Conventional medicine not working for you? How about homeopathy!

The Rockefeller Foundation tried to kill it, but it couldn't be stopped and is nipping at Big Pharma’s heels everywhere.

Wow, it’s been 47 years since I heard this lecture about homeopathy. It so impressed me that I got permission to transcribe the audio tape in order to share the information that Dr. Bill Gray presented so delightfully that March day in 1977.

This talk is a shortcut — no need to read a whole book to learn the big ideas and important details of this strange and powerful healing method.

Conventional medicine calls it quackery but many a desperate MD has secretly gotten help for their own medical issue from a homeopath. And we can’t credit the astonishing results of homeopathy to the Placebo Effect (powerful tho’ it is) because babies and animals, despite their lack of suggestibility, also have amazing results from those little potentized lactose pellets.

Dizzie Gillespie said the two Big Ideas in his life were Jazz and Homeopathy. The World Health Organization (WHO) stated that homeopathy was the second most used medical system worldwide. David Beckham broke his foot just prior to the 2002 World Cup, he told the world of the impressive results of treatment that he got from homeopathic medicines.

I just searched online, and am happy to report that Dr. Bill is still practicing homeopathy, now from Dunsmuir, California, after a splendid career that included co-founding the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy, as he anticipated back in 1977.

Please feel free to comment below on your own experience with this approach to health.

Dr. Bill Gray's Talk on Homeopathy

Holistic Health Institute
March 5, 1977

First off, I want to introduce myself and I'll try to give a lightning introduction to homeopathy and then try to leave the second half for questions. There's a lot that could be said and it's very hard to do in just a 3-hour period but what I want to do is give you a basic understanding of what homeopathy is, how you can get more training in it, and how you can recognize a homeopath, including homeopaths of different types.

I became interested in medicine because of the indirect influence of my mother, who was a nurse. It was indirect because she definitely didn't want to influence my future, right? So around the eighth grade, I was reading about Albert Schweitzer and all kinds of famous doctors and had dreams of myself walking around in a white coat curing the world's diseases. And I ended up going to Stanford Medical School, where I quickly learned that it wasn't what I thought it was.

During my clinical years they would put a white coat on me, which was the whole goal of my life, right, and march me into a room and introduce me to somebody who had lupus erythematosus, which I could barely pronounce, much less understand, and tell that patient that I was their doctor. There would be a bunch of doctors in there to see this patient, but I was to be the primary doctor. This was to help me get used to the idea of taking care of patients. This was literally only the first week of my clinical experience.

Then, of course, the patient would ask me questions. They're in this strange medical center with all kinds of fancy techniques and words that sound like they're from another language and they want to know, "What's going to happen to me, Doctor?" And I didn't know. But I acted as if I did. And if I didn't act as if I knew, I got all kinds of flack from the other staff members, "unprofessional conduct" and so on. And not only that, but in my own self I had this dilemma going on about what's best for the patient. If I admitted that I was just a student and didn't know much, how would that person feel? So I copped out and lied all through medical school and most of Internship. Then at the end of internship I looked back on what I had done and I couldn't honestly decide whether I had done more good to patients than harm, or the other way around. So I couldn't do it anymore.

I decided to drop out and I traveled around the country and reflected on my experience. One thing that had really impressed me during internship over in Highland Hospital in Oakland was an orthopedic surgeon who taught me some chiropractic techniques. He did this sort of thing on the sly, for the liberal minded doctors, and made sure that we didn't talk about it to anyone else.

People would come in with whiplash injuries and with Valium and analgesics, I knew, it would be sometimes months before they would recover. They'd wear collars around their necks and so on. With the chiropractic technique, just a quick, noisy and frightening snap of the neck and their pain was gone and they'd walk out free of pain and they wouldn't have pain after that. It was a non-toxic technique that was very effective and I had a prejudice against it that didn't come from super scientific, Stanford level, double-blind control studies. The prejudice was picked up by osmosis. I wondered how many other things there were that are non-toxic that I had a prejudice against.

So I started looking around. I went to health food stores and mystical book stores and visited a bunch of chiropractors and osteopaths and looked into acupuncture and did some herbal medicine and a lot of nutrition and polarity therapy and psychic healing and spiritual healing and a wide variety of things. And after that I still couldn't decide to go back into medicine because as an M.D. I needed to have a systematic, thorough method of dealing with illness. Most of the available approaches, though non-toxic, weren't that reliably effective for my purposes. I think for lay people a lot of it really is effective, and you can cure a lot of minor ailments. But when it comes to treating cancer, lupus, diabetes, and so on, I needed to find something that was very effective.

Finally, after nine months, I just happened to come across a magazine article on homeopathy. The description of the whole thing made a lot of sense. Here was a systematic, thorough approach that was effective. So I took the only formal training available in the United States, which is the two week course in Pennsylvania sponsored by the National Center for Homeopathy. It was designed mainly for doctors but they have courses also for lay people. And at the end of that I was very impressed, they used gigantic books with lots of detailed information in them, and there are actually fixed principles on which you can judge the progress of lack of progress of the patient. And the case studies they gave were phenomenal, people being cured of all kinds of diseases. "Why in the world didn't I know about this before if it's so effective?" went through my mind. And gradually as I got to know more and more about it, I realized why it isn't so widely known. Because, as you'll see, it is very hard to know how it works. In fact, we have no idea why it works. It is just an empirical observation that it works.

I started to use homeopathy treating influenza during an epidemic. The results were so phenomenal that I couldn't believe it. For example, I was working at Kaiser and all we could recommend bed rest, fluids, and aspirin. A Primal Scream therapist was brought in by his friend, who had to practically carry him. He was pale, totally wiped out, he could barely raise his head. He had a client who was in the primal crisis, and he had to be there with his client every single day. I knew I just couldn't say "Bed rest, fluids, and aspirin."

I began by asking him a lot of crazy questions. This will give you an idea of how a homeopath works. It's not a matter of whether you have a sore throat, muscle aches and fever. It's where exactly did the sore throat start, on the left side, on the right side, in the middle? What exactly does it feel like, is it a sticking pain, a fish bone sensation, or a raw pain, or a burning pain? Is it painful when you swallow or when you're not swallowing, or if you're swallowing solid food or liquids, and if it's painful when you swallow, does it radiate downwards, to the side, to the ears? What time of day or night does it seem to be worse? Muscle aches, are they the kind where you just want to stay perfectly still so it doesn't hurt or are they the kind that make you restless so you are always trying to change position in bed? Do you prefer to be alone and away from people, are you bothered by noises, discord and chaos, or would you rather be around people and have activity around you? Are you better if you are sleeping or if you are trying to move around and do things? Do you like the window open or closed? Are you thirsty, and if so, do you drink warm or cold drinks? Do you drink in little sips or just guzzle the whole thing down?

Of course, this guy must have thought I was crazy but he was too sick to really wonder about it. At the end of the questions, I told his friend to come by my house that evening and I would give him some little granules for his friend, to be taken on his tongue, and he would be better by the next day. Of coarse, for the two-week flu that sounded crazy, but the guy didn't have any choice. I heard from him later in the week. He woke up the next morning completely and totally free of any symptoms and was able to go on treating his client. He was totally and absolutely astounded.

Here I was, just trying this out, and it really worked. I started studying it more and more, and ended up opening a practice in Sebastopol and finally moved to Mill Valley. I was gaining more and more experience with heavier and heavier cases.

Gradually I discovered that the brand of homeopathy that's available in the United States, and I'll explain this in a little bit, is pretty mediocre homeopathy. I found this out when I came across the work of George Vithoulkas in Athens, Greece. He wrote a book called Homeopathy, Medicine for the New Man, which was published by Avon, I think, and it's fairly unavailable nowadays. The only bookstore in San Francisco that carried this book burned down the other night, so I don't know where in the city you can get it now. The Mill Valley Library has one copy, other libraries might carry it. Shambala used to have it, over in Berkeley, but I don't know if they still have it or not. Anyway, it's an excellent introduction to homeopathy.

George Vithoulkas is, in my opinion, the master homeopath in the world. I visited his place twice, a month each time, and sat in on cases. He has a number of staff who take the cases and he goes from room to room prescribing the remedies. He sees about 50 patients a day. He's been doing it for about 15 years and he's the most amazing prescriber I've ever seen. He gets the worst possible cases imaginable: congestive failures, the most brittle diabetics, epileptics that are practically in status epilepticus, very bad asthmatics, patients with very bad eczema, psychiatric psychoses of various kinds. And he has a 95% cure rate.

The definition of cure in homeopathy, even with chronic diseases, is complete disappearance of all the symptoms and a full sense of well being, not just the absence of disease, without reliance on any drugs or medications or vitamins or diet regimen or anything.

I want to give you an example of how powerful homeopathy is when it is practiced by someone as skilled as Vithoulkas. I saw a patient there three and a half years after her cure from. She had returned for a regular routine follow-up visit. Huntington's Chorea is a neurological disorder that is hereditary in a definite Mendelian genetic way. It usually comes on in middle adolescence, it is something that causes involuntary motions of the skeletal muscles so that they are always jerking and moving and making what are called choreic motions. At first it starts in little ways and then it spreads until it involves the whole body.

When she first came to Dr. Vithoulkas at the age of 23, she was on the verge of dying, she'd lost weight down to about 65 or 70 pounds, she was totally bed ridden with these constant motions 24 hours a day. It was the sheer energy expenditure that caused her to lose weight, and not being able to eat so well. She was just zonked with all the medications to try to control this, and of course there is no treatment for something that is genetic, right? So Vithoulkas asked her a lot of these crazy questions and then gave her a few sugar granules of homeopathic remedy in one dose, which she just took on the tongue, and within three months she was completely free of symptoms.

