Yogic Traditions
Yoga is an ancient and complete humanistic spiritual science, which evolved with the Saraswati, Kaveri, Narmada, Godawari and Gangetic civilizations in India, through thousands of years of study and inner experience.
Today people practice yoga for bodily health, mental concentration, tranquility and spiritual experience. Many yogic paths are tools designed to help us to become caring and considerate, loving and compassionate human beings.
Yoga is a way to balance and harmonize body, mind and emotions. Physical postures, breathing practices and psycho-physiological energy release techniques are practiced to achieve this – along with a wide variety of meditation techniques. Greater skills and efficiency in action can be attained, which results in the expression of higher levels of creativity and positivity in life.
Reference: Yogic Traditions
INFLUENZA PANDEMICS
Influenza pandemics have for centuries posed the greatest threat of a worldwide calamity caused by infectious disease. Over the past 300 years, ten influenza pandemics have occurred among humans. According to recent analysis, the 1918-19 pandemic killed 50 to 100 million people globally. Today, even a “mild” pandemic could kill many millions of people.
Influenza manifests in the respiratory system and produces generalized aches and pain, especially in the limbs and back. It produces malaise; prostration; fever; coryza, headache; with photophobia and retrobulbar aching; and inflamed respiratory mucous membranes. The incubation period is around 48 hours.
The symptoms begin with sore throat with substernal burning; nonproductive cough; and coryza. Cough usually becomes severe and productive and causes pain in the chest. The soft palate, posterior hard palate, tonsils and throat become reddened and painful. The eyes water easily and the conjunctiva may be mildly inflamed. Sweating and weakness may continue for weeks. Complications include bronchitis; pneumonia; breathlessness; spitting of blood; pulmonary edema; encephalitis; and death.Old people; babies; those confined to bed; or with chronic pulmonary or heart disease are the most at risk.
During the 1918 influenza pandemic it was young people, 25 -34 years of age, which were most severely affected. They appeared to have no immunity and succumbed to a pneumonia that would kill within days. It was not uncommon for someone physically strong and in good health to get up feeling well in the morning and by bedtime they would be dead. During this flu pandemic large numbers of people sought homeopathic care and were restored to good health; in numerous cases their lives were saved
An article published in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy in May 1921 states that Dean W.A.Pearson of Philadelphia collected 26,795 cases of influenza treated by homeopathic physicians with only a mortality rate of 1.05%, while the average conventional medical approach had a mortality rate of 30%.
During this time there were many Medical Doctors practicing homeopathic medicine throughout Europe and in America, much to the chagrin of non-homeopathic doctors and pharmacists. While conventional hospitals in the US had an 80-90% loss of life during the scarlet fever, Cholera and Flu epidemics around 1919, Homeopathic Hospitals had only a 2-5% loss.
There is however a possibility that some of these high numbers of positive effects of homeopathic treatment can be subscribed to the ill effects of the conventional treatment. Many homeopaths reported a decrease in chance of survival in those that had, previously to homeopathic treatment, been taking Aspirin. A.F. Stevens, M.D. in St.Louis said about the patients undergoing conventional treatment: “They died like flies around a plate of poison although ‘science’ did all that could be done to ‘save’ them”.
There has been at least three large scale double-blind placebo- controlled trials to treat people with flu or influenza – like syndrome. Each of these large scale studies were conducted by independent researchers, and a treatment is considered proven when at least three independent studies verify positive results.
Several studies have suggested that the homeopathic remedy oscillococcinum, which is prepared from a duck liver, is a very effective treatment for influenza. One study found that the remedy significantly increased the rate of cure within two days of diagnosis. This was a high- quality trial, published in an important, non- homeopathic journal and involving large numbers of patients (237 treated and 241 on placebo).
It is generally impossible in homeopathy to pinpoint a few remedies that would help in general against the flu. But, what is fascinating is that during an influenza epidemic, a remedy or two will work marvellously. This remedy is sometimes referred to as genus epidemicus. The homeopathic Materia Medica has well over 3,500 remedies. There is no one remedy that is specific to the flu because individuals will manifest symptoms in different ways that are unique to them. The most important point to remember about homeopathy is that it treats the individual.
ACONITE is useful in a sudden onset of the flu with great anxiety and fear. The individual experiences high fever, dry cough, sore throat and feeling of great worry and fear, with restlessness. Typically symptoms occur after exposure to a dry, cold wind or from an emotional alarm or fright. The patient always feels better in fresh air; and feels worse in a warm room, in the evening or at night and while lying on the left side.
