Illness and Health: An Observation

[nightwatchdog]

Have you ever noticed that when you are sick, your urge to be healthy becomes stronger?

 

1. I used to smoke when I was younger. My urge to smoke would lessen or disappear entirely if I was ill.

 

2. I used to drink often. My urge to drink would disappear.

 

3. I used to eat animals sometimes. My urge to eat animal food would disappear, and sometimes my urge to eat any sort of food would disappear.

 

4. My urge to drink water or other clear fluids always increases when I am sick.

 

5. I rest more often, and for longer periods when I am ill.

 

6. My urge for caffiene disappears, and I never experience caffiene withdrawl symtoms if I am ill.

 

7. I take the time to keep my body and environment cleaner.

 

8. I travel less, and spend more time at home.

 

It seems so simple, and yet so profound. It is as if the body naturally knows what must be done to be healthy, and it is the mind which is so resistant. How wonderful to have the opportunity to be ill. Perhaps one can be healthier simply by following the sick body's wisdom when one is not sick.

 

Can anyone think of other things that naturally occur in response to illness?

 

How do you take care of yourself now?

 

What changes in lifestyle can be made to use this body wisdom for greater health?

 

Thoughts?

[kathrynwyles]

It's an interesting idea. The body does naturally know what it needs and what it doesn't, but it seems that humans really do have this goal of being master over everything, including our selves. Most people instead of listening to their body's needs will just tell it what they think it needs e.g. by smoking, drinking, taking drug or doing anything to excess. My body knows that there are certain foods that simply do not agree with it, and it has been trying to tell me that for the past few years. Only recently I've actually been taking notice of it and changing things. The effect of actually taking notice of my body and making the changes has been profound, in that I don't feel ill all the time like I used to.

 

Do you think that, along the same lines, Western medicine works with or against the body's natural abilities and needs? As a nursing student I'm beginning to really think about this issue and I'm finding it's quite a deep complex subject.

 

Kat

[nightwatchdog]

It seems to me that much of the difficulties we encounter in western (Allopathic) medicine (WM) is that this model is still in it's infancy. It is true that WM has made tremendous breakthroughs, and has found ways to treat illness that we were never able to touch before using other models. It's also broadened our ability to continue to explore and understand using the scientific method. This may be a quicker and more accurate way to understand illness than the trial and error that our ancestors were forced to use.

 

Unfortunately, as I said, WM is still very young. While we possess the means to understand, we are still focused on symptoms which we understand very, very well. We have very little understanding of cause. We may even be looking in the wrong direction on that one. Have you ever noticed how every few years a new cause for cancer is found? Have you ever seen an activity or habit (say cardiovascular exercise for example), may one year be found to be very healthy, and the next year may cause a heart attack or stroke?

 

We are obviously wandering in the dark a bit. In my own work in mental health, I am really interested in the disease (really a syndrome) known as Schizophrenia. As you may or may not know, Schizophrenia is characterized by several symptoms... most notably delusions and hallucinations that are linked to Chemical imbalances in the brain. Several causes have been identified over the years, and the list is growing. There is a school of thought that parasites cause Schizophrenia, another school says that a fetal virus is to blame, a school for brain injury, for genetic propensity, and finally a school for "all of the above." We know certain drugs can help, but no one drug works for everyone, and some people continue to be flouridly psychotic in spite of trying them all. We know that certain therapies can work, while many work only for some to ease the symptoms.

 

The bottom line is that we don't know what causes Schizophrenia. Heck, we don't even know if it's a disease!

 

I offer the hypothesis that all illness is like this in the case of Western Medicine. I'm not saying other sorts have it all figured out either, for the failings of WM are the same failings as any other method. WM strength is the spirit of experimentation using the scientific method. The problem, to re-state my postion, is that we are probably looking in the wrong direction.

 

There is no microscope powerful enough for us to look closesly enough to figure out why some people (89%) can get injected with the common cold virus (for example) and get sick, while others (11%) have the virus injected and don't. White blood cells don't attack viruses. Some lymphocytes attack virus infested cells, but how are viruses expelled? How do we get well? We don't really know.

 

Just some food for thought.

 

 

Edit: P.S. to answer your question Kat, we can't help but get in the way of the body sometimes. The interventions of Western Medicine are largely experimental in nature, and as such there is always the chance, even likelyhood that for some people our intervention may harm or even kill them. The measure of success in scientific terms is whether or not the "cure" works more often than it "harms."

 

I personally turn to Body Wisdom, and Eastern Medicine when I'm healthy. An ounce of prevention and all of that. I turn to Allopathic medicine when I've made an error and need symptom relief. I turn back to Eastern models in order to identify what I can do to be well in the future. In the meantime, during all this activity, my body works behind the scenes.

 

It's probably rolling it's eyes at these antics as it returns to health.

