Wood Aven, a medicinal plant. Photo taken by
M'reen
What is your definition of health?
When asked, many
people define health as not being sick. This is usually a very limited
definition. You can not actually be sick, but have feelings of sadness or low
energy – does this mean you are healthy? Likewise, if someone is on
antidepressants, or another type of drug, would they be considered healthy or
not?
The body and mind are constantly evolving and in a state of change… and as
long,
as someone can
recover from any sudden change, then we can consider them healthy.
For example, a
person may develop a bad cold or feel depressed after losing their jobs.
This is OK and can be considered healthy as long as recovering from such events
can be done promptly.
Health can be
defined as being in a healthy state of balance.
You are an
amazing self-rebalancing organism. In fact everybody is and the medical term
of
this process is called homeostasis. We self-regulate constantly, without
thinking.
Emotions,
trauma, toxins, food and physical activity will influence a myriad of
parameters,
such as heart
rate, blood sugar levels or sweating. It is estimated that there may be more
than
10 million
processes being constantly re-balanced in our bodies.
If some of these
parameters stay out of balance for too long, then symptoms will start to
develop,
as our
homeostatic capabilities will be stretched. This is when disease arises.
Medically, disease is defined as an
inability to achieve balance naturally (homeostasis).
This is why a
health check will monitor a series of metrics, such as heart rate, blood
glucose levels and so on. This will give a picture of our ability to stay
in balance.
Two philosophies
of treatment – interventionist or holistic
Holistic
approaches, such as homeopathy or acupuncture and modern conventional
medicine sometimes appear at loggerheads because their approaches to restoring
health or balance
are completely
opposite. To restore balance and health, conventional medicine usually uses
chemical means to force the patient’s body to get back into correct metrics.
Conversely,
homeopaths, and other alternative practitioners, will try and understand
how an imbalance
arose in the first place, and define a strategy to let the body’s vitality
(“chi” in
acupuncture or “vital force” in homeopathy) to re-balance and sort itself out.
Neither system is better and one may be more relevant at some specific times
and under some circumstances and of course depending on the patient. An expert
practitioner, either conventional
or a homeopath, will understand this and work
accordingly with his or her patients’ specific
needs.
The pros and cons of both approaches are described in the next page.
In the West,
these differing principles of healing started in Ancient Greece,
and to understand
them, it is worth talking a bit about History.
Health in the
Western World – How it all started
From the
beginnings of time, people have tried to reduce death or diseases in a variety
of ways, using trials and errors. The use of healing plants began with the
hunting and gathering societies which wandered over the globe some 50,000 years
ago. The specific cultivation of medicinal plants
to treat diseases developed
with the advent of agriculture around 5 to 10,000 years ago.
At this time, the healing powers of herbs and plants were probably seen as a
mix of two conflicting philosophies. One was the belief that the plants had the
ability to eradicate specific disease
or symptoms
(intervention). The other principle was based on vital force (or vitalism),
a
concept that disease
would only arise in an imbalanced organism/person.
Herbs were then used to help
to re-balance that person.
Enter
Hippocrates
Hippocrates (c.
460-675 BC), is regarded as being the Founding Father of Western Medicine,
and he was a
major proponent of the Vitalistic approach. He refused to use the Gods to
explain illness. He implemented a logical system of medicine based on
understanding what had caused
the patient to
produce disease or symptoms, and how best to re-balance the vital energies
(“humors”) of the sick. He was probably influenced by concepts coming from
Black Africa, Egypt
and the Chinese
systems of healing. Hippocrates focused healing on the patient’s vital energies
instead of spiritual or external energy. This is why he stipulated that as a
health practitioner,
you should
“first do no harm”. He and his followers after him, believed in the natural
healing powers
of the body, and that it was wrong to act against them.
Hippocrates had laid down two key principles of homeopathy: first, that the
sick patient
was a
self-balancing system, which required regulating through the gentlest means
possible.
He also
postulated that the best way to achieve this was by using the Law of
Similarity,
a principle that
a substance that would cause or create similar symptoms could be used
to regulate the
patient into optimal health
After his death, and in opposition to the Hippocratic school, came the
Cnidians who believed
in intervening
by prescribing high doses of herbs to relieve the symptoms of a disease,
without thorough
investigation of the symptoms and their causes.
This was easier for the
practitioner, as there was no need for a thorough individualised analysis.
The Middle Ages:
the mixing of religion and healing
After the fall
of the Roman Empire, the monastic centres of Europe kept the vitalistic
traditions
of medicine
alive, and prosecuted anyone who was perceived to use medicine without its
consent. With the advent of universities and printing presses in Europe, the
dominance of religious centres over medicine started to wane and became more
mainstream. A new current of Medicine started
in the
Renaissance and challenged the Christian’s Church teaching on healing.
They started to
dissect human bodies and experiment with potent poisons.
Paracelsus (1493 – 1541) became one of the most influential medical
teachers of his time.
He was a Swiss
Renaissance physician and doctor, who re-discovered and took on board most
of the
vitalistic concepts of Hippocrates away from the Church. In opposition to many
of his contemporaries, he was giving diluted doses, and used herbs for their
opposite effects on the body: for example, he was commonly prescribing very
small doses of Helleborus plants to treat diarrhoea because huge consumption of
these plants were known to cause diarrhoea.
Paracelsus set up medical principles and one of his key-principles, still
quoted and used today,
was that “All
things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits
something
not to be
poisonous”. This principle laid the foundations of the biphasic approaches of
treatment.
The Renaissance
and the schism in healing thoughts
A split began to
develop in how healing was practiced during the “age of rationalism”,
around
the 1700′s. Educated doctors moved away from the
vitalistic concepts of medicine.
They sought ways to make the
herbs & medicine more concentrated.
The principle of using herbs or
minerals for specific
symptoms, without investigating the patient’s
individual case became more and
more common. It was the heyday of “heroic medicine” and herbs were combined and
then replaced with what was
seen as more potent substances, such as opium, arsenic or mercury which were of course toxic
to people.
Because of increased cases of poisoning or death of patients, many
countries in continental Europe enacted laws that prevented lay people from
prescribing or even using herbal medicine.
The commercial
business of producing and selling herbs started to be also more tightly
regulated.
The Beginnings
of Homeopathy
Homeopathy
emerged during this period, as a reaction to ‘heroic medicine’.
It was founded by a group of
German medical doctors who became disillusioned with
the seriously damaging side-effects of
the drugs they were taught to use.
They started to
study the old texts of medicine and to revive the concepts of vitalism.
However, they also sought to apply a more rigorous and scientific approach to
the principles
of healing and
this was the foundation of Homeopathy.
Samuel Hahnemann (1755 – 1843) is considered the founding father of homeopathy.
He was very
meticulous and a medical doctor by profession. His aim was to lay down a
logical
and methodical
process of healing, which could be backed by clinical observation.
He was strongly
influenced by Hippocrates and Paracelsus and laid down principles
to use the
body’s own vitality as a healing platform – the principles of vitalism.
http://thierry-health.com/homeopathy/history/
While this article does not deal with the workings of the innermind,
the innermind does not exist without the physical and spiritual body. M'reen
Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more
things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”
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