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 »

One of NCCAM’s challenges appears to be: While resisting enmeshment with unfamiliar and scientifically questionable mode of knowing, how to evaluate or substantiate desired benefits attending established though non-conventional modalities? My intention here is to argue against acceptance of solely quantifiable data and rejection of soundly derived intuitive knowledge.

But how is the validity of long-established but non-conventional means of knowing best established? The answer: by means of our introducing the appropriate conceptual framework and rationale.

Within the Western intellectual tradition a sturdy framework happens to exist. It is a conceptual bridge by means of which the gleaming techno-city of biomedical science and its cross-river neighbor, the old-world city of non-conventional medicine may be linked. Our methodology not only shields the scientific enterprise from undisciplined applications of the intuitive method such as found in poorly formulated versions of the Doctrine of Signatures, but assists Integrative Medicine in coming to terms with problematic, holistic means of knowing.

Acupuncture is better known now in 2009 than when first introduced to the American public in 1972. At that time NY Times writer James Reston reported that acupuncture treatments he received in China relieved pain he was experiencing following abdominal surgery. Traditional Chinese Medicine’s mode of diagnosis, relying on the appearance of the tongue, palpated qualities of the pulse, and use of unfamiliar concepts such as stagnant qi, hyperactive Yang and deficient Yin served to alienate acupuncture from western medicine. Conventional medicine authorities thus viewing acupuncture as non-scientific distanced themselves from its mode of knowing.

Though endemic to American medicine, homeopathy has received much the same treatment. This has to do with homeopathic medicine’s non-scientific sounding insistence that symptoms represent the expression of an energetic entity known as the vital force.  As we shall see, the fact that qi and vital force are essentially qualitative as opposed to quantitative entities continues to pose a problem for conventional biomedicine.

This desire for distance is expressed in the terms  “alternative” and “complementary” that are attached to “Alternative Medicine,” and then more recently, “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (CAM). A fly in the ointment is the fact that acupuncturists and homeopaths credit these very same questionable-appearing modes of knowing with their achieving what are more often than not, remarkable treatment outcomes.

Phenomenology Defined:

Phenomenology concerns theoretical approaches toward understanding how people experience the world they live in and create. It has also been defined as an analysis of human existence without prior assumptions by the term’s originator, the early 20th century philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology helps us with the question: can we possibly analyze human existence without presuppositions? Its literature reflects the study of human experience and consciousness in everyday life, as well as the idea of ‘”being,” rooted in physical and social space.

Advantageous Features:

Phenomenology can be thought of as intuition subjected to rigorous discipline. In practical terms its application utilizes inductive reasoning, or the building of an overwhelming case of circumstantial evidence. The following features characteristic of phenomenological investigation serve to provide a legitimizing context for culture-specific, and dialectically oriented schools of medicine.

Bracketing off of prior assumptions

Phenomenology is perhaps the first formal, academic discipline not only to make a point of sequestering or bracketing off the investigator’s own ideological, cultural, and even, “investigator-related” bias, but to study of the difficulties attached to doing so. The methodology has proven foundational within the social sciences and especially within homeopathy and psychotherapy, wherein failure to recognize the impact of one’s own role, as in transference reactions, or self-investment in a particular outcome undermines a clinician’s effectiveness.

Envisioning a phenomenon in its unity before its components

In 1988 a Royal Society of Medicine study in regard to an acupuncture point, Pericardium 6 detailed the latter’s effectiveness in treating a specific symptom, emesis of pregnancy. In 1998, many eyebrows were raised when studies indicated that moxibustion (heat) stimulation to the acupuncture point Urinary Bladder 67 was effective in provoking a fetus in the breach position to alter its fetal position in the womb. Whereas medical journal publication of these CAM outcomes was hailed as a triumph of evidence-based methodology, what also came to light is a glaring deficiency within the prevailing paradigm:

Despite thousands of years of supportive clinical research in China, the greater acupuncture meridian system to which the acu-points P6 and UB 67 belong has yet to be entirel validated in the west. Within the currently standard investigative model, a potential 367 years’ years of documentation concerning individual acu-points would still fail to reveal what the Chinese have long ceased to question, that the meridian system of qi circulation is real.

An antidote to Common Sense Realism

As opposed to Common Sense Realism (CSR) a view unequivocally accepting of direct observation, phenomenology provides us with a more reasonable perspective on what we think of as evidence. It offers a safe haven to rational doubt, as in questioning whether adoption of an external perspective in regard to our humaneness is at all possible. This matters when: we seek to enter the perceptual world of another species of life, or, when accepting data merely because it is quantitative, we fail to examine prior assumptions at play in a dataset’s creation, or the fact that data-gathering instruments merely extend the reach of our own faulty sense receptors.