This is magical, miraculous: 95% cure rate of all these serious diseases. I saw photographs and X-rays of one case, she had breast cancer that had fungated out through the skin, destroyed half of the breast and eaten down the arm and had metastasized throughout the whole body. Three surgeons considered that incurable, there was nothing they could do. Again, one dose, and within 3 months the symptoms were gone. I saw her on a six-year follow-up, and I examined her myself. There was a little bit of scar tissue and so on, but there was no trace of the cancer and she was living a perfectly normal life. Just one dose!

So, exactly what's going on here? The basic principle of homeopathy is commonly stated as Like Cures Like. That's what the word homeopathy actually means. Homeo means similar, pathy comes from pathos, which means suffering. Basically this principle was first enunciated, well probably in the Vedas, but in the Western world, Hippocrates was the first to enunciate this. Being an herbalist, and being very eclectic, he said that you can treat diseases by two principles, the principle of Contraries or the principle of Similars. If somebody has a runny nose, you can give them an herb or something that will decongest the nose. Or you can give the person a substance that produces the same symptoms in a normal person, which will also cure their symptoms. In other words, it's just an empirical observation; we don't know why a substance that will produce symptoms in a normal person will cure those symptoms in a sick person.

A common example is belladonna. If you give the herb belladonna to people, that's a toxic herb. and it produces this picture: A flushed face, dilated pupils, a dry mouth, particularly a dry mouth without thirst. A sore throat that has mostly to do with dryness, and it's usually centered on the right side, or at least begins on the right side and may progress to the left side. A throbbing, pounding headache, also worse on the right side, and particularly aggravated by noise, by light, by any kind of jarring or motion, by lying down flat, and alleviated by putting cold or putting pressure on it. A form of delirium in which the person sees phantoms and ghosts and feels attacked or pursued by entities of one sort of another. But in their terror, they don't move; they want to escape but they don't go running out of the room and jumping out of windows and crazy things like that.

Now, of course, we've all seen this picture before in people with fever. It can be a fever due to anything, due to meningitis, due to influenza. And if you see exactly that picture, not just a dry mouth but a dry mouth without thirst, etc., then you can give homeopathic belladonna, which is an extremely minute dose of belladonna. Just one dose and the fever will come down in five minutes, and the whole thing will be cured, regardless of whether it's influenza or meningitis or what. It doesn't matter what the diagnosis is, i.e. what we call the allopathic diagnosis, it still can be cured if you match the remedy to the symptoms that the person's body is generating in the first place.

It's as if the symptoms are the attempt on the part of the body to heal itself. In acute illnesses, if you give the body a chance, it usually does accomplish the healing. In chronic illnesses, usually the body does not accomplish the healing. It generates symptoms but it is not effective enough to actually cure the ailment. In homeopathy what we do is to find the substance that produces exactly those same symptoms in a normal person. Then we give that substance to the sick person, which stimulates their own healing forces. You see, their own healing forces are already trying to work, the remedy stimulates them even more and makes them more effective so the body can quickly and rapidly cure whatever it has been struggling with up to then.

By symptoms, in homeopathic medicine, we don't mean just simple pains or discomfort, but we mean whatever form of limitation the person experiences, and not just on the physical level, but on the mental and emotional levels also. And it's a highly individualized concept about symptoms. If all of us here were to suddenly get the flu, there would be a lot of common symptoms that we would all share. But each of us would have symptoms that would be different than the other people's, ways in which our bodies are unique and individualized in response to the stress of having this virus. We can find a substance which matches the person's total constellation of symptoms, and which produces a powerful healing response, curing them overnight, just like the Primal Scream therapist. So that's the basic principle of Like Cures Like. Hippocrates never systematized this, it was an idle observation.

It wasn't until the 1800's when a German doctor named Samuel Hahnemann, being a German, and fastidious and precise and thoughtful, and being a genius besides, and divinely inspired very likely, said, 'Well, if this is true, then we should be able to give substances to normal people and see the spectrum of symptoms they produce.'  In other words, he used people to define the personality of the substance, that is, the actions of the substance in the world. And by minutely describing the actions of the substance in the world on normal people, he built up a body of knowledge that could be used for curative purposes. He called this "proving."

He would take a collection of people like us in this room, and he'd give belladonna, say, in one dose, and then he'd wait and see if any symptoms showed up in any of us. Then, if nothing happened after the first dose, he would give a number of doses, every day maybe, or three times a day for a long period of time, sometimes maybe even a year. And every day, every two hours in fact, people had to record in their journal if there is any new symptom, any way they feel, even in the most subtle ways, in terms of their energy, the way their minds work, any kinds of emotional reactions, reactions to stress situations, any kind of food cravings or aversions they have, any kind of difficulty sleeping or disturbed dreams, or unusual day dreams, anything. No matter how unusual it may seem, it gets recorded. It's done very systematically.

At the end of recording everything, the symptoms that were common to the people before they took the substance were subtracted and the symptoms that were newly generated upon receiving the substance are organized and put into books called Materia Medicas. This big heavy one is just a summary of a summary of a summary. It has minutely described symptoms that were generated by substances given to normal people, and that then cure those symptoms in sick people.

It's a total reversal of our usual way of thinking. Even in herbal medicine if somebody has constipation, you give them a laxative, something that has a different and opposite effect on the body. In homeopathy we give them something that in other people produces constipation and which now cures the constipation. Of course, we don't do it on a one-to-one symptom like that, we do it in a totality of the symptoms of the person, all the different things, not just constipation, but any kind of rash they have, any kind of food craving or aversion, whether they're warm blooded or chilly, whether they are comfortable in this room or not, a wide variety of things.

It's a very detailed process of taking what we call a homeopathic case to get the totality of symptoms that individualize that person in their life. And then we go through books like this, which I'll pass around so you can see for yourself. You might want to look up things like coffee, and onions and garlic, or cannabis. See the description and you'll see that it is one you'll recognize. Then you can do a double think and see that if somebody, for instance a psychotic, has a distorted time sense, and walks around laughing all the time, and they crave sweets, you can give them cannabis and it can cure their psychosis. I've seen it happen. A homeopathic amount of cannabis, by the way, you wouldn't give them the cannabis itself.

Of course, you can't just go thumbing through 2,500 different remedies every time a patient comes in to try to find the one that covers all their symptoms, so we have a cross index, a great big hefty book, which has all the different systems of the body listed here, including a chapter called The Mind. In here are very many highly individualized symptoms that have been produced in normal people by substances that have been given to them, and the remedies that correspond to those symptoms. So if somebody has a throbbing headache on the right side that's better from cold, you look in here under head, pain, throbbing, better from cold applications. And you see 50 remedies that have that characteristic to them.

Then you go through all the symptoms that the person exhibits, and all the remedies that correspond to those symptoms until you find the one or two or three or four or six that run through the whole picture. Then you have to know the essence of the substances. After some experience, you begin the realize that each substance has a “personality.” And there's a personality to people that you're matching. You are almost literally meditating on the essence of substances and the essence of people. When the matching is done, some of the most powerful things that you could imagine in healing occur, I'll pass this book around too so you can see how detailed it is. Mostly I want you to see that this is a highly systematic book, that's what really impressed me about homeopathy in the first place.

It takes, they say, 15 to 20 years to get good at homeopathy. It's a very detailed, systematic, thorough science, and also an art that involves a great deal of intuitive understanding. However, it's not psychic, it's not like a psychic saying, "Oh, your aura shows such and such a color and this kind of a liver thing, why don't you take chelidonium and arsenicum and a bunch of homeopathic remedies, mix them together and that will make you better." It's not that, it's a very systematic method, using the body's own expression.

What we are as people is expressed in our body type, our reactions to: various environmental situations. For instance, some people are cold in this room, some are warm, some are restless and constantly change position in their seats all the time, some people sit very still, some people have a terrible time staying awake with a boring talk, and other people have very active minds that keep them going all the time, maybe even in things that aren't related to what's going on right here. Some people cry very easily, at the drop of a hat or without any reason at all, some people never cry at all, no matter how severe a grief they experience. Some people get very irritable when they are in crowds and they prefer to be alone and to use their mind all the time and they don't like to relate to people. Other people need to be alone, but not because they like solitude itself, but because they have a lack of self confidence and have anxiety in social situations, they fear what people might think of them if they were to reveal themselves, they are introverted for a different reason. I could go on and on. There are a lot of different images of people, a lot of different essences of expression. And a person's essence is essentially the same as the essence of the correct remedy.

To give some examples in my own experience. I had a patient who was a 13-year-old girl who had rheumatoid arthritis since the age of two. That's probably the most severe form of arthritis there is. She'd been to the Stanford Rheumatology Clinic and the Mayo Rheumatology Clinic and she's had a half dozen specialists and she's been on cortisone continuously for one year, with all the puffiness and complications that come from it. She was having daily physical therapy. She was 13 years old when I saw her and her life had been wiped out by this illness, they'd spent I don't know how many tens of thousands of dollars on her care and her prognosis was dismal. There's no way you're going to cure something like that. She had been on aspirin continuously for 10 years, something like 20 aspirin a day. She was completely bedridden except for maybe 1½ to 2 hours every day when she could get out and walk around a little bit, but she'd get so fatigued and so full of pain that she'd have to go back to bed again.

