Sunday, May 8, 2011

Your MIND: The Window To Disease

That patients recover from illness doesn’t really amaze me any more. After more than 20 years of practising homeopathy, what still takes my breath away is the transformation patients go through, completely and wholly, and the speed with which this often occurs.

This transformation is apparent in this short video of young Aneesa Ansari, who could barely sit upright on her own and needed help to walk. She had developed tuberculosis a couple of years earlier. She had grown resistant to the drugs and, over the next two years, developed tubercular meningitis, which had taken the disease process to her brain.

When Aneesa was helped into my clinic, she was disoriented, to say the least. She had been experiencing a high-grade fever that she could not shake off for four months. Despite being admitted to hospital four to five times, conventional physicians were unable to help her. Desperate and frightened, Aneesa entered my clinic, cannula still attached to her arm.

Barely a month after I began to treat her, Aneesa went from being a very sick young woman to a happy healthy and vibrant 24-year-old. And just in case you’re wondering, yes, I believe in miracles and homeopathy is one of them. This wonderful system of self-healing is a lifeline for many, arriving at my clinic as they do with a sense of panic and helplessness.

Is This The Same Patient? (2.11min)

Aneesa is one of many patients who come to MindHeal Homeopathy as emergency cases.

But how does someone so sick recover so quickly and so completely? The lay public is sceptical about using homeopathy in an emergency situation. Isn’t allopathy what you’re looking for in serious and acute cases? 

Before we come to that, let’s take a look at Safina, a 26-year-old homemaker who was brought to me earlier this year. She had been experiencing frequent splitting headaches, and her vision was blurred. After the usual rounds of opthalmologists, Safina had been referred to a neurologist, who found her intracranial (inside the skull) and intraocular (inside the eye) pressure abnormally high.


Doctors then recommended CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) tapping to relieve the pressure inside her eye. They began periodically drawing the fluid out via a lumbar puncture. Thus, Safina had doctors draining fluid from her spine on a fortnightly basis. Finally, doctors recommended that a thecoperitoneal shunt be placed inside Safina’s spine, to make the tapping procedure more convenient! All they needed to do was open the valve and let out the excess fluid when her vision grew blurry. 

Sometimes, the solutions thrown up by conventional medicine boggle the mind. When will physicians realise that you simply cannot ‘drain away disease’ from the human body?

In Safina’s case, the remedy I prescribed cleared up her symptoms in just 15 days. I had located the disease process at its source. Treatment, of course, continued much longer but relief came swift and easily. As with all patients, the upshot was that Safina began to feel more alive and free of the emotional burden she has been carrying. Take a look…

How is this possible? Without returning to the basic tenets of homeopathy, there is one pivotal point I would like to make, and that is: that the MIND is the window to all disease.

Patients usually provide a wealth of information during the initial consultation. All of it is relevant but the important elements are not flagged in red! Evaluating a case and piecing it together is like playing ‘join the dots’. The experienced homeopath must pick out the dots and then connect them to form a complete picture.

We have to first pick out the dots, or, what I call the patient’s ‘key sensitivity – their core fears, and psychological and emotional injuries that dictate their thoughts, actions and emotions in their everyday lives.

Cheers For Fears
Fear, by its very nature, is buried deep in the unconscious, its manifestation masked but still visible to the trained eye. But the homeopath does not psychoanalyse. All he/she needs to do is identify the fear and understand how it is expressed. There is no need to go backwards to understand why it exists.

After identifying the patient’s key sensitivity, the next step is to understand how the patient has coped with these core issues. In other words, the homeopath must identify the patient's main defence mechanisms.
Human nature presents a wide array of personalities. Some people act out their feelings and fears, others bottle them up, while still others compensate or overcompensate. Identifying the patient’s coping mechanisms and watching them at work in the patient’s life is critical to arriving at an accurate diagnosis, or in homeopathic terms, the right rubrics.

In Safina’s case, her lack of education and frustration at being unable to offer her children a good education was her ‘key sensitivity’. The other key issue was the constant verbal abuse from her in-laws and her refusal to bare her feelings. Neither did Safina say anything to her parents as she didn’t want to "burden" them with her problems. Her "stoic silence" and controlled nature were her coping mechanisms.

(To understand just how identifying the ‘key sensitivity’ is actually the key to every case and, I have discussed my rubrics and remedy in Safina’s case here.)

Interestingly, some patients experience a perceptible change in their health within a couple of days after treatment begins; others in less than a day. There are still others in whom reversing the disease process takes longer.

Get Well ‘Soon’
So what determines the speed of recovery? In simple terms, the human constitution has a genetically determined pace at which changes take places in each individual – changes of all kinds. This includes the pace at which disease sets in, their ‘boiling point’ or the point at which it intensifies before it becomes destructive, the progress of disease from one layer to another, the individual’s tolerance and reactivity to stress, and their ability to absorb and adapt to unfavourable changes in life circumstances.

‘Constitutional speed’ varies between individuals, some ‘changing gears’ quickly; others not so fast. This explains why some individuals recover slowly while others, like Aneesa and Safina, recover from serious diseases in a matter of days or weeks.

Also, closely tied to the recovery process this is the human immune system. We classically think of the immune system as that which fights germs and keeps us free of disease. Many are also aware that the immune system plays a crucial role in healing all ailments. But it’s more complex than that. The immune system does much more, even playing a part in determining your state of mind.

A word here about the way conventional medicine views illness vis-à-vis holistic systems of medicines such as homeopathy. Conventional medicine takes a mechanistic view of the human body and attempts to "cure" individual symptoms. Physicians are of the view that fixing the symptom is tantamount to cure.

They could not be farther from the truth. The truth is that disease is a process and this process manifests itself when the body can no longer cope and adjust to the disease process. As a result, something "gives way" in the body, leading to and overt symptom or ailment. Any attempt to suppress, manage or control (a la allopathy) the symptom or ailment only drives the disease process deeper. Eventually, when the patient is led to believe he/she is cured, they are actually getting sicker!

House-Cleaning Anyone?
Homeopathy, on the other hand, identifies the very source of the disease process and then altogether reverses it. When this happens, not only is the presenting ailment cured; the patient is cured of all that ails him/her at a deeper level. He/she is thus permanently cured.

To present an analogy… a can of insect-repellent will take care of nasty bugs but only a round of pest-control can effect a thorough house-cleaning!

Lesson Learnt: Symptomatic treatment cannot cure. Homeopathy is a science that altogether reverses the disease process. This is another reason this wonderful art and science can cure diseases and disorders that are completely untreatable by conventional medicine - pathological and incurable cases that conventional medicine has long since given up on. House-cleaning anyone?