A disturbing example of CSR is found in the writings of the renowned Daniel Dennett, a neurological investigator unable to recognize, much less question his own bias in favor of a heavily culture-bound notion: that the brain is a computer. In consequence, for Dennett, the world of human consciousness is a trivial matter, the mere hum of machine!

Other CSR biases:

–Biomedical research’s rejection of the reality of qi within TCM or of Vital Force within homeopathy. This is due to a paradigm-specific belief that force fields must be both quantifiable and NOT subjectively experienced. Thus, despite detectable electrical potential levels measurable at the surface of the skin that offer quantifiable evidence of its activity, qi’s characteristic feature, that it is subjectively experienced effectively disqualifies this mode of energy from scientific investigation. The same is true of homeopathy’s vital force, which expresses itself via subjectively experienced symptoms.

–The distinction between “anecdotal evidence,” on the basis of which a report to the effect that an acupuncture treatment effectively reduces pain or enhances function is pejorative; while  “evidence-based,” a term for exactly the same idea bathes a physician’s perception of an unusual therapy’s effectiveness in the warm glow of acceptance.

Though we must admit that one of our most highly esteemed sciences, physics is rooted in common sense realism its founder, Isaac Newton was himself a product of a world in which a more phenomenological approach, Natural Philosophy, ruled the sciences. Newton’s introduction of mass, force and gravity was initially resisted as these novel concepts at that time suggested unnatural, magical entities. Nor, since the meaning of his equations had first to be interpreted, were any of Newton’s precise calculations alone, sufficient to cement the case for gravity. At a time when philosophical questions suggested by scientific investigations were still viewed as honorable, Newton once having succeeded in his quest for truth remained thereafter committed to alchemy and spiritual pursuits.

Curiously enough, with the modern advent of String and Superstring theory whose core assumptions persist in defying empirical verification, the physical sciences have themselves, come full circle with Natural Philosophy: In the absence of confirmatory data, we are left with no choice but to compare the aesthetic merits of interpretative models of subatomic activity.

Conceding biomedicine’s deliberate obtuseness with regard to natural philosophy (resistance to accepting the benefit of breast feeding a child, or the desirability of good nutrition, both examples of common sense wisdom that no Randomized Double Blind Study has yet managed to validate) we might infer that the demise of Natural Philosophy has hurt as well as advanced biomedicine.

Recognize emergent natural phenomena

Emergent phenomena because they express creativity, exceed rather than equal the sum of their parts. Thus, the relation that creative phenomena hold in to their constituent (or more accurately, antecedent) elements is almost impossible to explain.

The physicist, Werner Heisenberg’s famous “Indeterminacy Principle,” gave a theoretical limit to the precision with which a particle’s momentum and position could be simultaneously measured. This struck a blow against the belief that the more we reduce phenomena to their smallest components, the more accurately we predict the movement of atomic and sub-atomic particles.  Deprived of this certitude we are left with only the jumbled and unpredictable “phenomena” themselves to discuss.

Likewise, the Scottish philosopher David Hume discovered a dirty truth about cause and effect explanation: We are never able to satisfactorily demonstrate that one phenomenon is actually the cause of another. When speaking in cause and effect terms, Hume found, we are instead postulating an association between two unrelated phenomena. Since cause and effect do not exist, the best we can manage to do is model relationships between phenomena. Models sound flimsier than fundamental laws but they are more reliable and durable when it comes to explaining what takes place in the universe.

Whether we like it or not, we know scarcely the first thing about the greatest “whole” of all, organic life, at least not with regard to the mysterious and sublime events at work during embryological development. For all our talk about incremental evolution and an organism’s seeking of evolutionary advantage, little that is meaningful can be said concerning the engine in charge of life, consciousness; why living things even bother to seek evolutionary advantage; or the fact that organic life is explosively and spontaneously creative.

Excavate levels of meaning in language

How is it that some of our most powerful myths such as those of Greek antiquity perfectly describe subconsciously experienced illness processes? Why do we say, “he went blind with rage,” as opposed to ‘deaf with rage,” or “lost his sense of smell with rage”? Why is the expression, “Go with the flow….” associated with the 1960s? What is the reason that in moments of illumination we report hearing the voice of God as opposed to seeing God?

Myths do not endure in culture, nor do metaphors entrench themselves within language unless they embody an enduring truth. This holds true especially in homeopathy where a patient’s pet expressions reveal much about the nature of his or her inner reality. Homeopathy in fact, can be viewed as the land where metaphorical expression is literal.

