Gunk In The Plumbing

It’s odd how when you walk into a room of relative strangers and you’re introduced as a homeopath, all conversational roads lead to homeopathy. It happened to me for the nth time recently, at a social gathering where a peppy young lady said, “Tell me, Doctor, why does someone under homeopathic treatment become worse before getting better?”

The young lady obviously didn’t realise that her seemingly benign conversation opener was actually the key to what homeopaths call the “healing crisis”. Since we have discussed in previous posts why homeopathy is a holistic system of medicine, let’s focus here on the healing crisis per se.

If you’ve been treated by a homeopath before, you may have noticed that soon after treatment begins, chest congestion, skin allergies and joint pain ‘mysteriously’ and temporarily show up. As I reassure Harpreet Kaur in the video that follows, this is an EXCELLENT sign! It indicates that the body has begun to fix itself.

Turning The Key

Homeopathic remedies begin by ‘turning the key’ and unlocking the disease process that has either caused your first major illness or, as the case may be, yet another physiological breakdown in a series of illnesses.

When you unlock the disease process, the gunk or toxins in the system begins to clear out. It’s like unclogging blocked plumbing. A body that has been functioning below par or organs that have been malfunctioning or only partially functioning accumulate plenty of cellular debris over the years. They overproduce or underproduce chemicals, they are constantly compensating for other organs, they shrink or swell, and they get stressed and damaged as they bravely keep trying to give of their best despite the odds.

Homeopathic remedies, mild as they are, first shake up your system on the path to good health. They change and correct your faulty metabolism at the molecular level, thus RELEASING toxic chemicals and energy that are locked into disease patterns which set in a long time ago.

After “loosening the gunk”, the body needs to eliminate the cellular debris and it looks to the organs of elimination to achieve this. This toxic debris and unblocked energy must be allowed to leave the system naturally for healing to be permanent and complete.

Inflammation in the form of fever, chest congestion (mucous discharge leading to a cough and cold) and joint pain are typical signs of a healing crisis, a sign that your body is trying to cleanse itself. Acidity is also a common sign of such “chimney sweeping”. After all, aren’t the stomach and small intestine the very seat of our metabolic gravity?

The skin, the largest organ we have, as well as the bowels are the obvious organs of elimination. Hence, toxins that no longer need to be stored find a way out through these organs and give rise to temporary rashes, boils, pustules, allergies and bowel disturbances. After each round of cleansing, rest assured you advance to a higher level of health. Thus, while the road to health and vitality is exhilarating, it is initially marked by short and sharp dips in the road.

But it’s not only about clearing away all that is dead and diseased. When your body is truly healing, it also RETRACES the path it had taken to deterioration. This means old symptoms, long since suppressed, will invariably flare up.

What this simply means is that the body is re-starting a fight it once gave up – a battle against microbes, toxic chemicals, addictive substances and other harmful influences that left it diseased. Emotional trauma, which is stored as cellular trauma, is another powerful cause of disease and has more to do with illness than most people realise.

Though your body gave up the struggle a while ago, these pathogens, harmful chemicals and traumatic memories continued to impact your body, progressively weakening your organs, muscles, tissues, glands, and metabolic and immunological processes. This is the root of chronic disease.
Now revitalised through homeopathy, the battle resumes and inflammation will result.

Supporting the body with appropriate nutrition, rest and cleansing will allow the healing process to run its natural course. Not to mention that your immune system is also strengthened, eventually leaving you permanently disease-free. Alternatively, if this process is interrupted by allopathic drugs, the vicious cycle of suppression resumes and inhibits the healing process.

Hence, periodic flare-ups in chronic illnesses are nothing but a sign that the body is feeling strong enough, albeit briefly, to resume its struggle and try and heal itself. Thus, contrary to what most people believe, periodic flare-ups are not a sign of disease but of healing!

Multiplying Disease

At this juncture, it is pertinent to note that the healing crisis is as far as you can get from the approach that drug medicine takes. They are polar opposites.

And there’s a huge price to pay for conventional medicine’s seemingly efficient approach to curing ailments. Allopathic drugs invariably work by suppressing, controlling, managing and regulating the symptoms of disease because conventional medicine is founded on the myth that the removal of symptoms is the same as curing disease. Allopathy assumes that the symptom IS the disease.

Drug medicine therefore does not remove the DISEASE PROCESS, which continues to rage, gradually chipping away at your body till it can no longer defend itself. Years of suppression though painkillers and antibiotics, not to mention bad nutritional habits and unhealthy lifestyles lead to toxic overload.

Here’s something to think about for anyone who regularly takes multiple types of medication for MULTIPLE ailments. (I cannot emphasise this enough) The fact is that all your ailments arise from the SAME disease process which, in fact, manifests as a range of symptoms. So you don’t really suffer from asthma, arthritis and constipation – you suffer from ONE SINGLE disease process, whose destructive force has damaged your lungs, joints and bowels respectively.

When resorting to conventional drugs, you’re actually suppressing one set of symptoms and driving the disease process deeper. The disease is thus bound to show up elsewhere, even years later, as a more serious ailment. In a double-whammy, the medication you take to relieve, say painful gout (thus inhibiting the formation of uric acid) could encourage the formation of kidney stones at a later stage.

Thus “fixing your body” (like it’s a broken blender!) and “healing” are like chalk and cheese. It is vital to make this distinction to understand how homeopathy works.

How Homeopathy Works (Dur: 1:27)

Homeopathic remedies are aimed at correcting dysfunctional metabolism and by unlocking cellular trauma, releasing blocked energy. They rebalance your biochemistry, realign and fine-tune your physiological processes so that disease is rooted out at its source.

Once your metabolism is rebalanced, ALL your ailments will disappear. Again, unlike allopathy, homeopathy also REVITALISES the individual, leaving you energised, rested, stronger and disease-resistant in general. Where else do you get a bonus like that?

Innate Intelligence

The healing process is far from random and is guided by an inner intelligence. There is NOTHING RANDOM about the way your mind and body functions. (I am deliberately using the singular for we are but one whole entity of mind, body and spirit) It follows a superior logic that for the most part is unconscious in most of us. Yet it’s always there – to use or abuse as we may choose.

Thus, just as every minute physiological and metabolic process follows an innate logic, so does the healing process. This process was first described by Constantine Hering who gave us the Laws of Cure.

Laws Of Cure

These laws are like a rudder, guiding the classical homeopathy while tracing the journey to healing, which follows a very specific direction.

Inside-Out: Healing starts at the very deepest level – the mental and emotional levels and the body’s vital organs. From here, it progresses to the skin and the extremities. It also takes place first in more vital organs and proceeds to less vital organs – from the interior of the body towards the skin. (In our video, young Meghna Masurkar’s chest-to-skin or asthma-to-vitiligo progression)

Rewind: Symptoms disappear in the reverse order of their chronological appearance.

Top-Down: Healing also begins from upper to lower parts of the body. (Vandana Kapoor’s hand-to knee progression)

Many patients, most of them schooled in allopathy and used to its quick-fix effects, often ask me how soon they can “expect results”. Well, if the treatment course extends over a longer period than the wham-bam allopathic approach, tangible “results” usually begin to show within days or a week of starting on homeopathy.

And for my readers who are still iffy about choosing this wonderful healing way, there’s no better endorsement from Vandana Kapoor, who came to me with complaints of depression and recurring nightmares as she tried to battle a controlling husband.

It's been more than six years but I still remember what the young lady had said:

(This is the concluding part of my two-part series on disease and healing, The MindHeal Way)