yes, you’ve solved the skin problem and now you have a different problem to take to the allergy specialist. This is the fallacy of conventional specialization!

In reality, the acne is an inflammatory process that the body produces to try to get rid of some kind of toxin, whether from outside or a toxin produced by the body itself. For some reason, it couldn’t be eliminated at the level of normal excretion (sweating, urination, mucus, etc.). So it had to bring in the heating quality of inflammation to do the job.

When you suppress that process, you push it more deeply into the system, where different symptoms crop up, and now they’re even more difficult to treat and begin to involve tissue degeneration.

The “Table of Homotoxicology” is a wonderful visual aid and model for understanding the difference between a disease process and a healing process, so that when you have symptoms you can see the larger context of what they really mean.

The table shows the various phases the body uses to try to get rid of these toxins, and the various conditions that can appear at each phase. The idea is that we want to get the condition to move in the healing direction, to push the toxins out of the system.

But commonly, drugs such as antibiotics and anti-inflammatories are used to make symptoms go away, and they’re very good at that, but we’ll see how they actually can suppress this healing process and lead to a progression of the disease process.

In this article I’ll give you a little introduction to how to use the table of Homotoxicology to understand the direction of symptoms - whether they’re moving toward deeper disease or are going in a healing direction.

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Let’s take the example of allergies and acne one step further. You have chronic allergies, which means that your body isn’t easily throwing off toxins, and they’re on their way to beginning to cause cellular damage. But you’re treating that properly without suppressing it, and your allergy symptoms are improving, although now you have a bad case of acne.

What does the acne really mean, besides just being a new symptom that you’re tempted to suppress or make it go away however you can?

Now that you have the acne, that’s a very important indication! Acne is an inflammatory process, indicating that your body is trying to repair the damage of the chronic allergies. This inflammation, although it’s uncomfortable is actuallly a favorable response!

You see, we’re looking at the direction in which the process is proceeding. To go from acne to chronic allergies is an unfavorable direction - the disease process. But now with the acne inflammation, you’re proceeding in a healing direction toward proper elimination of toxins. The body is trying to move toxins outward so that they don’t progress to do damage on the cellular level.

What we need to do now is to support this healing process, and we can use nutrition, tissue salts, and various other regimenal methods.

If you were to use antibiotics for the acne, you might get some symptom relief, but you’d actually be suppressing this healing process, which would be like sabotage. It would be like anything else that gives you short-term gain but hurts you more in the longer run.

You would be driving the disturbance deeper into the system, and then it would be expressed later, most likely in a more serious condition. So we want to avoid that. What we can do is to help you feel better with remedies that don’t sabotage your long-term gain, while focusing our efforts on what is going to maximize your healing.

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Now let’s look at the example, on Dr Reckeweg’s Table of Homotoxicology. Don’t let the name intimidate you - it’s a wonderful model and very clear visual aid for understanding the difference between a disease process and a healing process.

Here is a shortened form of the table

More detailed table

To illustrate how it works, in the table look under the column titled Inflammation Phase, and you’ll see acne listed there. Now look over to the right, under the column for Impregnation phase, you’ll see allergies.

What this means is that if someone has chronic allergies, it’s because they have gone through the phases on the left side of the chart, over to the right side of the chart which represents disease processes that are beginning to affect the cellular level.

The left-hand half of the chart shows functional disturbances that haven’t produced actual tissue damage. In the functional phases, the body is still fairly well able to throw off the toxins, as they haven’t penetrated very deeply yet. Some of the symptoms in the functional phases can be quite intense, as with pneumonia or meningitis. But as you move to the right of the chart, the conditions are becoming more degenerative, more embedded in the tissues.

So if a person had acne, and then later they’re developing chronic allergies, you can see that they are in a disease process, going from left to right on the table.

But if someone has allergies, and they’re being treated properly to remove the disease blockages, and now they’re developing acne, now they are going from right to left, reversing the disease process, moving in the direction of healing!

In this context, the appearance of acne is a good thing and should not be suppressed with antibiotics but treated properly and supported so that the person can move through the inflammation phase and back to the excretory phase to the left.

The healing process goes from right to left on the chart, although not all the in-between phases will manifest, and this is really just a rule of thumb to understand what direction the person is going in, when they had one problem and then another problem crops up.

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The key to all this is that the symptom itself does not give you an understanding of what is happening and how to treat it. Depending on whether you’re going from right to left or left to right, meningitis or pneumonia or acne (or other inflammatory condition) may be a healing process, and usually is!

A common problem is getting stuck in the inflammatory phase, and then the person gets anxious and thinks they need to suppress the inflammation. What they really need is to treat it properly to get it moving so it resolves to the left on the chart, not to suppress it and drive it toward the right.

Talking about symptoms, conditions, diseases and illnesses with loads of people over the years, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of confusion about what symptoms mean.

Even the medical field labels something a disease, which is really just a group of symptoms. And symptoms are effects, outer appearances, not causes. Without clear distinctions to help us understand the real nature of what we’re dealing with, we can’t intelligently address what’s going on according to real causes.