A chief proponent of phenomenological language excavation was Martin Heidegger, the philosopher responsible for characterizing language as the house of Being. While shaping phenomenology to my own purposes, my forthcoming book, Interpreting Chronic Illness, the Convergence of Acupuncture, Homeopathy and Biomedicine (to be published by the American Association of Integrative Medicine) provides answers to the questions I have posed, above, as well as a general method for interpreting the inner meaning of symptoms experienced by individuals afflicted by chronic illness.

Posted on November 18th, 2009 by Jerry Kantor
Under: Perspective | 1 Comment »

Homeopathy and Other Modalities
In my experience homeopathy is one of, if not the single most profound of all healing modalities. Of course, this is true only when the remedy prescription is highly accurate! But yes, when such is the case one would be hard-pressed to find a health care intervention more finely tuned to the precise issue underlying a client’s illness.

That said, the question can be raised: what happens when homeopathy is utilized simultaneously with another powerful modality, for example, acupuncture? In my experience using both modes of care together is not optimal. Here is why:

The timeframe for an accurate constitutional remedy is usually in the vicinity of six weeks. The timeframe for a single powerful acupuncture treatment is several days (which is why acupuncture works best when performed at least twice weekly).

Let’s employ the metaphor of our having been assigned two work projects. The first work project will account for perhaps, sixty percent of my yearly income and will require my full-time involvement five days a week. While thus engaged I am offered a second work project that if given my full effort could be completed within three days. Assuming that I were to accept this second project on top of the first one, which project would be likely to suffer? At least according to my reasoning—and this is my own chosen metaphor—the second project would suffer. This is because, despite my greed I should be unwilling to risk under-performing in relation to the project on which my livelihood principally depends. Thus, the smaller project receives less than my optimal effort.

Similarly, acupuncture being the “smaller” project is diminished in its effectiveness. Being an acupuncturist as well as a homeopath, when the choice is left up to me, I opt for acupuncture especially when confronted with a client in obvious physical pain due to musculo-skeletal trauma. Otherwise, but especially when dealing with chronic illness my choice is constitutional homeopathy. I refrain from using both modalities together except for when seeking to blunt the edge of a homeopathic aggravation.

Despite a professional bias in favor of homeopathy other modalities hold tremendous healing and diagnostic value. Just now I should like to single out the usefulness of nutritional counseling as well as the remarkable skill of well trained Reflexologists (who perform foot massage based on ancient Egyptian or Traditional Chinese Medical diagnostics) and—provided you can find such a person—-a Medical Intuitive who is gifted with “second sight” diagnostic capability. As it happens Helen Chin Liu, a remarkable Reflexologist has recently joined my practice at Vital Force Health Care. I recommend her work highly. Read more about Helen at http://www.healingplacemedfield.com/.

From time to time I also have the privilege of working in conjunction with an extraordinary Medical Intuitive, Wendy Marks. Check out her video magazine interview at http://boldfacers.com/index.cfm?page=videos&video_id=142&channel=profiles.

Posted on October 19th, 2008 by Jerry Kantor
Under: Health, Perspective | 2 Comments »

Let’s discuss the well-known Curse of the Bambino.  This refers to the Boston Red Sox’ inability to win a World Series after basically giving away to the New York Yankees, and for a piddling amount of cash, Babe Ruth, who as it would turn out would become widely recognized as the greatest player in the history of baseball. In 2004 with the Red Sox’ miraculous come from behind playoff win against the Yankees, and their subsequent rout of the National League’s St. Louis Cardinals the infamous Curse was finally, and after 86 years was put to rest. How did this come about? Homeopathy provides the answer.

The power of the curse was not mystical. Rather, it represented an entrenched fear and its related behavioral rigidity. States of stuckness of exactly this sort are routinely identified by classical homeopaths as underlying disease states in their patients. But “remedy states” need not be cured by homeopathic remedies alone. Homeopathic “behavior” can also do the trick.

The fear underlying the Curse of the Bambino was that team management might again some day commit an error as serious as giving away Babe Ruth, the great Bambino. The associated rigidity is: beware of making any baseball trades that are even remotely suggestive of this possibility. When installed as a core front office belief a fear such as this delimits managerial flexibility, creativity, and thereby places the team at a disadvantage with respect to other teams in the trading marketplace.

There exists a shibboleth in baseball that the value of even a handful of good players cannot equate that of a single great player. The reason for this is that truly great players are irreplaceable while many even very good players can be readily exchanged for others having equal value. Avoidance of any such trade would be fully in keeping with the fear and associated rigidity of the Bambino Curse. Now, homeopathy teaches that “Like Cures Like.”  Thus, the homeopathically recommended way out of the dilemma is to indeed engage with the original error, but to perpetrate a micro-dosage of the mistake. Yes, facing the demon once and for all is better than doing nothing.

