Healing

Illness is a fact of life. When illness comes, whether it be a minor or major problem, we all want basically the same thing: a rapid, gentle treatment that cures us and alleviates our suffering. The most rapid relief comes from treatments that control the obvious aspects of illness, such as the swollen nose in allergies or the tumor in cancer. These kinds of treatments are quick, but they also affect the healthy parts of our bodies, often producing adverse "side effects" we don't want. In addition, they may not address the underlying reasons for the illness.

A more desirable approach to illness would be to stimulate natural healing mechanisms inherent in the body and guide them to eliminate the illness. This gentle type of treatment would only proceed as quickly as the body can repair itself naturally, so it might take longer than the treatments we are accustomed to. A body that eliminates a disease on its own, however, is more likely to remain healthy, truly curing the problem and preventing recurrence. In the long run, a therapy that encourages the body to heal itself is the best way to treat illness and restore health.

Illness: the disease / healing complex

For the past 100 years, modern, conventional medicine has focused on control of disease, the physical manifestation of illness. Refinements in technology and the discovery of the fundamental building blocks of the physical world have increased our ability to manipulate the physical body. Anesthesia and surgery are wonderful and dramatic examples of this. Twentieth-century medicine can now painlessly remove organs and repair tendons through small fiber-optic scopes and see into the anatomy and functioning of the body through computer driven X rays and imaging. We have medications that affect specific cellular functions, such as the amount of calcium or protons flowing through a cell membrane, and we are gradually mapping the genetic structure of humans.

Modern Western medicine's abilities in these areas will undoubtedly continue to improve and help us to treat disease better in the future. This detailed control over the physical body can have some unwanted effects, however. We are not machines. Thousands of complex, interconnected mechanisms operate to keep us functioning and healthy at anyone time. Collectively, these mechanisms maintain a balance, called homeostasis, and provide us with functional flexibility, resistance to disease, and health.

We experience many of the homeostatic responses of our bodies as symptoms and illnesses. If you get a cold, for example, an infection with a small virus or bacteria causes your body to increase blood flow to the nose, produce an influx of white blood cells and infection-fighting chemicals, such as histamines, which will increase mucus and drainage from the nose. This response to the infection is what produces the stuffy nose, headache, and other symptoms that we call a cold. Thus, what we call the illness is also the healing response of the body.

If your body presents a symptom, however, you know that something is wrong and your body is responding to the problem. This response is your body's attempt to heal itself. What brings you to the doctor is both the cause of the disease and your body's healing response to it. The two are inseparable. In conventional medicine, we control the symptoms of a cold by taking a medication such as an antihistamine or decongestant that stops the stuffy nose. This brings relief from the symptom but also blocks the self-healing action of the body.

Fortunately, the body has multiple ways to heal itself. If one cellular or immune pathway is blocked or slowed, there are several other ways the body can heal. Because of this, interfering with the healing process in order to get relief from symptoms is usually not a problem. We get over our cold, and most other diseases, whether we treat them or not. This tendency to heal spontaneously is immense and usually keeps us healthy. Occasionally, however, it is unsuccessful, and we develop chronic symptoms as the body keeps trying to correct the problem.

For example, in a person with allergies, pollen or dust mites cause a chemical reaction in the sinuses very similar to that produced by a cold. In chronic allergies, however, the attempts at self-healing never establish homeostasis, and the body's continuous attempts at healing result in chronic nasal drainage or stuffiness. Specifically blocking the chemicals that produce these symptoms with medications such as antihistamines can temporarily improve symptoms, but they also reduce the body's efforts to heal and restore balance permanently. In this situation, the body needs guidance as to how to restore that balance in a way that does not simply block the healing response. Allergy shots, for example, which are injections of small doses of the offending agent, are a conventionally accepted way to guide the immune system toward a more balanced response to the environment.

The many paths of illness and healing

Nothing within us, including individual organ systems or cells, functions in isolation. We continuously affect and are affected by our emotions, thoughts, and social and physical environment. Using the previous example, colds and nasal allergies are influenced by how we react to stress. Infections of the nose and throat have as much to do with our behavioral, psychological, and social environment as they do with the presence of the infectious organism. How well our immune system functions and how well we fight off infections has as much to do with our feelings about ourselves, our families, our friends, and how we relate to them as it does with the presence or exposure of a virus or bacteria. And we know that these effects occur in animals as well as humans.

Every disease/healing process involves an interplay between the offending "cause," or agent of the disease, and the person's self-healing response to that cause. In some cases, the causative agent is more dominant, such as after a severe injury, or with overwhelming infections, as in epidemics and other acute illnesses. In these situations the most important treatment is to interfere with the cause, perhaps through mechanical repair or antibiotics. In other situations, however, a person's healing response is the predominant part of the illness, as in chronic disease like allergies and arthritis. In these cases it is the self-healing, homeostatic mechanisms of the body that must be assisted. It is this aspect of the disease/healing complex that much of complementary and alternative medicine addresses.