I’ll start by addressing the issue of the wisdom of the body and the idea we have in the natural health field of working with the body, not against it. It’s an idea that’s been greatly misunderstood, and the misunderstanding centers around the debate between the “vitalist” school (which wants to support the life force), and the allopathic school which mistrusts it and wants to control it and suppress symptoms.

In the natural health field, it’s assumed that the vitalist tradition is the wiser, and efforts are aimed at supporting the life force in various ways. But this is a simplistic assumption which doesn’t take into account the dual nature of this life force. In order to understand the meaning of symptoms, we have to understand the nature of the life force that produces them.

To put this in perspective, let me outline the two major schools of medicine in the west (with the eastern schools being closely aligned with the vitalist tradition).

1. The Hippocratic school observed nature and sought to support the the natural healing power of the organism. This stream is the basis for much of modern “natural medicine” with its focus on the vital force, and has come to be known as the vitalist tradition. So natural medicine is oriented toward balancing and facilitating this natural healing power.

2. The school of Asklepiades, on the other hand, mistrusted the organism’s innate healing power, and sought to oppose its seemingly misguided efforts by using heroic measures according to the law of opposites to remove the disease effects. This is much like modern day allopathic medicine giving drugs to counteract the effects of disease without basing the prescription on any principle of nature.

So we have a kind of duality here, between trusting the natural healing power, vs. mistrusting it.

There’s a third way, though, that has been developed in recent years, although it emerged out of the Romantic period of history with Dr. Hahnemann being the primary medical researcher. The Dynamic system transcends this duality, and doesn’t simply support the natural healing power, nor does it suppress it.

The Dynamic System

The Dynamic system sees the effects of the natural healing power as simply symptoms, and seeks to know exactly the real underlying cause of those symptoms. Dr. Hahnemann was the first in the medical field to begin to understand the dual nature of this natural healing power. The vitalists were treating it as one abstract thing, whereas it really had a dual function.

1. It would sustain, maintain, balance, promote homeostasis, on the one hand. This came to be called the “sustentive power” or sustentive aspect of the life force.

When the sustentive power is disturbed, the person is indisposed or imbalanced. There, the sustentive side of the natural healing power simply needs to be supported with nutrition and various regimenal techniques, sometimes energy balancing, but the therapeutic measures here are quantitative. You’re just shoring up the life force or removing excesses.

2. On the other hand, the life force also has a creative capacity to generate new thought and new life - the “generative power.” These two functions are distinctly different, and lead to the understanding that there is a qualitatively different way in which a person can be ill.

When the generative power is disturbed, this is an actual qualitative change in the organism, an impingement on the generative side of the life force, which no amount of “trusting” the wisdom of the body, supporting it, boosting it, is going to remedy. It’s like a pregnancy - no amount of nutrition or energy balancing is going to change it.

The symptoms are the body’s wise response to the disturbance, but in this case, it’s like those toy wind-up cars that hit a wall and just keep spinning their wheels. If we fuel that car more by boosting the sustentive power, we just make the wheels spin faster and actually can exacerbate symptoms in a way that doesn’t get us anywhere.

So the key is in a deeper understanding of this duality of the life force, which shows us when the situation calls for simply supporting the sustentive life force, and when we also need to intervene on the generative side, in a way that helps remove the blockage so that the healing can proceed.

In the Dynamic system, we have dynamized remedies (commonly known as homeopathic), which target the blockage and annihilate it according to the law of similars, in a systematic way.

But the vitalist philosophy has a sentimental notion that we shouldn’t fight against this wisdom of the body. And we’re actaully not — we’re removing the blockage that doesn’t belong, based on real principles of nature, not just blindly getting rid of symptoms as the allopaths do.

This is done with a deep understanding of the curative principle of nature - the law of similars, and knowledge of how to apply it safely, in the right dose, and at the right time.

After this is done, then the natural healing power of the body can proceed with the healing - all the adjustments and repairs that need to be made, like a house renovation, and we can support its efforts with various regimenal methods.

The reason the rules keep changing in allopathic medicine is because it’s an abstract philosophy that has no grounding in principles of natural law. It just seeks to suppress symptoms–the outer appearances–and not venturing to look at the real causes, no matter how powerful their microscropes or nanotechnology becomes.

In the vitalist natural healing tradition, there is a consistent sort of loyalty to the wisdom of the body, but we see that there isn’t a high success rate with complex, chronic conditions. Much of the allopathic mindset has been coopted, and there isn’t a tremendous difference - getting rid of symptoms becomes the measure of success in both.

Whereas the dynamic system seeks to remove the underlying disturbance, and then the wisdom of the body mounts a healing reaction to that, and symptoms can actually increase during that time.

A New Understanding of Symptoms

If we look at all symptoms as unwanted, we suppress the healing reaction and can never make real progress. If on the other hand, we see all symptoms as healing reactions to be supported, we also can’t make real progress! - except in very simple cases of imbalance.

The key to understanding why lies in the duality of the life force - when we’re addressing only one side of the polarity, we’re ignoring the whole realm where the disease impingements lie. The vitalist tradition and most of the natural health field has missed this whole dimension of medicine. When you start to discover it, it’s like discovering a whole wing of your house that you never knew was there before, and which puts everything in perspective.

For further reading that explains the dual nature of the life force and the dual nature of disease and treatment, see the article: Healing vs. Curing