Significant life traumas leave lasting impacts on the individual whom they impact. Substances from which homeopathic remedies are made have been demonstrated to prompt psychological and physical effects equivalent to the effects of human trauma. When the diluted version of the substance and the trauma are matched, meaning the Law of Similars is applied the effect is curative. There are three compelling reasons why this benefit cannot be accounted for in terms of a placebo effect:

a) Consitutional treatment of this sort provokes a temporary worsening of the condition known as the aggravation. Aggravations are not known to be associated with the placebo effect.

b) Homeopathic remedies act effectively both with animals and toddlers, neither of which type of patient can be readily made aware of being treated, which is a necessary component of being treated with a placebo.

c) Consitutional remedies provoke profound and multi-dimensional shifts in individuals that have distinct time frames, another phenomena not associated with the action of a placebo.

Posted on September 9th, 2010 by Jerry Kantor
Under: Perspective | 1 Comment »

Biochemical Basis

Professor Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who won the Nobel Prize for discovering a link between HIV and AIDS has demonstrated that water has a memory that continues even after many dilutions. The idea is one of the foundations of homeopathy, which maintains that the potency of a substance is increased with its dilution. Montagnier has discovered that solutions containing the DNA of viruses and bacteria “could emit low frequency radio waves”. These waves influence molecules around them, and turn them into organised structures. (Sources: Sunday Times, July 4, 2010; British Medical Association).

This echoes the claims of French immunologist Jacques Benveniste who in 1988 claimed in a Nature paper that a solution that had once contained antibodies still activated human white blood cells. Benveniste claimed the solution still worked because it contained ghostly “imprints” in the water structure where the antibodies had been.

These discoveries also the support the findings of a 2001 a research team in South Korea (German chemist Kurt Geckeler and his colleague Shashadhar Samal) concerning what happens when a substance diluted in water is then further diluted. Conventional wisdom says that the dissolved molecules simply spread further and further apart as a solution is diluted. But two chemists have found that some do the opposite: they clump together, first as clusters of molecules, then as bigger aggregates of those clusters. Far from drifting apart from their neighbors, they got closer together.

Dilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates five to 10 times as big as those in the original solutions. The growth was not linear, and it depended on the concentration of the original. “The history of the solution is important. The more dilute it starts, the larger the aggregates,” says Geckeler. Also, it only worked in polar solvents like water, in which one end of the molecule has a pronounced positive charge while the other end is negative. In accordance with homeopathic theory, diluting a remedy may increase the size of the particles to the point when they become biologically active.

Posted on September 9th, 2010 by Jerry Kantor
Under: Perspective | No Comments »

Dr. Tinus Smits is a prominent Dutch physician and homeopath with thirty years experience and who has achieved some major breakthroughs in the treatment of autism. I am pleased to announce that I will be away studying with him in the Neverthelands this coming week (from March 29 until April 2). I look forward to sharing what I will have learned upon my return. For more information about Dr. Smits approach please view his website:

http://www.cease-autism.com/3842/autism.aspx

Posted on March 24th, 2010 by Jerry Kantor
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Posing and Then Answering the Right Question in the Health Care Debate

The business model of our health care system is a jackal. If you grind down its teeth you neither shrink the jackal’s ravenous appetite nor curb his predatory bent. So why persist in seeking to reform this beast? Rather than profit health care should be designed to reward prevention, efficiency and safety. It is time to euthanize the jackal.

* The wrong question to ask:

How can we curb spending and control health care costs?

* The right question to ask:

How can we eliminate perverse incentives?

Simply put: Since each and every one of us is at risk to becoming sick or growing old and infirm, health care and long term care ought to be viewed as utilities rather market frontiers. Indeed, this is as it sensibly is much the world over. We do not scream “Socialism!” when government bodies construct roads, schools or sewage systems that benefit everyone. An outcry against socialism might be appropriate where the government attempts an incursion into beliefs and activities that are genuinely private and personal such as religious expression, the creation of art, or sexual activity.

The following is but a partial iteration of all too common examples of perverse incentives within our health care system:

· Acupuncture, a modality is known to be a safe, inexpensive, preventive, and powerful means of care for numerous conditions. It succeeds by alleviating pain and suffering while also addressing a condition’s root causes and connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated ailments. Rather than rewarding acupuncture’s broad based, holistic effects, conventional medical research not only ignores acupuncture’s broad benefits but actually punishes this blessed modality for the broad range of its clinical effects. This is because drug research erroneously validates only reductionist hypotheses and explanations.

· Our Drug Culture demanding new pharmaceuticals annually is at the root of numerous evils. New marketplace drugs are no improvements on the old, but merely serve to renew patent ownerships, thus building in escalating costs. Additional evils include a bias against holistically oriented medical research, a perverse incentive to addict multitudes of individuals to potentially harmful vaccines, and hormonally based drugs, drugs for dubious conditions such as Attention Deficit Disorder and meaningless conditions such as shyness. The drug culture promotes an idiocy that our immune system is at odds with our well being as in the inculcated fear of fever, which means only that the body has mobilized against a pathogen. It promotes a view that drugs rather than an active lifestyle, sound nutrition and stress reducing activities are indispensable to health. Most perversely of all, the general public ultimately is obligated to subsidize the advertising costs attendant to its own brainwashing as these are passed along to the health care consumer.