Because of these multiple influences on disease and multiple pathways to healing, the treatment of disease/healing cannot be dogmatic. There are many ways to heal. No two individuals with the same diagnosis are exactly the same. Even in cases where we know the exact cause of the disease, such as in measles, strep throat, or a herniated disc, some individuals can be deathly ill and others not even notice it. Some people with a cold or allergies may have a dry, stuffy nose, others a wet, drippy one. Some have cough, others have sore throat, some have headache or swollen glands, and others have none of these symptoms. Different people use different aspects of our multiple healing mechanisms and even different parts of the body to deal with the same problem.

Clinical agreement about a diagnosis or outcome of a treatment often varies widely, especially where the person's response is the main determinant of the illness. Most diagnoses are arrived at by convenience or social agreement, as are colds or the flu, except when a disease is specifically defined by a laboratory test or a pathology finding. Even illnesses defined by pathology may have markedly different importance and meaning for different patients. For some people, cancer is a devastating disease that ends their lives early. For others, it is merely an annoyance with no ultimate effect on their life span or quality of life. Many complementary and alternative medical systems attempt to address this variability of disease/healing by individualizing each treatment in detail.

Just as diagnosis cannot be dogmatic, treatment cannot be routine, as if it were from a cookbook. A patient with an allergic stuffy nose may not respond to certain types of antihistamines or may develop annoying side effects, such as drowsiness, from others, and yet respond well to another type of medication. Often we try several medications and see which works the best. The same trial-and-error process often occurs with other medications, including antidepressants and antibiotics.

Since illnesses are not uniform and indications for conventional treatment are based on the average response of groups of patients, there is an element of guesswork in the treatment of anyone person, even with scientifically proven medications. The more varied individual responses are within a specific diagnosis, the more art and less science is involved in medication selection for any one person. In chronic illnesses, where different individuals' self-healing mechanisms may vary widely, selecting the right medication is essential for success. Many complementary and alternative medical approaches, like homeopathy, address this problem by using methods for individualized medication selection that increase the chances that a patient will respond favorably.

Approaches to healing

Although the body has multiple mechanisms for healing, treatment involves three basic approaches. The first is to support the homeostatic mechanisms of the body through nourishment and nurturing. The second is to induce and guide specific healing mechanisms already in the body. And the third is to discover and eliminate the cause of disease, when it can be found. These three approaches form the basis for all therapies that have ever existed including those of modern medicine.

Lifestyle and the wellness approach

One approach to treatment is to eliminate disease by improving general health and providing lifestyle support. Originally called the hygiene school in ancient Greece, this approach includes what we now call health promotion and wellness. It consists of basic supportive health measures such as good diet, fresh air, adequate sleep, exercise, and positive social relationships. These types of health behaviors may seem like common sense to us today, but throughout much of Western medical history they were either denounced as ineffective or simply ignored by the medical profession.

In Hippocrates' time, these principles included cleansing baths and saunas, fasting and "pure" diets, meditation, prayer, and group healing rituals. Today we know that a healthy lifestyle can go a long way in preventing and treating disease. A low-sugar, low-fat diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, not smoking or taking harmful medications, regular exercise, stress management and relaxation techniques, and the cultivation of self-esteem and love for others contribute markedly to good health and healing.

Healing enhancement: the similar approach

The other two approaches to healing address opposite sides of the disease/healing complex, one by trying to eliminate or oppose the cause of the disease, and the other by trying to enhance and stimulate the body's healing response in the illness. The therapeutic approach that treats disease by stimulating the body's self-healing efforts has a long tradition in the West. In ancient Greece, physicians would seek a medication or herb to stimulate the body in the same way that the person's self-healing efforts were attempting to do so anyway. Thus a person with a rash might be given a medicine made from a plant that caused rashes, or a person with diarrhea might be fed a food with laxative effects. This is called the similar approach.

Numerous theories and methods were developed to try to determine systematically which medications would encourage healing. These theories included looking at the shape, taste, or color of the plant; asking an oracle; going into a trance; or selecting the treatment based on an elaborate theory of humors or "energies" that were thought to make up a human being. No matter what method was used, the physician was always attempting to select the treatment that would most stimulate a particular patient's efforts to heal. Physicians attempted to choose medicines that would act specifically for each individual patient's condition.

Eliminating the cause: the opposition approach

In addition to the approach of selecting medications that mimicked "similar" healing efforts of the body, there was also a large group of physicians who treated by attempting to stop the disease part of the disease/healing complex. This is the idea of contraries, or opposites, in which treatments were designed to stop or oppose the disease process directly by interfering with the assumed cause.

