Hey everyone,

 

You make some good points Luke.  My point was that one of the main slanders we have about allopatihc treatments is that "they only treat the physical" and then whenever that argument comes up about our modalities we claim body mind spirit can't be separated.  My point is,  if we really mean one of the things which separates what we do from allopathy is that we are treating the whole person and they aren't; we can't then claim it isn't possible for us to treat one part because the parts are interwoven.  Not a logical argument in any way, shape or form.

 

So, I examined what I mean when I say "they only treat the physical" and I discovered that isn't really what I believe to be happening at all.  I am only being lazy when I say "they only treat the physical" but I've said it so often that I was beginning to believe it enough that it was becoming confusing to me about how are we different from mainstream medicine. 

 

What I find to be the real belief behind that statement is that mainstream medicine doesn't consciously accept responsibility for what they are doing on the mind spirit or even fully on the physical.  They have a tendency to write effects off as "side" whenever they are undesired even if they are expected.  As far as the mind spirit aspects, there is no thought consciously given as a profession to these aspects of the humans they treat or to the humans doing the treating. 

 

This oversite makes for sloppy medicine and lots of opportunity for "placebo" and "spontaneous healing".  I think what really makes us different is that we attempt to the best of our ability to accept responsibility for, to plan for, and to include in our treatments all the effects of our interventions.  There aren't side effects in homeopathy because we don't just focus on the ones we want and discard the rest.  There is an acknowledgement of the mind spirit effects because we include them in the provings.  Pharm could do the same thing with their studies but they don't, by choice, consciously or unconcsciously.  Doesn't mean the effects aren't happening though.

 

The danger I see is that as a profession, we've lost our way with some of our modalities, botanicals being the greatest casualty so far.  We are taught to choose and use botanicals based on very limited pharmacological understanding of them and then we struggle with explaining how this is different from mainstream approaches... because it isn't and we know it isn't.  I've had the good fortune to learn from practitioners who prescribe plants based on other aspects than their chemical makeup and they get amazing results.  Essentially, they prescribe based on the overall effect of the plant, including mind spirit, matching the personalities of plants and patients. 

So I guess a point I want to make is that I don't believe that homeopathy treats on a whole person level while pharm drugs treat on a physical level, or even that one is better at treating on any of those levels than the other.  What I believe is that we, as a profession, have taken the time and responsibility to accurately describe and include in our prescriptions, how our homeopathic medicines effect the body mind spirit as a whole, while mainstream medicine has not.  And in some cases we are following their lead instead of holding to our own, as is the case for botanicals.

 

Another way I like to differentiate what we do in my mind is that I stay away from terms like "stimulating or suppressing the vital force" because I don't think that is the important distinction.  For example, surgery is very stimulating to the vital force.  It presents the VF with what would be a fatal wound, in most cases, that must be healed and the vital force gets on it like a champion.  All actions are stimulating to some aspect and suppressive to others so it isn't helpful to me to think in those terms.  I choose "sustainability" as my marker.

 

Is the reaction I am seeking to cause in the patient a sustainable one or is it not. In the case of most pharm drugs, I see them as unsustainable... like going on a temporary weight loss diet.  Makes you feel good now but the end result is further from your goal.  One of the things that makes pharm/mainstream approaches unsustainable is that I am shooting in the dark.  To use them, I must take very limited knowledge about a very isolated compound only studied in very controlled situations and attempt to extrapollate out to my complex patient's complex case in his/her complex world.  And, much of the information I need to do this well is written in fine print at the end of the commercial and called side effects.

 

One thing that makes things sustainable or not, I believe, is the learning contribution of the treatment.  What is the patient going to learn from this treatment?  What is the patient going to learn about life on this planet from the medicine born in a lab 5 years ago vs from a plant born 7 billion years ago?  I see pharm drugs as teenagers... overly aggressive, smart and completely ignorant of the world.  What can my patient learn from them?  Maybe, sometimes, it is more appropriate to take advantage of their youth and ignorance when the patient is being over-run by an especially aggressive and violent predator and prescribe temporary fixes...  But for the most part, I prefer to educate the patient on wholistic levels through what I say, do and give.  Hydrotherapy is so powerful I believe because it came before even the plants.  And we are predominantly water.  Sounds like a great educational opportunity to me.  Homeopathy takes minute doses, onlt the essense of an entity and teaches the body something with it. Isn't that how we describe it?  The remedy contains the information from the mother tincture?  Anyway, enough with that.

 

So my belief statements about what makes us different would be that we take conscious responsibility for the whole person effects of our medicines and we practice sustainable medicine.  We practice docere as physician's and we use medicine that has something to teach as well.  Mainstream medicine is not being consciously responsible nor is it sustainable... we see that people on their protocols decline rapidly over time as the unsustainalbe effects pile up. 

 

Again, just my way of figuring through all of this craziness and trying to find solid ground to stand on.

 

Peace and Light y'all,

William