Nomar Garciaparra the Red Sox shortstop had been anointed the greatest Red Sox player since Ted Williams by no less a luminary than Ted Williams himself. Yet in 2004 General Manager Theo Epstein was inspired to trade the inimical and  irreplaceable Garciaparra for three talented but lesser lights: outfielder Dave Roberts, and infielders Orlando Cabrerra and Doug Mentkiewicz. The day on which the trade was announced talk show radio hosts went berserk. The trade was denounced in the newspapers as another Babe Ruth giveaway.

One can of course say that the team’s improved chemistry due to the three new players, each of whom went on to play significant roles in the Red Sox’ 2004 triumph that lifted the Bambino’s curse. I would argue that it was Epstein’s fear-dispelling moxie that did the trick, thereby liberating the team to perform at its optimal level.

Posted on August 14th, 2008 by Jerry Kantor
Under: Health, Humor, Perspective | No Comments »

Welcome to my new blog!

These are days when truth often takes a terrible beating at the hands of perception so on occasion, let us seek some degree of redress. It will be my intention to live up to a self-imposed dictum, “Truth in Healing and in Health.” Over the next few months I hope to address a number of topics from this perspective, including: vaccinations, autism, and the politics of health care. I will also be critiquing articles such as The Itch (The New Yorker) as well as introducing innovative uses of homeopathy as in marital therapy. In the minute category of homeopathic humor you may also expect to see unusual features such as “A Case of the Blues,” and the proving of some “unsual” remedies such as Bovinus Foetor.

But for today, let’s talk briefly about the role of the FDA in relation to homeopathic remedies. By way of beginning, here is a multiple choice question: What is the official status of a homeopathic remedy? A) a drug; B) a nutritional supplement; C) a placebo; D) an herb.

Give up? Ok, be honest, how many of you picked A) a drug?  Yes, this is the correct answer. As opposed to general perception, homeopathic remedies have more legal status than either nutritional supplements, placebos, or herbs. If you got it wrong no need to feel bad. Hardly anyone at the FDA can answer this question correctly either. Or, if any official at the FDA does know it, he or she is not likely to admit the fact. Here is how it works: in 1938 the FDA was a good deal smarter than it is today. In this year the agency grandfathered homeopathic remedies included in the HPUS into its drug category. Moreover, the FDA said something even more surprising by today’s standards: It averred that an as yet, non-existent remedy would be declared kosher prospectively, just so long as it went through the rigors of HPUS’s proving rotocols! Even more significant is the fact that the FDA at that time was able to grasp a philosophical notion: genuine principles are not true here and there, or now and then. They are ALWAYS true. Of course, there is one more quirky feature of the drug that is a homeopathic remedy. Although the principle that Like Treats Like is indelible, in other words, always true, this also means that a homeopathic remedy is a drug ONLY when it has been prescribed in accordance with the Law of Similars. So Arsenicum Alb is a drug when I prescribe it for the fastidious, anxious, perfectionist patient in my office. But it is NOT a drug in the foolish event that I should choose to self-administer Ars (being myself, somewhere in the vicinity of Bufo, Anhalonium or Pulsatilla).

Is there a possibility that the FDA at some point will carry out its threat to subject homeopathic remedies to an inquisitorial process? Not likely, as this would only call attention to the decision the agency made in 1938 and which would have to be overturned. Doing so would also place strictures on the freedom of physicians to titrate, manipulate the strength of their own pharmaceutical prescriptions.

Now for some great mysteries. What is the status of over-counter-homeopathic remedies? I have no idea. On the one hand, they are empty products for which one must nevertheless make attach a single clinical indication. “Empty” though they are, you will not see Medorrhinum or Tuberculinum on any pharmacy shelf even in a low potency because here, the FDA chooses to assert that the few impossible to discern molecules of these nosodes sufficiently determine the “controlled substance” status of these “dangerous” remedies. Patent laws suggest that natural substances are not patentable, either singly or in combination. So, what Agency official has permitted this to take place, or determined how many remedies may effectively be combined into a single, commodifiable “remedy?” (Assuming that we are sensitive only to a single ingredient, why not combine ALL remedies into one giant saltlick that any sick individual can go and lick from…)

I am sure there are perfectly reasonable answers to these and many other questions. But the Land of Oz where they may be heard does not appear on my GPS, and someone took my ruby slippers to the local Goodwill.

Posted on August 1st, 2008 by Jerry Kantor
Under: Humor, Perspective | 1 Comment »