 

Edited November 7, 2007 by nightwatchdog

[kathrynwyles]

Well said. I completely agree with you about western medicine being in its infancy. It's such a shame that so many influential people in the field are so arrogant about their work that they can't see past their own noses and realise that western medicine can only develop further by looking in other directions and taking other perspectives into account.

 

As a nurse, hell even just as a human, my instinct is to do everything in my power to ensure my patient recovers from their ailment as far as is possible, or is cared for in such a way that they pass on in comfort. Surely if incorporating "alternative" medicine into a patient's treatment helps them to recover or maintain comfort, it's a good thing - right?

 

Going a bit off topic I know, sorry....

[nightwatchdog]

Not at all. It's a multifaceted issue.

 

Perhaps in future you will be in a position to make some of those changes as you continue your education. I have often wished for a medical proffessional who was experienced in other methods.

 

A nurse who offered meditation classes, chi kung, ayurveda, or chinese herbal advice would be in great demand for offering seminars for other proffessionals. At least in the U.S.A such things are slowly being offered more and more frequently. My personal educational plan is to get my Masters Degree in Contemplative Psychology. I will be bringing bring this method to the severly mentally ill at the institutional level. The down side is, I suspect the major changes it requires a bit more work than the already quite demanding load student nurses undergo, let alone a working nurse! If you choose this path, it will certainly be a lifetime's work.

[kathrynwyles]

I think a nurse trained in those areas would be in great demand in Australia as well. They would have to get past a number of hurdles, such as public hospitals who have policies against complementary medicine.... But I think the environment is changing slowly as people realise how much eastern medicine has to offer.

[karen]

It's a big issue that's hard to make sense of without some fleshing out- see my article,

The Meaning of Symptoms.

 

Causes of diseases can be known quite easily, actually, by practitioners of medical Heilkunst-- what's impossible is to know the cause of the disease labels like schizophrenia, autism, arthritis, etc., because these are abstractions! They describe a set of symptoms which are effects, not causes. The cause of the symptoms of schizophrenia or ADD or asthma, etc., in one person will be different from others who exhibit similar symptoms.

 

But conventional medicine, and to a large extent the natural medicine field, are all looking at the effects not the true causes. A true diagnosis means that you have seen through (dia-gnosis) to the inner reality of what is generating the disturbance. It discoloses the cause, not just describes the symptom. This can and is being done, but it takes a whole new understanding of what disease is.

 

-Karen

[seadog]

Karen can I ask by what means does one arrive at a true diagnoses?

[gendao]

I think the roots of most or all disease lie in problems (blockages, weaknesses, etc) in the energy body.

 

Agree or disagree?

Edited November 7, 2007 by vortex

[karen]

Karen can I ask by what means does one arrive at a true diagnoses?

 

Huge subject, but I'll see if I can summarize. This is a paradigm that you won't find anywhere in the natural health field except in Dr. Hahnemann's work, which has only been understood at the tip of the iceberg until recently.

 

In order to diagnose disease, we first have to know what it is as a phenomenon, not just an abstract concept, and to distinguish it from symptoms, conditions, imbalances. And in order to know that, we have to understand the life force as a polarity, because disease has to do with one particular side of that polarity.

 

Dr. Hahnemann described the life force as having "sustentive" power and "generative" power, two sides of a functional polarity. The sustentive power is what balances and maintains homeostasis. If you eat bad food and get sick, your sustentive power is creating a healthy reaction. If you're chilly, you use warming foods and herbs, and that balances the sustentive power. You work with the sustentive power to fill deficiencies and remove excesses - quantities.

 

But Hahnemann also described the "generative"power, which is the aspect of the life force that makes qualitative changes, not just quantitative. When the generative power is disturbed, you have disease. It's rather like a pregnancy - no amount of boosting or shoring up the life force quantitatively will change that.

 

Dr. Hahnemann described disease as a "dynamic affection," of this generative aspect of the life force. This means that the cause is nothing material, but it comes from an impulse within the energy bodies (specifically the astral impulse), It's a very specific kind of impingement on the life force, which imparts a unique state of mind.

 

Symptoms and conditions are the results of disease, not disease itself. And imbalances aren't disease at all, but disturbances of the sustentive power.

 

So first, when the practitioner is trying to identify a particular disturbance, we have to determine whether it's an imbalance that can be remedied with regimen alone (nutrition, exercise, sleep, drinking more water, energy balancing methods, etc.).

 

If it's not a regimenal imbalance but a true disease, well, that's what I'm going to school for 4 years to learn how to diagnose . But I can give you an idea of the basic jurisdictions of disease, according to their cause:

 

• Traumas - physical and emotional, that have occurred throughout the person's life (dealth of loved one, divorce, accidents, poisonings, surgeries, etc.)
  