ARSENICUM ALBUM
Influenza in children with sudden onset and much prostration. Flus caused by gastric derangements.
The patient is extremely restless, oversensitive, anxious and weak.
The face is pale with an anxious expression.
Burning pains that are better with warm applications.
Thirsty, drinks in small sips often.
Worse between 1 and 2am.
Vomiting and diarrhea are common. The diarrhea has acrid, offensive, watery stools.
BAPTISIA
The flu comes on suddenly and is associated with high fever and a bruised feeling. The patient looks drowsy and drunk. He has profuse sweating with a high fever and an intense thirst, and the bed feels hard.
The flu is associated with a stupefying headache, with confusion.
The fever is associated with a delirium with strange sensations, as if there is somebody else in bed with him, parts of her body are separated, etc.
BRYONIA
Slow onset of the flu with a severe, throbbing headache, body pains.
There is a dryness of mucus membranes and stitching, tearing pain that worsens from motion. Fluent coryza, watery or greenish discharge. Dry, hacking cough, worse from smoking and talking.
Thirst for large amounts infrequently, preferably cold.
Pains (headache, body pains) better by pressure.
Lies on the painful part.
Sleepy, heavy, lethargic, irritable, wants to be left alone .
EUPATORIUM PERFOLIATUM
Eupatorium is said to have been a principal remedy for intermittent fever with the Indians. It is known as “Bone-set”, from the prompt manner in which it relieves pain in limbs and muscles that accompanies influenza.
Sudden onset of the flu with violent aching pains in the bones, as if bones are broken. High fever preceded by chills, especially from 7 till 9 am. Cills running up and down the spine, but still thirsty for ice cold water.
GELSEMIUM tends to be the number 1 flu remedy. The flu has a slow onset and is associated with chills, tiredness and paralytic weakness. The chills begin in the hands and feet, and run up and down the spine.
These patients feel as if run over by a truck. Aching pain is felt in the muscles and they experience trembing of the limbs with lack of mucular co-ordination. Want to lie down and be left alone.
The patient is generally worse in the early morning and last thing at night. They feel better after urination and in fresh air.
PHOSPHORUS
The flu quickly affects the lungs, especially the base of the right lung. Dry, tickling cough, with tightness aross the chest, worse evening and before midnight. Bleeding. Bloody sputum, which is bright red.
The patient craves cold drinks, which may be vomited when they become warm in the stomach.
Burning, pressure and constriction in the chest; worse lying on the left side; worse lying on the painful side (patient and the cough).
This remedy is also useful in nasal bleeds, which are bright red.
Cough, worse talking and laughing.
RHUS TOXICODENDRON is useful in flu where the cause is exposure to wet, damp weather or getting wet. There is stiffness and restlessness in the joints that is wors on first movement but become better with continued movement.
Intense fever. Thirsty. Great prostration. Severe aching in the bones.
Extreme restlessness with constant changing of position, great apprehension at night, can not remain in bed.
INFLUENZINUM, a nosode made from the flu virus, can be used as a prophylactic during epidemics. Baptisia has also been used for this purpose. The “remedy epidemicus” can be found by using the totality of symptoms in several cases of the the present epidemic.
The arrival of a pandemic influenza would trigger a reaction that would change the world overnight. Many experts agrees that the widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a time bomb and that antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, in all likelihood will bring about a reemergence of those diseases and possibly epidemics. The World Health Organization and several countries have finalized or drafted useful but overly general plans to prepare for the next pandemic.A vaccine would not be available for a number of months after the pandemic started (it could take six months to manufacture adequate vaccine stocks and current stocks may be useless because the flu virus has mutated), and there are very limited stockpiles of antiviral drugs. We should also not forget that only a few privileged areas of the world will have access to vaccine-production facilities.
The World Health Organization states that ”an influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness. With the increase in global transport and communications, as well as urbanization and overcrowded conditions, epidemics due the new influenza virus are likely to quickly take hold around the world.“
Homeopathy has been very effective in treating many of the epidemics during the 19th. And early 20th. Centuries. Why the successes are not better known is a subject for conjecture. It could be that most would rather not see the ineffectiveness of the conventional therapeutics nor accept the efficacy of homeopathy.
Even some of the hardest critics of homeopathy has admitted, that yes, in times of such epidemics – when conventional medicine has nothing to offer – we might have to trust homeopathy to work and heal.