· Insurance cannot be reformed given our health care system’s dependence on profit. Don’t get me started! There are no profits attached to reimbursing for the future benefits attached to preventive medicine, or securing the needs of individuals with “preexisting” conditions. Insurance incentives are to accept premiums from healthy individuals and avoid the currently or potentially sick except at extortionist rates. Because insurance executives and physicians sit on the boards of insurance companies insurers persist in economically irresponsible behaviors such as not reimbursing for safer and less expensive modalities s such as acupuncture and homeopathy while pushing people into more dangerous interventions such as surgery and its necessary aftercare.

· The Demise of Public Health. Growing up in New York City I still recall the existence of public health infirmaries in various neighborhoods. One by one these vanished for much the same reason that the auto industry succeeded in destroying New York’s efficient and energy-clean public transportation trolley car system. At various times in our history the American Medical Association has gone to court in order cripple public health medicine, meaning the appropriation of public monies for one-on-one health care. As a result, American public health care has remained dwarfed: it covers only vaccinations and quarantines. In other countries such as Great Britain, public health care has grown until it has finally formed the foundation of a national health care system. This allows doctors to treat in hospitals and public settings where because they are on government salary they need not be pharmaceutical industry puppets and remain freer to practice sensibly.

· Long Term Care. Because our system rewards the delusional belief that none of us will ever grow old, or that the elderly are always someone else’s burden we are incented to become taxation misers, asset hiders, government and social service agency despisers, and poverty-stricken family member impersonators. Treating long term care as a utility would cost each of us pennies on the dollar a month. It would properly remunerate and adequately train the hardworking caregivers in whom we trust the desperate needs of our infirm parents and relatives. This change in perspective would serve to humanize our culture while restoring its economic and moral sanity.

Posted on March 18th, 2010 by Jerry Kantor
Under: Acupuncture, Health, Perspective, Vaccination | No Comments »

Underlying every chronic illness condition and its matching homeopathic remedy state is a vortex. The engine running the vortex’s cycle is a circular argument that eventuates in a self-fulfilling prophecy. In my clinical work I model illness chronicity as a radical disjunct between what for an individual constitutes a normal need and its associated satisfaction. This relationship becomes disharmonized as a result of physical, emotional or mental trauma. The usual satisfaction then not only fails to reconcile itself with the normal demand, but worsens matters, thus engendering persistent symptoms. As an example, the desperate need to be validated often degenerates into a hopeless search for validation. Consequent behaviors reflect a failed strategy that is subconsciously designed to confirm the individual’s non-acceptability. What we thus have is tautology, a dog chasing its tail, a spiral into illness—a negative vortex.

But if chronicity is a negative vortex then it is reasonable to suppose that movement into health and spiritual growth is its inverse, a positive vortex. Hence my interest in Sedona, Arizona.

Although no photograph, even if taken by Ansel Adams can do it justice, Sedona, Arizona contains some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. On visiting this past October, I was surprised, even stunned to discover this truth for myself, and how the presence of a site influences and overrides one’s visual perception.

Remarkable and bewildering, Sedona’s red rock formations emanate a serenity disturbingly at odds with the violent forces that shaped the area over hundreds of millions of years. These include volcanic activity, tectonic shifts, oceanic and aquifer formation, sedimentation, oxidation effects and every variety of transformative erosive force. One stands dumbfounded before the product: these peculiar and suggestively shaped buttes, spires, mesas and one vast canyon that God in his infancy appears to have playfully created in his sandbox.

Hiking about one encounters the area’s contorted juniper trees whose twisted branches suggest ecstatic possession by an ancient Tai Chi master but which local lore indicates proximity to a spiritually powerful vortex site.

By the way, unless one is drawn to typically commercial venues the towns of Sedona and also nearby Oak Creek as well are forgettable. My recommendation instead is to visit nearby Jerome, once a thriving mining town that nearly became a ghostly dive once the copper went bust. Jerome remains lively, funky and with a bit of its original frontier roughness. Carved into the side of a picturesque mountain one can espy Sedona’s red rocks in the distance.

My venture to Sedona was certainly for the purpose of heightening my intuitive powers as a homeopath and for spiritual development. Apart from awe, wonder and the obvious benefits of relaxation, it is difficult to say that I was immediately struck by spirit of Sedona’s vortex energy. In the week’s time spent there I took six splendid hikes of which the most notable was the Little Horse to Broken Arrow trail. I also meditated at the foot of Bell Rock and climbed to its summit where I managed to get festooned with cactus spikes (homeopathic Ledum by the way, immediately alleviated the inflammation incurred from a one and a half inch thorn). Oak Canyon was a splendid, windy and stunning delight.

But Sedona’s effects were visited on me later.

In the two months since my return I note that my perceptions are sharper while my emotions more intense. I also detect an increase in personal compassion. Though not every day is the same the overall resultant change is enduring. I feel more alive and appreciative of life. My suspicion is that I have undergone the effect of a positive vortex wherein positive ideas within the subconscious are heightened and cyclically set in motion.

Of course, I hope to return to Sedona again sometime soon.

An idea to explore with regard to my homeopathic practice: undertake a trituration proving of a sampling of Sedona’s red rocks. I cannot imagine a more promising investigation or use of a weekend.

Posted on December 24th, 2009 by Jerry Kantor
Under: Health, Perspective | No Comments »