• Allopathic drugs (they create an energetic impingment on the life force)
  
• Acute infectious diseases (childhood illnesses, scarlet fever, cholera, etc.)
  
• Inherited predispositions (also known as miasms which we all inherit)
  
• False beliefs (which Hahnemann called the "highest" disease)
  
• Deepest fears (which has come to be called the "deepest" disease).
  

It gets more complex. There are more polarities: idiopathic or primary diseases vs. secondary diseases that they may give rise to; chronic (protracted) vs. acute (self-limiting).

 

But the simple kernel of truth that cuts through the complexity is that disease is an etheric, or supersensible entity that has eluded modern medicine because it's using the wrong mindset. You can't use the physical intellectual mind to recognize a supersensible entity.

 

You have to develop your etheric mind, and then it becomes quite easy to see the states of mind that characterize the particular disease, just as easily as you can recognize a good friend even if they're wearing clothes you never saw them in before. There is an inner essence you can recognize beneath the outer appearances (symptoms), once you develop the capacity to see it.

 

That's why my training involves watching a lot of movies , to practice identifying all these states of mind. Some diseases can't be recognized by their root cause, so we have to look at the symptom picture. But still, we're not treating the symptoms but the disease that the symptoms are an expression of. There are precise principles for doing that.

 

With traumas, we take a history of the patient, asking them to write a list of all the traumas they can remember happening to them throughout their life, in sequence. This provides a guideline for knowing which diseases their life force will be expressing - it always expresses the most recent one, and when that's removed, it goes on to the next one going backward in time. Each of these traumas is a disease to be removed with remedies.

 

When the case is complex and there are lots of diseases and lots of symptoms, we don't always know which symptoms come out of which diseases, but it's not necessary to know that. We can identify the diseases that are there, and treat them in the proper sequence according to laws of nature (Hering's law of cure). When the roots of the symptoms are removed, the symptoms disappear.

 

Dr. Hahnemann made many other observations about the way in which diseases are expressed sequentially, according to laws of nature. So the system of diagnosis is based on true principle, not abstract concepts.

 

In allopathic medicine, a bunch of people sit at a meeting and decide that a drug needs a certain market, so a new alphabet "disease" is created according to arbitrarily chosen groups of symptoms. PDD or ADHD or whatever

 

Or they take a common symptom like joint inflammation, use the Latin name (arthritis), and call it a disease. Logically, something can't be the cause of itself! But they have no system for understanding disease in any real way, so they're just creating these abstractions. It's like worshipping false idols - outer appearances that have no connection to anything real.

 

That's medicine based on authority, or princiPAL, not princiPLE . When the identification of disease is grounded in principle, we have a system of true diagnosis.

 

I think the roots of most or all disease lie in problems (blockages, weaknesses, etc) in the energy body.

 

Yes. It comes from an astral impulse, impinging on the etheric body. And Dr. Hahnemann clarified that even further. There are disease causing entities, which are supersensible and have an energy body. When the human energy body is susceptible, or receptive to that particular disease entity, then it can be penetrated by the disease causing entity, leaving an impingement, a particular type of disturbance. It's actually a kind of sexual act - disease is "engendered."

 

Why we become susceptible in the first place, has to do with consciousness. If we didn't need to evolve in consciousness, we wouldn't be susceptible to disease. Disease is in a sense a divine cure, because we evolve in the process of overcoming it, like the way we strengthen muscles by working them against resistance.

 

The etheric forces of growth need to be stopped in a way, to channel energy into consciousness, otherwise we wouldn't be able to think and reason. But it's that same astral impulse that's involved in disease. So the process of growing in consciousness involves susceptibilities that we're challenged to overcome, or master.

 

-Karen

[joeblast]

Unfortunately, as I said, WM is still very young. While we possess the means to understand, we are still focused on symptoms which we understand very, very well. We have very little understanding of cause. We may even be looking in the wrong direction on that one. Have you ever noticed how every few years a new cause for cancer is found? Have you ever seen an activity or habit (say cardiovascular exercise for example), may one year be found to be very healthy, and the next year may cause a heart attack or stroke?

A lot of issues with this or that being good for you one year and not the next is really an issue of statistics and weak statistical correlations. If your control factors are lax or you overlook contributing factors, you end up with correlations that end up falling far below the range of natural deviation. You can easily see that in all kinds of medicinal studies, global warming studies, you name it. These studies start out with a hypothesis, asking a question and then attempting to answer it.

That's not to say statistical studies do not have value, but when they are addressing very complex issues that can have many determining factors, it becomes very easy to overlook things that contribute to results.

[seadog]

Dear Karen, Thanks for your indepth reply to my question.I can't begin to describe or bore you with how much of what you presented in your post has been in my thoughts.Particularly in regards to the souls need to evolve through affliction or disease.My partener suffers from multiple sclerosis,could you point me in the direction on some useful literature that may give us some futher insight.I wish you the best of fortune in your study.