Thus a patient with a rash might be given a plant that reduces skin inflammation (rather than produces it) and a person with diarrhea might be given a constipating diet or plant. The problem was in determining what the cause of the illness might be so that the cause could be interfered with. Selecting the medicine was less of a problem because once an assumed cause was determined; the treatment was directed toward this cause and the same treatment was given to every patient.

Science and healing

These three approaches to the management of illness-hygiene, similarity, and opposition-began in and have continued from the time of Hippocrates. The methods and therapies are different today, but the basic approach and thinking are the same. In modern Western medicine, if a person has an infection that person is given an antibiotic, a medication designed to kill the infecting agent. If one has inflammation and pain in the joints, one is given an anti-inflammatory or analgesic (literally "against sensation"). These are examples of the opposition approach, which has become very sophisticated in modern medicine. It works well when a cause is simple, easily identified, and dominates the disease/healing complex.

In the last fifteen years or so, the principles of the hygiene school have received more attention by modern medicine. This takes the form of the wellness, health-promotion, and preventive medicine movements. We now recognize that lifestyle and behavioral changes affect many of the problems for which people visit a doctor. For the most part, however, lifestyle activities are still limited to healthy people and are rarely used as primary therapies, even when behavior is the main cause of an illness. Likewise, the similarity approach is not used much in modern medicine as primary therapy.

For many centuries, there was very little scientific basis for any of these schools of therapy. None of these systems provided a scientific way of deciding ahead of time on an effective therapy. Any reason could be devised and (if accompanied by sufficient power and influence) be adopted as a rationale for even the most poisonous and ineffective therapy.

For illnesses with multiple or less clearly identified causes, as with most chronic illness, the opposition approach is not very useful for long-term healing, and stimulation of the self-healing process through the similarity or hygiene approach is more reasonable. Unfortunately, detailed and scientific development of the similarity approach has not been well established. The beginnings of a scientific basis for the similarity approach, however, was established in the last century with the development of homeopathy.

Holism, healing, and homeopathy

All therapy, whether conventional or alternative, is holistic in the sense that the whole person always responds. Any intervention, be it a medication, surgery, psychotherapy, or change in behavior, has effects on the entire body and mind. The difference between therapies lies only in which part of this global effect is assessed and used. When a specific disease cause is the dominant factor in an illness, it makes sense to direct a therapy toward that factor and then attempt to minimize the side effects of therapy.

If a person with a nasal infection develops bacterial meningitis (a serious infection in the brain) for example, the only hope of recovery is to eliminate the bacteria with high doses of antibiotics. The side effects of the antibiotics (such as hearing loss, in some cases) are an unfortunate consequence of the treatment but are better than death. If the nasal infection becomes a chronic sinus problem, however, where the self-healing efforts of the body are the dominant factor in the disease/healing complex, the best treatment is to enhance these self-healing efforts. Treating the bacteria in such a case will often have only a temporary effect and may lead to other subsequent problems.

Homeopathy is a complementary medical system that is useful in the latter situation, when the self-healing efforts of the body are the most important factor in an illness. Homeopathic medicine is a gentle method of treatment. It is a system for treating individuals that induces the body and mind to heal themselves. It uses small amounts of a variety of substances derived from plants, animals, minerals, synthetic chemicals, and conventional medications, which are prepared according to a specific process. There are explicit guidelines for the selection and use of homeopathic medicines that help ensure that their use in treatment will stimulate the body's self-healing properties.

Homeopathy is a special type of medication therapy. It is not a type of herbalism, psychotherapy, naturopathy, spiritual or psychic healing, or other such system or technique. Because it stimulates self-healing, it is one of the "gentle" or "natural" therapies and works within the body's natural process, producing few or no side effects. It also is a highly refined approach to the treatment of certain conditions and can, at times, have very rapid and specific effects.

Homeopathy uses the effects of a medication to enhance the body's healing efforts. It assumes that a medication can be useful when it is matched appropriately to the whole patient, rather than just to the diagnosis. The more detailed and "individualized" this medication matching is, the more likely that the person will respond with an effective and lasting healing response. In other words, homeopathy addresses a patient's complete symptoms rather than just treating a cold, a migraine headache, or a backache.

The homeopathic system assumes that all psychological, physiological, and cellular processes are interconnected and are involved in an illness. Pathways and mechanisms of healing are multiple and complex. Because of this complexity, simple one-to-one diagnostic-treatment approaches may not be very useful. Each individual may use a different combination of self-healing mechanisms, even for the same disease. Assisting this process requires adjustment of therapy to support these individual differences. Tools for guiding such a comprehensive and individualized therapy are still rather primitive, but are improving. Homeopathy addresses this complexity through a system of medication selection that provides specific treatment for the individual patient.

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