So during a 2-hour period when she could be up, she came to the office and I asked her questions, like what sort of books did she like to read, how was she affected by changes in the weather, mentally and emotionally as well as physically, what kind of foods did she crave or dislike, and all kinds of irrelevant questions. Then I gave her some little sugar granules on the tongue and told her to come back in a month. In the next week, she had a healing crisis that caused all of her joints to flare up. A law of nature is that in a chronic disease there has to be an aggravation of symptoms before there is a cure. And this is true in any method of medicine. By cure I mean a permanent absence of symptoms and increased resistance to whatever it is, say it's a virus, bacteria, or whatever, or just the stress. So there has to be an aggravation before there's a cure. Why that is, I don't know. We could talk about it from a mystical standpoint and karma and all kinds of notions, but nobody knows, it's just an observation.

Then her pain started to steadily disappear, to the point where a month after she took this substance, which was poison oak by the way, this one dose of rhus toxicodendron, all the pain had disappeared except her right knee and her ankles, which were the joints where it began at the age of 2. So she went ahead and went to high school. And the next month when she came back, without repeating the dose, she was completely free of pain. That was a year ago last July, over a year and a half ago. She hasn't had a repeat of the remedy and of course is not on Indocin. She is very active in after school activities, she was trying out for cheerleader at one point. She got an A on a homeopathy paper.

How could a little bit of poison oak on the tongue cure rheumatoid arthritis that had gone on for 10 years? I wish I knew the answer. The principles are Like Cures Like and the Minimum Dose, which is to give just a small amount of substance and see what the reaction is. Homeopathic remedies seem to stimulate the body's healing forces in such a way that the body cures itself.

QUESTION:  Did the girl with arthritis have frozen joints?
ANSWER:  No, all the physical therapy had prevented her joints from becoming frozen. If her joints had frozen and degenerated, we wouldn't be able to correct the deformity, but the pain would be gone, and the inflammation, and the whole arthritic process.

So, anyway, Samuel Hahnemann tested substances on normal people, and enumerated them in books in minute detail, and started treating people, and got such phenomenal results that he was world famous very quickly. He got such good results that the standard medical societies hounded him out of three countries, which is always a sign of success.

They didn't have any treatment in those days for cholera, they barely have any treatment for cholera now. Hahnemann could go into a county which had a raging cholera epidemic with a 70 or 80% mortality rate and cure every single case without a failure, and prevent it from spreading in that county. He would just go from county to county and do that with homeopathic treatment. The same thing was true for plague and yellow fever and all the influenzas.

QUESTION: Was it necessary to find the remedy for each individual or was there some way that he would deal with that as an epidemic?

ANSWER: Basically you do have to find the remedy for each individual, but in an epidemic the symptoms are similar enough that it comes down to a few remedies. That's why it's easier to start with acute cases when you're doing homeopathy, because you can at least learn a few remedies and be able to cover say 90% of the cases from that.

He would prepare the homeopathic remedies by potentizing them, i.e. shaking and diluting them in glass vials containing alcohol. You take something like poison oak, grind it up, dissolve it in 87% ethyl alcohol, in a glass vial, and shake very, very hard, with a great deal of kinetic energy. As a matter of fact, the best remedies in those days were made by a certain blacksmith in the Midwest. Then you take one drop of that and dilute it in 99 more drops of alcohol, and shake very hard, and then one drop of that in another 99 drops of alcohol. And just keep doing that in serial dilution, one to 99, one to 99. And it turned out that the more it was shaken and diluted, and it must be done in glass, the greater the curative power of the substance when it is used according to the Like Cures Like principle. If it is matched correctly to the person, it has a profound effect, a really dramatic effect. If it is not matched correctly to the person then it has no effect. It doesn't make them better, and doesn't make them worse.

A lot of the substances that were being used allopathically* in that day, like mercury and arsenic and so on are toxic substances. Yet Hahnemann wanted to try these on people to see what their homeopathic effects are. So, since he couldn't get normal people to volunteer to take arsenic or mercury, he gave potentized preparations of these sub stances to a group of volunteers and they would get harmless symptoms that could be recorded in books. Then these substances, which are toxic in non-potentized amounts, can be used in a curative way in potentized forms under the proper circumstances.
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*Defined in Webster’s New World Dictionary: Treatment of disease by remedies that produce effects different from or opposite to those produced by the disease.

How far would you do this shaking and diluting? After all, Avogadro's Number is 12 of these one-to-a-hundred dilutions. For the mathematicians in the audience, that would be 10 to the minus 24^th dilution. Avogadro's Number is 6,023 times 10 to the 23^rd. And what Avogadro's Number represents is the point beyond which there's not one molecule of substance left, all there is in a material sense is just the alcohol.

Most people tended to stay in the low potency ranges, they would use 6 or 12 "X", which means it is a one-to-ten dilution done 12 times. They would stay in that range because there is still and after all it couldn't work without substance, right? Hahnemann was crazy, he didn't go by theories, he went by observation. If it worked so far, how far would it work? He blithely went on to higher potencies, like a 30, which is a one-to-a-hundred dilution done 30 times. That is already a million-fold beyond Avogadro's Number. How in the world could that work? Well, the potency I gave to the guy with the flu was a one-to-a-hundred dilution done a thousand times. That's ten to the minus 2,000. Ten to the minus 24 is one thing, but ten to the minus 2,000 is just way out there. There's no chance that there's one molecule there of the original substance. And yet he was over his flu overnight, and the control group, the people treated with aspirin, bed rest, and fluids, took two weeks. The poison oak case that had rheumatoid arthritis for 10 years got a ten to the minus 2,000 dilution, or potency. In other words, one to a hundred dilution done a thousand times. There were no actual molecules of poison oak in those sugar granules I gave her.

Now, we could call whatever it was that cured her Energy, or we could call it Life Force, or Prana. We could call it anything, it doesn't matter what we call it. We don't know what it is. Some people have tried to do research on it. There is some chemical research that shows if you use nuclear magnetic resonance it shows a slight shift of resonance towards the hydroxyl end of the alcohol molecule. But so what, what does that mean? There are some changes that are detectable even in those realms beyond which there are no molecules left, but exactly how homeopathy works, we don't know.

We do know some of the properties of homeopathic remedies. They are easily destroyed by various strong odors, like gasoline, cigarette smoke, onions, bleach. If you expose some of these remedies to such odors, their curative action is destroyed. We don't know why. If the remedies are heated up to a temperature above 120 to 130 degrees, they lose their action. We don't know why. However, you can freeze them all the way down to virtual zero, and it doesn't change the action of the remedy.

There are all kinds of theories, lots and lots of theories, on why and how homeopathy works. As a matter of fact, you could read theories for the rest of your life on how this works. People talk about informal polymers between the water molecules and the ethanol molecules, the influence on the glass. And there are all kinds of psychic ideas. It's a whole crazy field. But nobody has any proof of any of it, it just works. It is a pure empirical science.

There is another interesting property to remedies, and that is that they are self-perpetuating. For instance, this is a kit of remedies. It has these little glass vials containing sugar granules. The final alcohol dilution, maybe a half a drop of it, is put in one of these vials, not even enough to wet the granules. Then a cork is put on it and it is shaken around a little bit. If there was a flu epidemic and I was treating people and ran out of this remedy, all I would have to do is fill it up with unmedicated sugar granules, shake it around a little bit, and it would be remedicated. There is something about the glass that actually maintains the energy or force, or whatever it is you want to call it, in there.

The most dramatic story I ever heard of this was told by an Indian homeopath, who had an angina patient, heart pain. He got homeopathic treatment and was completely cured of his pain. And after a while he moved clear across India. In the process he ran out the remedy. By the way, some homeopaths give more than one dose. One does is all a true homeopath needs to give, and I'll go into this later, but in this case he was taking it repeatedly, which is not the highest level of practicing homeopathy. Another interesting observation is that once a person has taken a homeopathic remedy, the effect of the remedy is somehow antidoted by drinking coffee or using camphor on the skin. We don't know why that is. For some people a little bit of coffee will do it, for others it takes a fair amount of coffee before the remedy is antidoted. For some people the amount of camphor in chapstick is not enough to antidote remedies, and for others even one exposure on the skin will stop the action of the remedy. In other words, if this rheumatoid arthritis patient were to use camphor on her skin, then the action of the remedy would stop and her rheumatoid arthritis would come back. There are limitations on homeopathy, you can't have coffee and camphor. Cigarettes don't interfere with it.

So this patient somehow antidoted his remedy and he was clear across India and he went to the allopathic doctor and they gave him all kinds of toxic drugs and he got worse and didn't know what to do. Then he called clear across the country, which is really a feat in India, to talk to this homeopath. And meanwhile, it had been ten years and the doctor had moved into a new office and had thrown away all his old records. He didn't even know which remedy. he had given him. But in India they save everything, so he asked, "Do you still have the vial?" The patient said he did. The doctor said, "Fill it up with sugar granules and start taking them." Which he did, and it cured his angina.

We know some of the parameters of the remedies: they are self-perpetuating, the effectiveness has to do with the influence of the substance on the glass, they are antidote-able in certain ways.

QUESTION:  How do you treat something without any symptoms?
ANSWER:  How do they know they are sick without any symptoms?

QUESTION:  He went for a physical examination and was told he had hardening of the arteries.
ANSWER:  You see, there is a difference between the homeopathic concept of symptoms and the allopathic concept of symptoms. Somebody could run through a Kaiser Multi-Phasic and have a half dozen internists do physical exams and come up with nothing. And the person himself knows he's sick, "I don't feel well, Doc." They may get weak or fatigued, it's hard for them to get out of bed in the morning, it's hard for them to concentrate on things, they don't have the stamina to go through the day, they can't remember names and dates, and so on. And you may not be able to find anything wrong in terms of physical diagnosis. That's where the limitations of allopathic medicine are.