References:
1. Materia Medica (Boericke)
2. World Health Organization.
3. Homeopathy in ‘Influenza – a chorus of fifty in harmony’ by W.A. Dewey, M.D. Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, May 1921.
4. The Faces of Homeopathy, an illustrated history of the first 200 years. by Julian Winston. Great Auk publishing, Tawa, New Zealand.
5. Pandemic preparedness by The World Health Organization
6. Some history of the treatment of epidemics with Homeopathy by Julian Winston
7. British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 1989; 27:329
8. Preparing for the Next Pandemic By Michael T. Osterholm
From Foreign Affairs , July/August 2005
WEAKNESS DUE TO LACTOSE INTOLERANCE
A 16 year old boy had in the previous one and a half week fainted two times.
The circumstances around the fainting episodes were peculiar. Both times it happened as he was standing, stretching his arms above the head – and because of the fainting, he fell backward. Luckily he was not hurt from the falls. In addition to these episodes of fainting, his face was very pale. I asked him about his relationship with milk, as people not tolerating milk are prone to be pale. He loved milk, drank a lot of it every day. This is something which we often see at the clinic, people not tolerating milk either love it, or don’t drink it at all. Other symptoms included backache, headache and weak ankles.
The remedy which fitted his symptoms was Lac Defloratum, a homeopathic remedy made of cow’s milk. This is a remedy typically indicated in people intolerant to milk, although it was the patient’s peculiar way of fainting that led me to prescribe it.
He got a single dose of the remedy. The next day he experienced a bad headache, an aggravation of his symptoms which I had already prepared him for, knowing that he was sensitive to homeopathic remedies. The next days and weeks he was fine. He did not have any more faintings and his face regained its normal color. After 3 months I saw him again and he told me that he had no more headaches, and that he otherwise felt good.
Comment: This is a case treated on symptoms of lactose intolerance only, not from a medical diagnosis. When I realized which remedy this young man needed, it was at the same time a confirmation that his gastrointestinal system didn’t digest milk sufficiently. I asked him to reduce his milk consumption one week after starting the homeopathic treatment.
Lactose intolerance is an inability to break down lactose (the sugar found in milk) due to a lack of lactase enzymes in the body. Most humans do not produce these enzymes (with an exception in some northern countries), and are by nature lactose intolerant.
ANNABEL CROFT RELIES ON HOMEOPATHIC MEDICINE
LYME DISEASE; EMERGING FROM A TICK BITE
At the beginning of the 70’s an unusual number of cases of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis were reported from the region around Old Lyme, Conneticticut. From this town was derived the English name of the disease. Many of those affected said that they had noticed a skin outbreak before the joint pains set in, and a portion of these recalled tick bites in the past – in the very place where the skin lesions later made their appearance..
The bacterium infesting the ticks was named Borrelia burgdorferi after Dr. Willy Burgdorfer, the researcher who isolated the spirochete in 1981. Borrelia burgdorferi, the genospecies found in the USA, is associated chiefly with the arthritic form of the disease, termed “Lyme arthritis”.
In Germany, as well as in North America, peple ordinarily speak of “tick bites.” More accurately the tick actually stings its victim. Ticks have no teeth; but rather pierce the skin like a mosquito. As with most blood-sucking parasites, ticks inject an anti-coagulant enzyme into the puncture site, allowing them to suck for an extended period (if undisturbed, the tick’s feast can last for 1-2 days.).Since mosquitos in our latitudes are also known to carry other epidemic diseases.., the suspicion arises that they also have their part to play in spreading Lyme disease.
PREVENTION USING HOMEOPATHY.
For the prevention of Lyme disease following a tick bite we recommend the following provisions:
1. The tick should be immediately removed in its entirety. As an aid to hikers and dog-lovers there are tick-pliers readily available at the drug store or at the veterinarian’s. These serve the purpose better than tweezers or one’s fingernails, which can tear the head off and as a consequence do nothing to prevent the infection.
2. On the day of the bite and for two subsequent days the recommendation is to take one or two doses of just one globule of Ledum palustre C30. This can be obtained in the first-aid section of any good homeopathic pharmacy.
3. Just to be sure, we give just one globule of the Aurum arsenicosum C200 on the sixth and twelfth day following the bite.
A number of colleagues have told me that in past seven years they have cared for more than a dozen tick bite victims using this or a very similar method, and that no case has proceeded to a clinical manifestation of Lyme disease. Nor did it show up when a serum test was made.
The treatment of patients with Lyme disease is generally no different from the homeopathic treatment of other chronic conditions. As always in homeopathy, the law of similars is fundamental.
