Alternative and Conventional Medicine

There are so many ways to deal with situations.  You know – situations.  Someone said something, did something, something happened.

You can ignore it and hope it goes away.  Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.

You can analyze it deeply, try to find out why it happened, and hope your newfound awareness will prevent it from happening again.  But often you’re still going through it, still experiencing whatever the situation is, whether through deep suffering or minor sustained irritation.

You can deal with the situation itself sharply, efficiently, cutting off its manifestations, without really going into why it happened in the first place.  Sometimes this works.  Sometimes whatever caused the situation carries on grumbling, a sure sign of future volcanic eruptions of the same situation in the future.  Sometimes it may not be the same situation, but it will have the same “signature”, involving the same people or issues in different settings.

You can speculate about why and how this happened, what karmic and cosmic influences are at play, and try to change your emotional outlook and physical lifestyle to reflect the results of your speculations.  But since they are, at best, speculations, the effect may be limited and disappointments are common.

Working with health issues is a bit like this.

For example, if someone has stomach pain, he can ignore it and hope it goes away.  This can often happen, as the body has a tremendous built-in ability to heal itself, and will do so wherever possible.

The patient can look into all the possible causes leading to the stomach pain.  This often ranges from therapy all the way through to invasive medical testing.   Sadly the medical testing often mistakes results as causes, rather than realizing that just like the symptoms, they too, whether increased acids or polyps, are outcomes.  And when the patient deals with the stomach pain sharply and efficiently, through surgery or aggressive medication – since the original issues remain untreated the problem returns.  Even if the manifestation may be different, the “signature” remains the same.

Conventional medicine usually looks for fast, effective treatment of the symptoms, with testing for causes which usually simply unearths deeper symptoms in the body.   Frequently conventional medicine will “attack” the symptom with several treatments in one go – antibiotic, cortisone and anti-fungal for example – in the belief that one of these must work.  And often the symptom does disappear after this onslaught, especially if it is skin related.  But then the same symptoms can re-appear in the body again and again, only eventually to be “replaced” by another problem which often seems unrelated.

Medicine acknowledges the concept of a relationship between asthma and a form of dermatitis that has been termed “asthma of the skin”, realizing that the respiratory problems often follow on the heels of the skin issues.  However, the entire organism is interconnected, and this expresses itself in how new symptoms show up after old symptoms have been eradicated in this way.

Alternative Medicine has become a catch-phrase, an all-inclusive term that includes so many forms of treatment that are actually opposed to each other.  However, the increasing interest is due to ever increasing awareness that the fast and the effective… doesn’t always do the job.  The headaches persist, the stomach pain is constant, the cough is there every winter, and the tests show all is well.  Or the medicines work but the side effects are unbearable.  Or the baby hasn’t finished with one course of antibiotics before he gets sick again and is prescribed another course, a different antibiotic, a new vaccination.

So people are out there now, looking for alternatives.  As a Homeopath I’m often one of those alternatives. But I have to say that as long as people harm themselves – they harm their bodies’ ability to self-heal.  Most methods of alternative medicine seek to harness that ability. That ability can be seriously compromised through poor diet, domestic drama, misery at work, physical stagnation, lack of sleep, shift work – and also through excessive use of conventional drugs.  In such cases there is no “storage” of that self-healing ability to draw on.  This is why it can be so difficult to work with older people in chronic cases when they are adamant about persisting in a lifestyle that is damaging.

But this is also why working with children can be so rewarding for any alternative practitioner.  Parents often take more care of their children than they do for themselves, and there is “storage”, the ability to self-heal is often very high.

So if you really want to heal, to resolve the inner disease through methods which stimulate the body to heal itself, once that decision has been made a second decision must follow: the decision to do all you can to increase your body’s ability to heal itself through making changes in lifestyle and diet, to make sure that the alternative methods will have something to stimulate!