On the other hand, in homeopathy, all of the manifestations of the person, even things we consider normal, for example, irritability and anxiety in certain situations, or fear of heights, all those things are actual manifestations of limitation of the person. That's how health is defined in homeopathy. So virtually everybody has symptoms to a homeopath, and we would prescribe the remedy accordingly.

Now, if you're asking me "Suppose the person doesn't really have even homeopathic symptoms, or they are minimal in importance in their life, but they've got an elevated cholesterol level." To a homeopath, it's what comes through the ears, the eyes, the touch, and so on, that gives us information that leads to the remedy. If you want to look at it from a mystical point of view, it's as if the world is set up so that the way the body expresses itself is exactly the cure. You learn to know how to prescribe substances in nature that can fit that particular individual picture. It's as if the solution to the problem is already available in nature but it requires a knowledge of principles in order to apply the substance. And it does not require blood tests and fancy pathological-level understanding of tests. So homeopaths don't actually do that much in the way of physical exams or testing.

QUESTION:  Suppose you get sick from taking a toxic substance, for example from accidental poisoning. According to the theory of Like Cures Like, would you give a small dose of that same chemical and thus take care of the problem?
ANSWER:  Yes, you could do that, that's close to homeopathy, but not the same. That would be treating that specific response to that specific toxin. But if you really wanted to cure the person totally, you would go on the symptoms that were produced, which may not indicate giving the toxin itself.

There is a difference between the specific prescriber and the constitutional prescriber. Someone who spends 10 or 15 minutes with you and only asks about the pain in your knee, that's a specific prescriber. And that may be alright, as far as it goes. But someone who spends an hour or two with you, going into all aspects of your life, especially emphasizing emotional and mental states, that's someone who knows constitutional prescribing.

A lot of homeopaths are only giving one dose, but you don't know it because they give placebos. It is a very common thing in homeopathy because they don't think that patients would believe one dose would work. In the Bay Area, however, homeopaths don't generally give placebos. Across the country and elsewhere in the world it's almost always placebos in addition to the one dose, so you have trouble telling if you got a constitutional or a specific prescriber on that basis.

In the Bay Area there is the Hering Family Clinic in Berkeley that is a whole clinic of homeopathic prescribers, doctors, and lay prescribers. It's at 2340 Ward Street. They are booked up 4 or 5 months in advance, which is typical of almost any homeopath. Then there is Frederich Schmid, who is a man in his fifties, or early sixties. I believe he is also not taking new patients, I'm not sure. He's basically a specific prescriber, but he's got a great deal of experience, and he's trained with some of the best homeopaths in the world, so I have a great deal of respect for him. He does allopathic medicine as well as homeopathic medicine, so if you are looking strictly for homeopathy, you have to be specific with him. Then there is Leo Bakker, he's at 450 Sutter St, in S.F. He's relatively young and inexperienced, but he's taking over the practice of a really highly respected homeopath, who died at the age of 86, Roger Schmidt. His practice is still open, and he does a good deal of allopathic medicine and some homeopathic medicine.

And then there is a new homeopath in San Francisco, he's been practicing about 4 years in Boulder Colorado, but he's just opening his practice here. His name is Eliott Blackman, and he is on Union Street. He's also an osteopath, and he practices cranial osteopathy, for those that know anything about that, so he's got quite a combination. I'm quite impressed with him. I don't know him very well, but I do know that he tries to do constitutional prescribing and spends a great deal of time with each patient and he's receiving some training that is coming through me from George Vithoulkas. So I think probably the best referral I can make is Eliott Blackman. Since it is still a new practice you have a chance of getting into see him. My practice is going to be closed in a few months because I'm going to Athens to study under George Vithoulkas for 2 or 3 years and I am not taking new patients.

As for learning homeopathy, you can get a lot of books from Shambala's book store in Berkeley, they are probably the best source of homeopathic books in the Bay Area. If they don't have certain books then they are often in the process of ordering them. Another good source of books is Dana Alman, who has kind of made a business out of this. He also teaches classes, introductory and advanced classes in homeopathy in Berkeley. He has a table out in front today. For people who want to learn more about it, that's a good way to get an introduction. It is effective as far as helping you to prescribe for family and friends. Of course you wouldn't be a homeopathic prescriber after taking Dana's classes.

Then there are a variety of study groups. mushrooming all over the place, so it's hard to give you an update that won't be out of date in a few months. Dana is probably the best source for finding out about study groups in the Bay Area. The Hering Family Clinic has a study group. I understand there's a study group in San Francisco, there are a couple of them down in Palo Alto, and so on.

In the future, George Vithoulkas will have a correspondence course in homeopathy that will originate from Greece and will be available all over the world. It's a very elaborate thing, the way it's being planned. It's not just a course you spend an evening month working on. It will be something that will be equivalent to going to college. It will demand a good 16 to 20 hours of study a week, not just homeopathy, but also some of the basics of standard allopathic medicine.

Because allopathic medicine is very valuable as far as it can be used. Allopathy is very good at diagnosis, which is sometimes important. And it is very good at mechanical things like broken bones and surgical situations, while homeopathy is not good at those things. Homeopathy's strength is in the realm of functional conditions that are still evolving, even before pathological change. Once there is pathological change, homeopathy can still be effective, but if you get too far along, then often surgery or allopathic medicine is still the best thing to do. So I don't put down allopathy. And for anyone getting into any wholistic field of practice, homeopathy included, having a pretty good knowledge of allopathic medicine is extremely important in order to evaluate what's going on.

Sometimes you need to know how serious a given situation is, what the prognosis is, will this person die in a day or two, or do they have a year or two? What's the pace of the illness? Without that knowledge, you can't always judge the best way to deal with somebody wholistically. You may not have time, so you may have to use allopathic medicine sometimes.

It is not certain with this course is going to be available. I would say the earliest would be within a year. It could be maybe two years before it's ready. It depends a lot on George getting his book out, but he's so busy with patients that he hasn't completed the book. He's writing a three-volume work on the actual theory and philosophy and the nuts and bolts details, case-taking details that will probably be the most comprehensive book ever written on how to do homeopathy. It will be published in English. It's slow going for somebody that is as well-known as he is, since he gets so many cases. But we are going to kick his ass and get him to finish it.

There will be publicity on it throughout the whole Bay Area so people will know when it's finally available. It will probably cost considerable money, maybe equivalent to going to college. It's going to be a multimedia thing, it will utilize audio and video tapes, programmed texts, and various elaborate teaching aids.

Then, after I get two or three years of training under Vithoulkas it's planned that I'll come back here to the Bay Area and will establish a permanent school, with a physical location. It will provide year-round training in both homeopathic medicine of the highest level of understanding, that is real constitutional prescribing, and also allopathic medicine. And that's still 3 to 5 years away.

QUESTION:  What about the Royal College in London?
ANSWER:  Yes, there is a college in London that trains doctors in homeopathy. It's not an actual physical structure, it's a hospital, and they make rounds, and they have a two-week course that they give on a repeated basis. Again, there's one real constitutional prescriber there and the rest have lesser levels of understanding. I don't mean to put that down. Any homeopath is going to do you a great deal of good. The true constitutional ones are the ones you want to have when there's real heavy duty illnesses. And there it's important to make whatever efforts are necessary to get that care.

In the United States, there are only six homeopathic doctors doing constitutional prescribing. Most of their practices are closed, unfortunately. I can give you the names: There's Edward Whitmont in New York, who is doing only a psychiatric practice, he's probably the best in the United States. He's a Jungian psychoanalyst, an astrologer, and a homeopath, all at once, with about 40 years experience. I think he's the president of the Jungian Society in the United States.

Then there is James Stevenson in New York City. In Chicago there is a homeopath named Rudy Ballentine. In Orlando Florida there is Ruth Rogers, she's a very experienced homeopath and she's had some training under Vithoulkas. There is Maise Panos in Tip City Ohio, which is near Dayton. She's one of the better known ones in the United States. Those are the main ones I recommend. Incidentally, you'll be interested to know there are probably as many women doctors doing homeopathy as men doctors, and that's always been the case.

QUESTION: Please talk about the legal status, both for M.D.'s and non-M.D. 's.
ANSWER: The legal status is fairly iffy, but not as bad as you might think. For M.D.'s, you can do almost anything, so even homeopathy can be done by M.D.'s and they aren't being hassled currently. In the past, it is true, some M.D.'s lost their license doing homeopathy, not just because they are doing homeopathy, though, but because they were claiming to cure cancer and various other diseases that you just don't claim to cure, considering the way things are. But those that have just ordinary practices, and treat people instead of illnesses don't usually run into that kind of trouble. If anybody really gets serious about doing homeopathy, the safest of all the ways is to go to medical school and then do it. But, of course, the vast majority of the time and energy that you spend in medical school is irrelevant once you become a homeopath.

Then, as far as the status of lay prescribers, that has not really been tested in the law yet. Dana Alman was arrested for practicing without a license last May and his trial is coming up April 11^th. A group of us pulled together to join in his defense. The defense is that while you must have an M.D. diagnose or treat pathological diseases, in a true sense homeopathy does not even attempt to do that. It does but it doesn't -- homeopathy treats the pathological as one level, but it also treats the whole range of the person, and fundamentally the choice of the remedy is not based on the ailment, it's based on the person.

It appears that this defense will be quite effective and he'll be acquitted. The charges may even be dismissed, which would be a very great victory for homeopathy. It is just a local court decision so it doesn't have the tremendous weight of a Supreme Court decision, and the strategy is not to go to the appellate court level. But it will have the weight of one time, anyway, when this argument was made in court and was convincing to the court.