Excerpted from the book: “The homeopathic treatment of Lyme disease” by Peter Alex.
§ 275
The suitableness of a medicine for any given case of disease does not depend on its accurate homœopathic selection alone, but likewise on the proper size, or rather smallness, of the dose. If we give too strong a dose of a medicine which may have been even quite homœopathically chosen for the morbid state before us, it must, notwithstanding the inherent beneficial character of its nature, prove injurious by its mere magnitude, and by the unnecessary, too strong impression which, by virtue of its homœopathic similarity of action, it makes upon the vital force which it attacks and, through the vital force, upon those parts of the organism which are the most sensitive, and are already most affected by the natural disease.
§ 276
For this reason, a medicine, even though it may be homœopathically suited to the case of disease, does harm in every dose that is too large, the more harm the larger the dose, and by the magnitude of the dose and in strong doses’ it does more harm the greater its homœopathicity and the higher the potency1 selected, and it does much more injury than any equally large dose of a medicine that is unhomœopathic, and in no respect adapted to the morbid state (allopathic).
Too large doses of an accurately chosen homœopathic medicine, and especially when frequently repeated, bring about much trouble as a rule. They put the patient not seldom in danger of life or make this disease almost incurable. They do indeed extinguish the natural disease so far as the sensation of the life principle is concerned and the patient no longer suffers from the original disease from the moment the too strong dose of the homœopathic medicine acted upon him but he is in consequence more ill with the similar but more violent medicinal disease which is most difficult to destroy.2 1 The praise bestowed of late years by some homœopathists on the larger doses is owing to this, either that they chose low dynamizations of the medicine to be administered (as I myself used to do twenty years ago, from nor knowing any better), or that the medicines selected were not homœopathic and imperfectly prepared by their manufacturers.
2 Thus, the continuous use of aggressive allopathic large doses of mercurials against syphilis develops almost incurable maladies, when yet one or several doses of a mild but active mercurial preparation would certainly have radically cured in a few days the whole venereal disease, together with the chancre, provided it had not been destroyed by external measures (as is always done by allopathy). In the same way, the allopath gives Peruvian bark and quinine in intermittent fever daily in very large doses, where they are correctly indicated and where one very small dose of a highly potentized China would unfailingly help (in marsh intermittents and even in persons who were not affected by any evident psoric disease). A chronic China malady (coupled at the same time with the development of psora) is produced, which, if it dose not gradually kill the patient by damaging the internal important vital organs, especially spleen and liver, will put him, nevertheless suffering for years in a sad state of health. A homœopathic antidote for such a misfortune produced by abuse of large doses of homœopathic remedies is hardly conceivable.
§ 277
For the same reason, and because a medicine, provided the dose of it was sufficiently small, is all the more salutary and almost marvellously efficacious the more accurately homœopathic its selection has been, a medicine whose selection has been accurately homœopathic must be all the more salutary the more its dose is reduced to the degree of minuteness appropriate for a gentle remedial effect.
§ 278
Here the question arises, what is this most suitable degree of minuteness for sure and gentle remedial effect; how small, in other words, must be the dose of each individual medicine, homœopathically selected for a case of disease, to effect the best cure? To solve this problem, and to determine for every particular medicine, what dose of it will suffice for homœopathic therapeutic purposes and yet be so minute that the gentlest and most rapid cure may be thereby obtained – to solve this problem is, as may easily be conceived, not the work off theoretical speculation; not by fine-spun reasoning, not by specious sophistry can we expect to obtain the solution of this problem. It is just as impossible as to tabulate in advance all imaginable cases. Pure experiment, careful observation of the sensitiveness of each patient, and accurate experience can alone determine this in each individual case; and it were absurd to adduce the large doses of unsuitable (allopathic) medicines of the old system, which do not touch the diseased side of the organism homœopathically, but only attack the parts unaffected by the disease, in opposition to what pure experience pronounces respecting the smallness of the doses required for homœopathic cures.
§ 279
This pure experience shows UNIVERSALLY, that if the disease do not manifestly depend on a considerable deterioration of an important viscus (even though it belong to the chronic and complicated diseases), and if during the treatment all other alien medicinal influences are kept away from the patients, the dose of the homœopathically selected and highly potentized remedy for the beginning of treatment of an important, especially chronic disease can never be prepared so small that it shall not be stronger than the natural disease and shall not be able to overpower it, at least in part and extinguish it from the sensation of the principle of life and thus make a beginning of a cure.