[karen]

Hi seadog,

 

Thanks for the kind thoughts, and I'm really glad that what I wrote struck a chord. MS isn't a disease entity per se, but a description of symptoms that can stem from various diseases.

 

A great reference for looking into the emotional underpinnings of chronic illnesses is the book Messages from the Body, by Narayan Singh. It gives a few paragraphs on each condition or part of the body and tells what emotional pattern is usually generating problems in that area.

 

The author usually sums up by saying that everything comes back to the dysfunctional family, and I would just take that part with a grain of salt . Not everything is directly related to that. But the rest of what he says is food for meditation, not to be taken literally but to see if it resonates.

 

The book is expensive and hard to find, so I'll summarize what he says for MS:

 

1. "Hardening of the attitudes." They have typically been oppressive and demanding in their pattern in past lives. They are inflexible because of fear.

 

2. "Exploitation-rage." They feel that there is no support and that they have to sustain everything by themselves, and are exhausted and resentful. They feel alienated and in despair. They are in effect wreaking revenge on those who they believe never loved them the way they wanted.

 

3. "Gotta take care of it myself!" They are into controlling people and situations, moralistically. They were the one in the family who kept it together emotionally, and they fear that everything will fall apart if they don't continue this pattern.

 

4. "Self straight-jacketing". Repressed emotions are expressing as physical rigidity. They repeat the pattern by being attracted to overwhelming situations and relationships like the original family.

___

 

In addition to processing the emotions, remedies can be used which remove the blockages and can allow the person to access and process the emotional content.

 

The condition called MS often has roots in inherited predispositions or miasms, which are infectious diseases that have become chronic, including Lyme disease and others. They remain latent until triggered into action by traumas. Those miasms can be removed in a certain sequence, and people often get dramatic improvements, although it can take time to treat through all the layers of disease.

 

There can be many levels of causes, which can be different for each person who has those symptoms. And because each person has had different types of traumas, treatment is going to be unique for each person.

 

Sometimes MS-like symptoms are caused by neurotoxins such as aspartame and MSG. But not everyone reacts to those substances that way. Simply cutting them out can relieve or prevent symptoms for some people, but the underlying predisposition has to be removed.

 

For understanding the deeper meaning of illness, and embarking on a healing journey for transforming the deeply held patterns into consciousness, there is no other system I know of that is more rational, comprehensive and effective than the Heilkunst medical system. It's not just another method among the many, but an umbrella over all of them, because it understands precisely where they all fit. And it provides a map of what needs to be accomplished in order for each person to transform disease into the truth of who they really are.

 

For someone who wants to explore the spiritual aspect of illness and treat it at the same time, I would highly recommend treatment from the Hahnemann Clinic for Heilkunst, www.homeopathy.com/clinic. Rudi Verspoor and Patty Smith-Verspoor are the practitioners who I would refer someone to with a very complex, chronic condition.

 

It really depends on the particular person's inclinations as to how consciously engaged in spiritual development they want to be. But the treatment meets the person right where they are.

 

There are many resources I could point you to, if you could be more specific about what you're looking for? There are articles in the Resources section of the HCH website.. books, audios, etc. And I have articles on my website that are introductions to some of the basic principles of Heilkunst.

 

If you're looking for more philosophical writings on the spiritual meaning of illness, there are many good references, but let me know what you're interested in. For those who are interested in an esoteric western approach, there is an amazing book on spiritual evolution and illness, called Blessed by Illness, by an anthroposophical doctor by the name of Mees. It doesn't go into the therapeutics, but has profound insight into the basis of illness.

 

Really gives you some appreciation of what we're trying to work out when we express symptoms. Then the idea of simply trying to make symptoms go away seems pretty irrational .

 

The reason to look to western knowledge--not material science but the deeper knowledge that comes out of a modern, western understanding--is because the types of chronic illnesses that we have in modern times are not the same ones that the ancients were dealing with. Our consciousness is different, and our relationship to the spiritual world is different. Our astral bodies are more open, which is why we have become susceptible to diseases, while the ancients were dealing more with imbalances.

 

This is a big subject . But I hope that gives you something along the lines of what you were looking for.

 

I wish you and your partner the best,

 

Karen

[seadog]

Once again Karen thank you sincerely for taking the time to write your post.Narayan Singh observations that you quoted left me gobbed smacked to say the least.Spot spot on.I had a long look at the heilkunst site and was pleased to see it is in Ontario, my old stomping ground,I live in Australia now.I agree that MS is a modern western disease, this I believe is a very important consideration in regards to treatment.I will discuss what you have written with my partener and let her decide if this could be viable treatment option for her.Peace to you

[karen]

You're very welcome, seadog. I hope being "gobbed smacked" doesn't hurt too much.

Blessings,

Karen