There's a fair amount of energy that's being put into Dana's defense, not just to support Dana but because of the importance this has for homeopathy and the wholistic movement in general. If anybody here has energy that they can use to help organize for this case, we can definitely use as much help as possible.

This trial is really important because it is educational for the public to even know that there is such a thing as homeopathy and that it is even more effective than standard medicine. Most people are really disgusted with doctors. They know that the methods being used are dehumanizing and cost an undue amount of money, but they don't know what else to do. And Dana's trial is a showcase situation where publicity could be done to make that point. And we can also make the point that the wholistic health movement has gotten big enough now to create a confrontation with the legislative norms for what is and isn't medicine. And this is the tip of that iceberg. This case is historically important.

Whether it is safe to practice homeopathy as a lay person now is just not known until this case works itself out. There is definitely a risk even if Dana is acquitted because a prosecutor can prosecute anyone, even if there is a precedent on the books. But, if Dana wins, there will be the reassurance that at least once this argument protected somebody in court. It will also help to delineate the way in which homeopathy can be practiced legally. I.E. the way to communicate to clients in order to not just protect yourself legally, but to communicate to the client that you're not doing allopathic medicine, you're not qualified to diagnose, and that they need an M.D. for that, but that you are working on stimulating their life force which can produce a beneficial effect on their health.

As long as we are talking about resources, I want to comment on homeopathic pharmacies. There are pharmacies that are specialty pharmacies for homeopathy. The remedies are usually prepared by machines. There is a homeopathic pharmacy called Mylan’s on 220 O'Farrell Street in San Francisco. They generally don't handle their remedies very reliably, but if you are in a real pinch, they have some remedies there. I understand that Pay and Save in Berkeley has some remedies too, they are low potencies, i.e. not diluted as much as high potencies and therefore, paradoxically, not as powerful. By in large, until you know something about homeopathy, you probably ought to stay with low potencies.

Then there is the Standard Homeopathic Company in Los Angeles, and they have all different potencies available. There are several other pharmacies across the United States. The most reliable homeopathic pharmacy is Nelson's in London, England. They have very reliable remedies, and they really handle remedies correctly. A lot of so-called homeopathic pharmacists don't know about avoiding high temperatures and odors, etc., and I've seen them smoke a cigarette while preparing remedies. We are working on that, the homeopathic pharmacopia is being revised and the standards of preparation are going to be a part of the FDA law. [Boiron, a French company, is a reliable source both for doctors and lay people.]

QUESTION:  I have gotten the impression that a lot of provings over the past 150 years were done in a rather haphazard way, with no control and no controlling for placebo effect. How reliable are the Materia Medicas?
ANSWER:  Actually, most of the provings have been done very reliably. It is true that they haven't been done in a double blind way, the way we do nowadays because of the allopathic influence. But they have been done in a very systematic way throughout history. Hahnemann set standards that were very high. There are some provings in some places that were done with small numbers of people and they didn't keep careful notes and a homeopath didn't supervise it in a very strict way. But actually, the provings that make up the bulk of the materia medicas are really very reliable. And there have been some provings done recently to test information that's a hundred years old and it still stands. By and large they are accurate. However, there are not enough done. We need a lot more provings done. There aren't that many homeopaths and they don't have the time to do it so until there's a resurgence of homeopathy, we are not going to see much effective development of new remedies through provings.

I might comment a little on the decline of homeopathy. Because in 1890 there were as many homeopathic M.D.'s in the United States as there were allopathic M.D.'s. As a matter of fact, the A.M.A. was formed two years after the American Institute of Homeopathy. And part of its specific reason for forming, according to the bylaws, was to ‘stamp out the scourge of homeopathy.’ And it did a pretty good job.

It wasn't only medical politics that compromised homeopathy. One of the big difficulties is that it requires so much time with a patient, it's impractical. Nowadays, in the modern urban setting of doing medicine, money is the medium of exchange. Back in the last century, when medicine was done in a rural setting, a doctor had to travel by horse and buggy to somebody's house anyway, and didn't operate out of his office that much. He would spend a lot of time with people and was paid in chickens and fixing the roof and that sort of thing. So his basic needs were taken care of by the community. It was sort of like a peasant situation. [*Further information at the end.]

But now that we are in an urban environment, the economics have changed and it's very hard to make a living doing homeopathy, if you are really doing it strictly. Take, for example, MediCal. In my practice, I charge $60 an hour, which is an average charge for a doctor if they figure it on a time basis, or probably it's even a little low nowadays. But I may spend an hour or two, and that can run up to a lot of money for that first visit. MediCal will only pay a certain percentage, according to the standards of practice in the community. So if somebody has hay fever, or arthritis, it doesn't take more than 15 or 20 minutes to prescribe an antihistamine or a pain killer. So they will not permit charges for more than that amount of time. So, on an average, for MediCal patients, I collect 25% of my usual fee.

If you think it's bad now, wait until National Health Insurance comes in and everybody is on it, like they are in Great Britain. Homeopathy is declining in Great Britain just as much as it is here. And a major part of the reason is that they don't pay for the time that the doctor has to spend. Of course, in the long run, homeopathy is so effective that it saves people money. For instance, the parents of that rhus tox patient spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for her arthritis and probably didn't pay me more than one hundred dollars.

The fundamental principles of homeopathy are:

•      Like Cures Like

•      The Potentization Principle (the systematic dilution of remedies)

•      The Single Dose Principle

In true homeopathy you give one dose only. Results should be evident soon and no more remedy needed for the healing to continue until health is regained.

With a 170 years heritage, anyone doing homeopathy is going to gain quite a bit of insight into health and disease. You don't just sit down with somebody for 5 minutes and throw out a remedy, or look at their aura and zap a remedy to them. In real homeopathy, you go through a very detailed question and answer session, the whole interview usually takes hours. But as you gain experience, you can do it more and more quickly. By asking all those questions about their individual responses to their environment and social situations and so on, you are really getting closer to the essence of who that person is, the way they work, their fundamental, basic way of interacting in the world. It's more than psychoanalysis. The psychotherapeutic view of the world is that the mind causes things in the body. And that's true to a certain extent. But the homeopathic view of things is that whatever manifestation of limitation there is in the person, that leads to the remedy.

Homeopaths get quite a sophisticated view of health and disease. There is a principle that comes out of observations that goes beyond the principles that we have talked about so far. This is the principle that I think is of the most value to people using other therapies. Now this comes directly from George Vithoulkas, who is really the master homeopath in the world. It's a very simple concept. As I convey it, you may think "Well, of course, that makes sense." But this can be an extremely powerful tool in measuring how a person is responding to any therapy, or how sick a person actually is, regardless of the allopathic diagnosis. There are people with cancer who are healthy, basically, and the cancer is just one hang up. And there are people with lupus who are healthy, but it's just one hang up. And there are people with hay fever who are very sick, by this concept.

It's basically the definition of health. First off, the person is an integrated whole, including the mental level, the emotional level, and the physical level. The definition of health relates to all three of these levels.

The definition of health on the physical level is freedom from having extra attention on the body due to pain, weakness, stiffness, or whatever. It isn't just freedom from pain, but freedom from having to put undue attention on the body. If you must do your stretching or your yoga in the morning in order to get your body to a place where it feels comfortable so you can go on with your day, that's a limitation right there. Freedom would be that you can or you cannot do it, depending on how your body is on the physical level.

On the emotional level, it's freedom from being trapped by the passions. Most people react in a habitual way to emotional situations. If somebody confronts them in some way, they may habitually react with anxiety or withdrawal or anger or irritability or defensiveness, or whatever. And most people go through life reacting constantly in the same way to very many different situations. For instance, Richard Nixon had a characteristic way that he responded to all the stresses that occurred before and while he was President. That's a limitation of freedom on the emotional level. Now, freedom from habitual emotional reactions doesn't mean zen detachment, a state of noninvolvement in the world, or a state of emotionlessness. It's not that at all. It's a matter of being able to experience the full range of human emotions, but without being trapped in any one of them, so that you have a choice in how you can react to a circumstance.

On the mental level, this is a little harder to describe. The mental level is different from the emotional level. Our perception of the world is without emotion. Emotions are in our reaction to our perceptions. And that perception can be confused or it can be clear. It can be basically a perception which has to do with selfishness or with selflessness. It can be a perception of reality as it is or as a fantasy. And these don't necessarily have an emotional content to them.

The extreme example of somebody who is limited in this way, who has a lack of freedom on the mental level, would be a schizophrenic. Often there is a great deal of emotional reaction in a schizophrenic. But there are schizophrenics, particularly the more chronic ones, who cannot separate realities on different dimensions and yet are not frightened anymore. They may have passed through the emotional reaction to it, but the perceptual difficulty is still there. If you say something to a schizophrenic, he may not be able to perceive the impact of what you're saying on his own state. And he may not be able to perceive the impact that his words have on you. It's true that there are other planes of existence that people can come in touch with, and I think schizophrenics are often in touch with these planes, but the limitation in their case is that they don't know how to discriminate which level they are on in a given moment, whereas other people can.

Now the mental, emotional, and physical all interact. The mental can create emotional reactions, the emotional state can create ulcers and colitis, and vice versa. A bodily pain can stimulate fear in a person and fear can distort their ability to perceive what's happening around them, of narrow them in to a more self-centered consciousness, rather than a more outward consciousness. So these all interact, but the totality is animated by something we might call the Life Force, or the Vital Force, or Prana, or Chi.

Life Force is a non-material process, or force, or energy that animates the whole being. And this is what is always trying to create a state of equilibrium or balance in the person. So that if there is a stress or any kind, such as an auto accident or a change in weather or a full moon or cigarette smoke or the cat pulling the drapes down, then it produces a reaction. And that reaction comes from the Life Force trying to maintain a state of equilibrium.

