“The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole. No attempt should be made to cure the body without the soul, and if the head and body are to be healthy you must begin by curing the mind, for this is the greatest error of our day in the treatment of the human body that physicians separate the soul from the body.”
Plato (427-347 B.C.)
Why we need homeopathy
By Sadhna Takkar BHMS (Ind), RSHOM (NA), CCH
The need to take an active role in keeping ourselves healthy has become more essential in recent times. As conventional medicine has turned increasingly towards specialization, technology and the extensive use of chemical drugs, the importance of true care of health has been forgotten. Health care has become more of a managed care of diseased individuals. This also promotes the underlying despair that health is an unattainable state and that everyone must live with their disease and function as best as one can.
This despair from the medical community has infiltrated in society at every level. Patients have become accustomed to relinquishing control of their health to the “medical establishment.” The medical establishment has become compartmentalized into doctors, technicians, nurse practitioners, research scientists and pharmaceutical companies and healthcare management corporations. The current system seems to work in parts. First, the doctors and nurse practitioners must rely first on their research based on the cellular level, and was performed either on animals or on large groups of diseased people. They are rarely, if at all, ever in contact with any patient. The pharmaceutical companies provide the incentives to the scientists for their continued work as well as reach out to the patients to ask their doctors for the medications they are manufacturing. The healthcare management companies manage the financial part of health care and govern the doctors in financially appropriate procedures.
Together, these branches are expected to function efficiently to provide comfort, higher functioning and health for the patients. The medical establishment is able to provide some level of comfort, a sustained level of functioning, but unfortunately, a very poor state of health. More patients are recommended to live with the disease as best as they can with increasing dependence on medications to sustain the comfort and functionality. The fact that each of us is a unique individual capable of responding in a unique manner to diseases and life circumstances is lost in this elaborate multi-level process to find solutions to diseases.
In addition, the modern medical system revolves around the assumption that symptoms are diseases and most diseases are the result of germs, poisoning or stress from outside. This theory promotes the misconception of diseases as an external entity; it also enhances the fear as well as despair because we are merely human beings unable to insulate ourselves from our surroundings. Billions of dollars are spent to study these entities called germs and yet these germs mutate and transform themselves over time, making it an almost impossible situation in which to succeed. Massive research efforts are made to link all known pathologies to microorganisms, resulting in the unreal expectation—“eradication of the organisms will eradicate all possibilities of development of pathologies.” When this is not achieved, false immunity is then generated against the microorganisms through vaccination, which often results in a dysfunctional immune system leading to auto-immune diseases or allergies.
The medical education also revolves around learning more about disease rather than health. Most of the time spent teaching the medical student focuses on how to diagnose, label and annihilate the symptoms and their “external” causes with chemical drugs, rather than observing the role of the symptoms in the healing process and preserving health. They are also asked to join in the despair of the current situation by learning to remove and discard the organ that is believed to be diseased.
Thousands of routine tonsillectomies, appendectomies, gallbladder removals, and hysterectomies (removal of the uterus) are performed each year because these organs become “troublesome” and/or “unnecessary.”
Obviously, in the intense desperation and despair, the priceless fact is lost—that the human body is equipped with a marvelous system of repair and self-preservation. This haling system is active throughout the lifetime of the individual. It is capable of restoring the individual’s own rhythm and balance if it is given a chance. Instead of supporting and assisting our body’s innate self-healing ability however, we, through modern medicine, do our best to extinguish it under a deluge of medications. Such measures merely serve to suppress the healing ability rather than cure any illness.
Just as fragmented the medical establishment is, the prominent medical view is that the human body is a mere conglomeration of its fragments—the organs. Each organ is perceived as an independent entity, with little or no connection to the rest of the body or individual being. The whole is forgotten in the face of its parts.
A totally misguided belief is perpetuated that an individual’s sickness or health is dependent only upon the relative sickness or health of his or her various organs. This view leads to the notion that each organ requires to be cared for by a specialist who is a mater at resolving complaints of that organ. It seems logical, in theory however, that we are not just a sum of our organs and that health does not emanate from the relative health of every organ. If this was true, all of us, whether medicated or not, must experience the highest level of health at all times.
In practical reality, such a scenario does not exist. Medicated patients often regain the function that was lost due to the disease process; but thy do not experience health as it is commonly defined or described by the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO describes health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. In a familiar phrase, it mans that the overall health is more than the sum of the health of its parts. It is also more than a mere absence of symptoms.
How often does it happen that before any symptoms develop from a “sick” organ, the patient experiences a state of discomfort or dis-ease? If close attention is paid, it will be revealed that a state of “uneasiness” is always experienced prior to any actual reduction in the function of an organ through symptoms. The symptoms come after this state of unwell being experienced at an individual level, a general level rather than an organ level. If we intervene at this junction and helped the individual, the individual has a greater chance of regaining a sense of well-being even before the organ is compromised with a disease process. Thus, total health is achieved, experienced and sustained at both levels—general as well as in the organs. Prevention is much easier than treating disease processes.
Homeopathy has been known to bring back this level of health. Its efficacy has been widely recognized throughout the world in helping individuals regain total and complete health slowly, but surely.