Equilibrium will be achieved depending on the strength or weakness of the Life Force in the person. We are born with either a weak Life Force or a strong Life Force, or it's somewhere on the continuum in between. Some people are born with such strong constitutions that they can eat all the junk food in the world, and never exercise, and overwork, and they never get sick, and they live into their nineties. Other people can be health nuts, and put all their attention and energy into that realm. They exercise, they eat the right diet, they never miss their vitamins, they meditate regularly, they have good balanced relationships, they're always centered, and yet they're sick. Those people have weak Life Forces.

We can talk about the center of gravity of symptoms. If somebody's symptoms are generated by the Life Force primarily on the physical level, and they have a great deal of freedom on the mental and emotional levels, then they are relatively strong. They are setting up their defenses on the physical level, which is actually of least importance to the freedom of the organism. But if somebody has a disturbance on the mental/spiritual level, where their whole ability to perceive reality is distorted in a significant way, that's a limitation of freedom that permeates every other aspect of their life. That's the most important area. The center of gravity of an illness has a great deal to do with measuring how healthy or how sick a person is.

Using this concept, if you apply a therapy to someone who is sick, you can measure the progress of that person under that therapy by the way they respond. If they clear up on the mental and emotional level and their symptoms are still progressing on the physical level, you're going in the right direction, towards a cure. Often, the physical body changes much slower than the mental and emotional aspects, which are on a dynamic plane. So you can see somebody change on the mental and emotional level and the physical level is still sick. But you know they're better, and they do too.

I have a patient right now who has had ulcerative colitis for a long time. This is one of the worst cases I've ever had. She's been on cortisone a long time. Under the influence of her homeopathic remedy, a tremendous healing crisis was produced, it's gone on for a month. And it started with a deep-seated emotional response. She woke up the morning after taking the remedy and every symptom she had ever had on the mental and emotional levels all of a sudden came out in the space of an hour. She had all the canker sores, the colitis, the eczema and she had all the anxiety and fear and anger she had never been in touch with before. As the day went on, she experienced a lot of anger towards her husband and her brother-in-law, which had been what she had been going through the previous few months. After that, she experienced a lot of anger towards her mother that she had felt ever since she was a child. It marched right through time.

She said it was as if her mind was out of control, that these things would pop into her consciousness and she would immediately develop a symptom in the body at the same time. In a matter of minutes that symptom would disappear as the mental and emotional states disappeared. She said that during this experience she saw the root of her entire illness internally, in a psychic space. Before her homeopathic treatment she had been contemplating surgery to remove the colon. She discovered during this experience that it was not just her colon that was sick, it was her whole being, and that it is all connected.

And it was not a matter of her having to overcome her anger in order to get over her colitis. The anger which was created by the Life Force in response to stress was just as much an expression of limitation as the colon symptoms were. They were all the same, they were all just symptoms. And prior to the remedy, all those symptoms were needed in order to maintain a balance in response to stress.

Someone with a weak Life Force maintains their balance in response to stress by having symptoms on the mental, emotional and physical levels. And when either the Life Force is strengthened or the stress is reduced (preferably in homeopathy we stimulate the Life Force itself), then they are able to cope with those stresses, and the symptoms can go on the produce a cure. This is a reversal of the way of thinking about health and disease from the usual medical concept. The allopathic medical concept is that symptoms are something you want to get rid of. And that's true, as far as it goes, but it's also a manifestation of the body trying to heal that problem. In homeopathy, we strengthen the Life Force so that that process can be completed, that's why there needs to be an aggravation before there's an improvement.

To summarize: a set of symptoms is an integrated whole and the symptoms are produced by the Life Force. In homeopathy we stimulate the Life Force which then aggravates the symptoms to the roll-over point so they produce a cure. We measure progress by defining health as being equivalent to freedom. If you ever doubt whether somebody is sick, ask them if they are free.

QUESTION:  I would think that some of these healing crises would be very frightening. Do you explain to people what might happen to them?
ANSWER:  The healing crisis could possibly be frightening. However, the patient is really stronger than before they received the remedy and can now handle the aggravated symptoms. The colitis patient experienced much of healing crisis over a period of hours, and then she went on experiencing it for weeks, working exactly backwards in time. We could actually tell how far back in her life the remedy was working, it will work all the way back into infancy, till the first day of life.

Any symptoms that have ever been generated will be chronologically recreated during the healing crisis until all the symptoms are gone, and the patient is cured for life. And during the healing crisis they are actually stronger, so they have a greater capacity to cope with these aggravated symptoms. Whereas before the remedy patients feel overwhelmed and vulnerable and unable to cope with the symptoms or the emotional states. Under the influence of the remedy, there is definitely a heightened sense of well-being, a clear state that this is exactly what is supposed to happen.

Usually, I don't have to talk patients through their crisis, they already intuitively know it will turn out fine. I talked to her on the phone yesterday and she's doing very well now. The whole mental and emotional thing is nearly cleared up, and she's just working through the physical level of symptoms. She said one thing that was obvious to me all the way through, "I am fine." And that's the prime thing that we look for in homeopathy, that despite aggravated symptoms, the patient says, "Oh, I have this and that pain and so on, but I'm fine. I know that I am well." When people say "I", they are talking about a sense of themselves as a whole. They'll say "My knee hurts but I'm OK."

So counseling isn't even needed during the healing crisis. Mostly counseling is trying to talk somebody into a certain point of view. Usually whatever counseling I give is irrelevant because the person is already discovering those things for themself. When there is basically a neurotic kind of process going on, i.e. anxiety or fear, and they have some insight into what's going on, but they're just not able to take responsibility for it, the remedy will stimulate their capacity to see the root of the problem. Then it's up to them to learn from that and use it. And that's where counseling might come in. But usually they're strengthened so much that there is no obstruction to learning the lesson, so counseling is not needed.

There are several levels of understanding homeopathy. And you'll see people giving homeopathic remedies and calling themselves homeopaths who don't understand the highest level of homeopathy because they weren't exposed to it or they weren't interested in it. So let me describe first the different ways of using homeopathic remedies. I don't mean to put down the more superficial levels of homeopathic practice because they all have their uses. But we do need to be able to discriminate among them.

For instance, there's Tissue Salts, which you see in all kinds of health food stores. They are homeopathic preparations of the same salts found in the body. "Natrum Phos," "Natrum Sol," "Natrum Ur," "Cali Phos," and so on. Their originator theorized, "Well, if you extract the energy from them by potentizing them, that should enhance the absorption by the body of those salts, and help to balance the body's mineral balance." In actual practice, we don't know what they do and they don't do very much. They are low potencies (i.e. not diluted very much) and they have very minimal effects unless it just happens that your particular homeopathic remedy, the one that fits your system precisely is one of those. In that case, you can get a very nice response. But for most people, buying these salts and taking combinations of them will have very little effect. And probably it's an effect that is analogous to vitamin therapy, which is not useless, but it's not as curative as the highest level of homeopathy. Tissue salts don't work very well because, while they are homeopathically prepared substances, they are not prescribed by the homeopathic principles of (1) Like Cures Like, (2) of using the totality of the person's symptoms, and (3) matching the essence of the remedy to the essence of the person.

You'll also come across the Bach Flower Remedies. Bach himself was a homeopath. But he uses flowers that are not homeopathically prepared, they are prepared as a tincture so they're not potentized, and they are prescribed by a sort of superficial Like Cures Like principle. Prescribing is based on one or two or three mental symptoms. The Flower Remedies do actually have effects as far as relieving anxieties or angers or grief situations, but they are temporary and you have to keep on taking them in order to get the effects. So they're not curative in the sense of stimulating the body's own healing forces so that the body can manage on its own after that.

Then you'll see people who prescribe remedies in a very quick fashion on just a few homeopathic symptoms. The people who prescribe in this manner say you have to have three homeopathic symptoms because "You have to have three legs on a stool to get it stable." Basically that approach will have a relatively superficial, transient effect, and you have to keep taking the remedy to continue getting the effect. I call that Specific Prescribing. Usually the remedy is based on the particular symptoms. If you have a pain in the knee, then it's a matter of how is that pain affected by changes in the weather, what time of the day or night is it better or worse. Then you prescribe a remedy for that. That's basically allopathic prescribing, i.e. giving a remedy for a problem. Whereas in true homeopathy, you give a remedy to the person with the problem, based on who that person is as an individual, and then the problem is cured as a part of the process of stimulating the healing forces of the person.

But specific prescribing does work. So when somebody is basically strong and they just have a minor ailment, then specific prescribing is very, very useful. You can get a lot of benefit from it. I analogize it to mathematics. If you know arithmetic and can make change in a store, that's equivalent to knowing first aid. When you learn more homeopathy and you can treat people with specific remedies for specific problems, that's analogous to knowing algebra or geometry. And constitutional homeopathic prescribing, which is a very detailed, painstaking process that has very powerful deep curing actions with just one dose, that's analogous to doing calculus. So you wouldn't use calculus to make change in the store. You don't do constitutional prescribing because somebody smashed his thumb. [Just take arnica 30x then!]

But if somebody has cancer or Lupus Erythematosus or colitis or chronic asthma, you don't give a first aid remedy, you give a constitutional remedy. It's a matter of knowing how to do the level of homeopathy that's needed for the person. Unfortunately, in the United States, the vast majority of homeopaths are basically specific prescribers, including here in the Bay Area. That's good as far as it goes but it's not the full blown, constitutional way of prescribing.

This is gradually changing as George Vithoulkas has gotten more widely known. There are only a few constitutional prescribers in the world, probably only 5 or 6, it's really that drastic. But their knowledge is spreading, and it is developing in the United States. And gradually over the next several years you'll be able to see more and more constitutional prescribers.

I'll talk about how you can get training in homeopathy. It's still not easy. Technically there's only one formal course available in the United States right now. And that's sponsored by the National Center for Homeopathy. It's a 2-week course in late August and early September. It's a very intensive and good quality course, done by several well-known homeopaths in the United States. They can answer almost any question you have regarding resources, and they have a directory of practicing homeopaths in the United States.
     The National Center for Homeopathy    
6231 Leesburg Pike Suite 506
     Falls Church, VA 22044

In homeopathy we start from the assumption that the person is fundamentally a mystery. But we do know principles from just plain observation that lead to a cure. We don't have the depth of understanding to know what's happening on other planes. There's no question it's happening on other planes because there's nothing in these little granules, in a material sense. So it's obviously a non-material therapy. But we don't know what's going on. I don't sit there studying the astral level and the causal level of a person and somehow figure it out. It isn't that at all. It's a matter of knowing and applying the principles, and the more strictly they're applied, the better the result. But in terms of what's going on or why, we don't really know. Maybe someday we will.

QUESTION:  How can the patients remember everything you need to know about their pain or disease?
ANSWER:  Well, you have to help them, it takes a great deal of experience and skill to do a true homeopathic interview. It's not just a list of questions which you work through, "Are you warm-blooded or chilly?" etc. It isn't that, it's a matter of really helping the person to observe themself. And often you don't get that far on the first visit. But after they've thought about it, they can observe themselves.

There's a concept in Kant's Lectures on Philosophy that really goes to the heart of this business about freedom. The idea is that if, as an individual, you were perfectly healthy you would experience, no sensation. If you're healthy and you're sitting there and you don't have to put attention on your body, you're not thinking about your hair and your fingernails and things like that, that's a state of freedom. The body is doing its job, keeping you alive, enabling you to do various things but you don't have to put attention on it.

Well, this applies to the emotional and mental levels too. If you think about it, most of what we experience as our personality is really an expression of hang-up. If a person is irritable or if they're anxious or if they are withdrawn or if they're overly hyperactive or whatever, that's actually a limited response. As I said earlier, it's a habitual response to a given situation. We are healthy to the extent that we are free of habitual responses. The goal in homeopathy is to achieve that whole level of freedom from habitual responses. In illness almost everything that we experience as ourselves is a pathological symptom in that it limits our freedom. And people are aware of this so, if you approach the illness through that definition of health, it's not that hard to have a patient be precise about their symptoms. Some people are blocked up and they're aware of it only to a certain extent. But you can get them to talk about it as time goes on. Basically, the things that the patient himself sees as limitations are the most important homeopathic symptoms.

QUESTION:  Do you have to believe in it to get it to work?
ANSWER:  No. As a matter of fact, I've seen some of the most dramatic cures happen in animals and they don't have beliefs. My wife. cured our cat of distemper. Distemper in cats is supposedly fatal. It was diagnosed by a vet and he wanted to give it shots, and he gave it a poor prognosis. We said, "No way we're going to give it a drug." My wife took the case of the cat by observing him. We talked about the personality of the cat, he is a Siamese cat, really stand-offish of other cats and of people, he always tended to stay in the shade and not in the sun and he liked certain food and so on. It added up to homeopathic Sulfur. We gave him homeopathic Sulfur and he was cured of distemper overnight.

There was a poodle that I treated. I didn't even see the poodle, he was a patient's pet. He had chronic diarrhea that was really giving him trouble and they suspected cancer, I don't know if that was ever confirmed or denied. He was a really nervous kind of poodle, always wanted to be around people. And he always wanted to stay in the sun rather than the shade and he was very restless, he wouldn't stay in one position very much. That's the picture of homeopathic arsenic. So we gave him homeopathic arsenic and that cured the poodle.

You can cure infants and they don't know anything about homeopathy. It's a little hard to get a personality picture from an infant, but that's where specific prescribing really comes in handy, just on the specific nature of the symptoms. There are cases or people who don't believe in homeopathy at all and their friend or relative put the correct remedy in their water or juice and it produced a cure.

QUESTION:  Why is it recommended that people not take their own case?
ANSWER:  Well, people try. As a matter of fact, that's one of the big dangers when you first become a homeopath, you give yourself too many remedies. Generally people don't see themselves with as much clarity as someone else could see them. And homeopaths particularly could see someone else more clearly than they can see themselves. For instance, just think about it, are you introverted or extroverted? Compared to most people are you warm-blooded or chilly? Are you physically very active or are you more sedentary? Are you unusually neat or sloppy? Those are questions that aren't that easy to get at, and what I have to always do is follow it up and say, "Well, can you give an example?" Or for example, if I ask somebody if they are unusually neat or sloppy, they may say, "Oh, sloppy." And when they answer that way I know they are neat, because they're bothered by disorder. So then I ask them, "How do other people see you?" "Oh, very neat." So, it's a subtle thing. It's much better to have a homeopath take your case.

QUESTION:  What's the difference between vaccinations and homeopathy?
ANSWER:  There is a world of difference. A vaccine looks like it is based on Like Cures Like, you give a little bit of smallpox to prevent smallpox. But actually you're giving, first off, a material substance and in homeopathy you give a potentized or energized substance. And secondly, it's not being prescribed on an individualized basis. If you give the swine flu vaccine to a whole population, some of those people are going to be more sensitive to it than others. In homeopathy we would give the remedy that would fit the individual.

To a homeopath it's obvious that if you give one substance to a whole population a certain percentage of those people are going to react to it adversely, because people are individuals. It's an absolutely predictable thing. Homeopaths always oppose things like fluoride in the water and swine flu vaccinations because we know there are going to be adverse reactions in the people that are constitutionally weakest. We do it on an individualized basis.

When the swine flu thing came up, homeopaths just laughed at the whole thing. There wasn't good evidence that there was going to be a swine flu epidemic, this year anyway. Also, it was very predictable that we'd get the kind of complications that have occurred. And usually there's not studies done over 15, 20, 30 years on the long term effects of something like this. It could well be causing cancer or some neurological problem.

And finally, homeopaths aren't afraid of swine flu at all. There was a study done in San Francisco in 1918 during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. They had roughly a 50% mortality rate among the hospitalized patients. I think the overall mortality rate was 35%. There were 5,000 cases treated by the three active homeopaths at that time. All of those charts were studied and there was only one death out of 5,000 patients. That's quite a dramatic difference.

QUESTION:  Have you given talks like this to doctors?
ANSWER:  Yeah, sure. The first one I gave was to the staff of the hospital that I was a member of in Sebastopol. They had to have meetings every month. So they figured they'd have an entertaining one and have this quack get up and talk about homeopathy. I would say that a third were actively interested and sought me out afterwards and got treatment for their hay fever and stuff like that. A third were moderately entertained and probably enjoyed it more than TV. And the other third were openly hostile. It was an interesting evening.

By and large, doctors really aren't close minded to this if you approach it from an empirical standpoint. I've always said to doctors, "It's non-toxic, it's not going to do harm, so why not give it a try?" It always makes sense to start with something non-toxic before you resort to something toxic.

When I first started in practice in Sebastopol I didn't know that much homeopathy and couldn't justify treating people homeopathically if there was an effective allopathic treatment for them. So I applied the criteria that I would only use homeopathy in cases where allopathic medicine is either ineffective or it's too dangerous for the degree of the problem they have. Believe it or not, that turns out to be 75% of the time. I ended up doing a great deal of homeopathy, even on those grounds, and I gained a lot of experience. Allopathic medicine, when you look at it, isn't that effective. It always makes sense to try something non-toxic before you try something toxic, except in situations like very rapid appendicitis.

QUESTION:  What if the patient is already taking medication?
ANSWER:  Yes, that's difficult. Now the one thing I haven't talked about is suppression. The body is trying to produce symptoms in order to accomplish a cure. If you artificially suppress those symptoms, for instance by giving cortisone to take away pain, or a tranquilizer to take away anxiety, then all that does is push down the symptom which the body is trying to produce. The symptom will pop up somewhere else, and allopathic treatment would attempt to suppress it with another drug, and you just keep doing that. Here's the Life Force causing a symptom in order to cure the person and the allopath tries to suppress it because "If it's not there then you're not sick."

And that's also true of a lot of wholistic practices. Much of what goes on in wholistic medicine isn't that different from allopathic medicine. It's basically symptom suppression. It's wholistic in the sense that it tries to use non-toxic things and alternative therapies. They'll take a person and say, "She has a mental problem here so give her a little Gestalt therapy, and she has a little hypertension so give her a little bio-feedback. And hypnosis for her sleeplessness. And herbs for her constipation. And vitamins to prevent her colds and take care of her eczema. Balance the minerals in her hair. Doing all this is like band-aid medicine. The patient is walking around with a bunch of band-aids on. It's not really a cure, it's just keeping the symptoms down. Wholistic medicine is often the same as allopathic medicine, it just uses a broader range of therapy,

Most wholistic therapies are an attempt to remove stress from the system or to help the person cope with the stress better. But they don't actually strengthen the Life Force itself. Sometimes it's appropriate to detoxify a person, get their diet straight, teach them about exercise, posture, breathing, the whole business. That's effective for most people that are constitutionally strong and healthy. Their symptoms are coming from imbalanced life habits so by correcting those habits the symptoms disappear and they regain a sense of well-being. But somebody who is constitutionally weak, who's fundamentally sick, by the definition of freedom, can do all those things and still not feel well.

There are some exceptions. For instance, acupuncture, polarity therapy, reflexology, and Chinese medicine work with subtle body energies, and do it primarily by balancing and to a certain extent by stimulating the Life Force. Chinese medicine is based on an understanding of the person as a total being. And herbs are not used in the usual allopathic way of a cathartic for this and an astringent for that, but are used as stimuli for the Life Force, like ginseng, damiana, gotu kola, etc. These herbs have some specific effects but more importantly have general, constitutional effects. The oriental herbalists know this a lot better than the Western ones. Yet homeopathy stimulates the Life Force more powerfully than any other method I've encountered.

So in medicine we do two things. One is balance the life habits, and that goes only so far. And sometimes we need to stimulate the Life Force. And in both cases, wholistic practices are useful to the extent that we increase people's consciousness of the way they are reacting to their environment, via posture, breathing, exercise, diet, etc. Wholistic medicine is at its best the more patients actually take responsibility for themselves and are not dependent on their therapist.

QUESTION:  I am curious about the cost of the correspondence course.
ANSWER:  We don't know, we haven't gotten down to estimating that in a concrete way. We're trying to keep it in the range of what it would cost to go to college. This is probably going to be a three- or four-year course.

QUESTION: And when you start your school, will it cost that much?
ANSWER: Probably in the same range, although it wouldn't take so Jong, so the total cost wouldn’t be as much... But what we're trying to do is to establish real quality training. What's available now is mostly giving a rough idea but it doesn't emphasize the real deep, penetrating approach that homeopathy is capable of. 

QUESTION:  Do you use iris diagnosis at all? To help know what's going on with a patient?
ANSWER:  I personally don't. I used to but I found that the homeopathic case itself could give me virtually all the information I needed. Iris diagnosis mostly measures the physical body levels, which is the least important in homeopathy anyway. So by in large I haven't used it. I have worked with Josh Carter on comparing cases before and after. It's interesting, there is definitely a response. It is a very accurate diagnostic technique.

QUESTION:  Could you give a hypothetical example of a type of personality that matches a remedy.
ANSWER:  Sure, probably a lot of people here would relate to Pulsatilla, which is a windflower, since it's mostly women in the audience. It's primarily a female remedy, it fits the type of woman who is very tuned into what other people think of her, not necessarily in a negative sense. It's a positive orientation towards generosity and giving, especially an emotional expression. This type of person is emotional, she goes through wild emotional swings, one moment she is down because her child got scratched by the cat. But then a friend from next door comes over and brings her a flower and she is suddenly really up, or she can go out shopping and see something that she really gets turned on by. She really goes through big emotional changes, depending on her environmental situation. She’ll be depressed in a darkened room and elated in a room full of light. She like's being out of doors. She's warm-blooded and feels better from exercise. She has a gentle, yielding disposition, she doesn't automatically gravitate towards confrontation, instead she yields in a confrontation, she likes to make peace. She has a high degree of sexual desire, she enjoys touching, hugging, and being touched and being hugged. And if she is not being touched or is not receiving affection, then she misses it. She is oriented towards people, she really gets off on people energies, and emotional expression between people.

There is another type that is almost the opposite, the Sepia type, i.e. the ink of the squid. That fits the type of woman who has sublimated a lot of her sexual energy and emotional energy into, not so much the mental realm, but into achievement. Into accomplishing goals and learning things, becoming a career woman. They characteristically are chilly and constipated, they have a great deal of energy for physical activity. If they are depressed, they can really go out and play tennis or ride their bikes or run and they'll feel a lot better. Emotionally and sexually, they are quite blocked. They generally have a low sexual desire and a lot of tension around the whole issue of sex. Usually they feel a great deal of love for people close to them, but they can't express it.

Then there is the Sulfur type. They are real philosophers. They are thin and scraggly in the sense that their hair may not be combed. They don't care about their appearance and they are usually unorthodox, not because they are rebellious and trying to draw attentions to themselves, but because they just don't care what people think of them. Their minds work in a creatively synthetic way, so they'll see relationships between things which are not ordinarily perceived by most people. They make very great artists. Picasso was probably a sulfur type. Remember the thing he made out of the bicycle handlebars and the seat, that looked like a bull? Sulfur types make that kind of connection between things. Also, sulfur types have undying confidence in their own perception. They are so sure they are right that nobody else can shake them and they often get in trouble with their wives or husbands. They have disdain for other people who aren't as intelligent or have less perception than they believe they have. And it's a real hangup for them, actually, because they are very selfish types. I could go on and on.

I think I have covered what I can, and I am keen to go to the race track and watch this young jockey. Thank you. APPLAUSE.

Typed by Lauren Ayers from a recording. Contact:  530 796-2463 Lauren.yolocounty@gmail.com

* Additional information on the decline of Homeopathy:

In the early 1800's, lay practitioners provided most of the medical care. Many of these lay healers were midwives, and they were very close to the people they treated. Their methods tended to be mild, emphasizing diet, massage, herbs, homeopathy, etc. as opposed to bloodletting, mercury, and other strong measures used by physicians. Studies of the time show that a person got well faster by not going to a physician.

Physicians noticed the increasing popularity of lay practitioners and ostracized those other physicians who chose to use the milder approach of homeopathy and natural methods, expelling them from medical associations and thereby depriving them of legal status. By 1830, thirteen states had passed medical licensing laws prohibiting all forms of lay healing.

But the vast public sentiment that supported lay healing combined with the strong women's movement then and not only brought the repeal of the licensing laws but gave rise to ladies Physiological Societies everywhere, the equivalent of contemporary self-help clinics. Many types of alternative medical schools were established in this era, with their own licensing procedures. There were homeopathy schools in nearly every state. Orthodox medical histories characterize this period as the high tide of quackery.

Subsequently, bickering amongst homeopaths weakened their united front, Then, starting in 1910, huge grants from Rockefeller and Carnegie, to orthodox medical schools modeled after Johns-Hopkins, were the final blow, most foundation funds for homeopathic education were suspended. Other alternative systems suffered also, midwives were outlawed and replaced by male obstetricians, women were excluded from medical education, and six of the eight black medical schools were closed.

How the pendulum is swinging back towards safer and natural approaches, especially since orthodox medical care costs so much.

Information taken from "The Struggle for Alternative Health Care,” from the Bay Area Homeopathic Study Group, 545 62nd Street, Oakland, CA 94609.

Report on Lectures on Homeopathy

by George Vithoulkas
April 28 through May 1, 1978

Dr. Vithoulkas was introduced by Dr. Bill Gray, formerly of Mill Valley, who is now studying with him in Athens Greece, Bill pointed out that when George came to Greece a little over ten years ago, he was the only homeopath there, now there are about 25 and homeopathy is widely known in Greece. George's introductory book on homeopathy was serialized in the Greek counterpart of Newsweek. And his clinic is swamped with patients and has 20 doctors in training. Bill said that he believes George is the next step in carrying the mastery of homeopathy beyond Hahnemann and Kent.

Some excerpts from George's lecture (paraphrased):

•      A patient's symptoms are the best thing that the organism can do to protect itself, every symptom is something that is useful and should not be blocked or thoughtlessly eliminated.

•      The organism can maintain a kind of equilibrium via symptoms.

•      A person's health is composed of three layers, The central and most fundamental is the Mental, encircled by the Emotional layer, and the outermost layer is the Physical. People very sick in the deepest level, Mental, don't get acute diseases. And people with chronic diseases don't get light acute diseases such as colds.

•      And within a layer or level there are gradients. A person stays within their gradient and keeps equilibrium if they avoid stress, get exercise, eat natural foods, achieve emotional quietness via meditation, these all maintain that equilibrium, but the person will not necessarily climb out of that gradient into better health. In other words, stress or cessation of exercise or forgetting food supplements or eating the wrong things like sugar, can throw the patient into worse condition, while a truly healthy person would withstand that assault.

•      These gradients became evident when I observed that a person who gets Bacillus Pyanoyana infections cannot get Proteus or Strep. Treating a patient who has pyanayana homeopathically bumps them into the next gradient nearer health, and suddenly they are susceptible to Proteus. After the homeopathic treatment for that, they emerge into the next gradient and can contract Strep or Staph, which they never contracted while in the less healthy gradients.

•      Acute diseases, such as infections, are an effort by the organism to return to health, they are merely triggered by the specific mortific agent. The disease should run its course if the patient hasn't anything better to do. The patient may feel better than ever at the end of the acute disease, some chronic symptoms having cleared up.

•      By suppressing the acute disease, as is done in allopathic medicine, there is the risk of pushing the patient into the next deeper gradient, or into the next level of illness, such as from the physical into the emotional.

•      What is a symptom: it is a diversion from normal functioning of the person, it is not necessarily painful, craving certain foods or drinking more water are symptoms taken into account in homeopathy.

•      A case of a woman who had claustrophobia shows how various aspects of modern life act to suppress rather than cure symptoms. It took eight remedies, one at a time over many months, the first ones based primarily on her physical symptoms the later ones shifting to an emphasis on her mental symptoms. Finally, on the last remedy, her claustrophobia cleared up. The remedy was hydrophobia bacillus (potentized). A case of dog bite had been treated in her youth by a suppressive allopathic rabies series, and had worked on deeper layers of the patient, showing up as claustrophobia. That final remedy wouldn't have worked without the other remedies preceding it. It is the layers of suppression of disease which the old homeopathic masters didn't have to deal with, the patients they treated had simply survived previous ailments while patients today have had many previous ailments suppressed, which drives the basic imbalance into deeper levels of the organism.