November 6, 2012 has come and gone and we now know that President Obama will be in the White House for four more years. Positive change was accomplished during President Obama’s first four years: Lily Ledbetter Act, taking the banks out of student loans, preventing the Keystone Pipeline and passing the Affordable Healthcare Act, and more. We can keep this change coming by being involved and making our voices heard.
Healthcare and the environment are two important areas for change.
When people are asked: What do you need to be healthy? The answers are fundamental.
- Air (clean)
- Water (pure)
- Food (unadulterated, organic, naturally produced)
- Shelter
- Freedom of speech, religion, assembly
- Stability
- Creative Outlets
- Community
- Fun
Obstacles to cure
Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, lived in a much simpler era than ours. Two hundred years ago, if you managed to survive childbirth, infectious childhood diseases, epidemics, sexually transmitted diseases, and the most dangerous medical treatments of the day, then very often you would be able to live to a ripe old age.
Yet, even in his time, Hahnemann warned homeopaths to be aware of “obstacles to cure,” particularly in chronic illness. In aphorism 260 of the Organon of Medicine, he wrote: “… careful investigation into such obstacles to cure is so much the more necessary in the case of patients affected by chronic diseases, as their diseases are usually aggravated by such noxious influences and other disease causing errors in the diet and regimen, which often pass unnoticed.” In aphorism 261, Hahnemann added: “The most appropriate regimen during the employment of medicine in chronic diseases consists in the removal of such obstacles to recovery…”
If this was true in Hahnemann’s time, it is so much more true now. I encourage everyone reading this, whatever your political beliefs, to take a moment to reflect on the current problems with our wish list for health.
Current Picture
- The air, water, and food we need to thrive are poisoned with waste products, toxins, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, radiation, and electromagnetic fields from cell phone masts and receivers.
- Our shelter, peace, and stability are threatened by home foreclosures, volatile financial markets, ongoing wars, and severe weather changes.
- Our freedoms are under persistent political threat, our sense of community is destabilized by mobile populations and fragmented families, and creative outlets are often discouraged in our workaholic culture.
In short, there is systematic destruction of every single thing we need to be healthy.
What is wrong with this picture?
We are encouraged to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and sodas, radiate ourselves with TVs, computers, and cell phones, and sit on the couch for hours. We are served nutritionally empty meals with the option to super-size them. Products are loaded with sugar, artificial sweeteners, genetically modified (GMO) high fructose corn syrup, and salt, and sometimes, for good measure, they’re irradiated, too.
Our soil is denuded and GMO mono-cultures have led to increased pesticide use, super weeds that choke the land, and cross-contamination of healthy seeds. Feedlots raise millions of animals in misery, pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics that enter the food supply, leading to “super bug” bacteria that are increasingly resistant and lethal for humans.
Toxic pharmaceuticals are poorly tested, one at a time, by those with vested interests and then prescribed in deadly cocktails. Later, these so-called wonder drugs are often recalled after many thousands of injuries and deaths. More and more vaccines are introduced, despite not being properly tested for safety.
In the process of all this destruction, corporations are rewarded with huge profits and use a chunk of them to pay professional lobbyists to buy the loyalty of government officials and agencies, whose purported role is to serve and protect us. In the past, watchdog agencies eject whistleblowers swiftly and maintain a cozy relationship with the companies they are allegedly overseeing. This ensures a well-paid job when they leave “public service” to switch sides, via the “revolving door.”
So corporations, with our collusion, make us unwell and then, in a business model of Machiavellian genius, the biggest and most profitable corporations of all, the pharmaceutical companies, offer to make us well again, for a price.
A killer business model
For example, Novartis’ agribusiness arm merged in 2000 with Astra Zeneca to form Syngenta. Syngenta makes Atrazine™, the most widely used weed killer in the US. Although it has been banned in the European Union since 2005, the US still applies 80 million pounds each year. Tyrone B. Hayes, professor of integrative biology at University of California-Berkeley, has extensively studied the sex change effects of even tiny concentrations of Atrazine™ on frogs.3 The pesticide is a proven massive endocrine disruptor leading to infertility and increased breast cancer rates in humans; but not to worry, Novartis has just the drug for that in its oncology stable, tastefully named Femara™.
The pharmaceutical business is booming. On the one hand, routine antibiotics and other suppressive pharmaceuticals have made the full expression of short-lived acute illness a rarity; on the other hand, much more profitable chronic illnesses are hitting all time highs in the Western world.
The body count
In the US, each year, almost 1 in 4 deaths will be due to cancer.4 Heart disease will claim even more.5 Levels of diabetes and obesity are also soaring. As a result, the current generation will likely be the first to have shorter lifespans than their own parents.6 And according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control, autism and autism spectrum disorders are now running at a shocking 1 in every 88 children, or 1 in 54 for boys.
What’s all this got to do with homeopathy?
Happily, the philosophy of homeopathy, or any truly holistic medicine, holds the answer to this train wreck. A symptom is not the dis-ease, it is a friendly warning that dis-ease exists. This brings me back to an earlier point. Why am I simultaneously for and against what is now known as “Obamacare”?
The money pit
The Centers for Disease Control reported in late 2010 that nearly half of all Americans use prescription medications regularly, and more than one in ten were taking five or more prescriptions. Figures released in 2010 by IMS Health estimated Americans spent $307.4 billion on prescription drugs in 2010, $22.3 billion of which was for chemotherapy.
Chronic healthcare based on pharmaceuticals is expensive, suppressive, and unsustainable. It completely ignores the root causes of illness—the continued sale and marketing of millions of noxious substances and the relentless degradation of our world that comes with it. How can the answer to mass poisoning be more poison?
Blank Check
We have a chance to create better healthcare reform but we have to let our voices be heard.
President Obama may have had good intentions, but his Healthcare Reform has effectively written a blank check to the most powerful corporations in the world for drugs that not only have questionable benefits but are frequently implicated in patient deaths. Prescription drugs, taken as directed, cause an admitted minimum of 106,000 deaths annually, according to a report published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.7 Given the well-established tendency to deny liability and vastly under report any iatrogenic deaths, this figure is likely to be considerably higher.8
Be careful what you wish for!
Bad as all this is, this is not the worst thing about our current sick care model. Imagine that with just one wave of a magic wand all 300 million Americans could have health care insurance, at no direct cost. Would it be a good thing? Would everyone then take the drugs, say “that was easy enough,” and ignore the decimation of our environment that is the very cause of our sickness? For us to succumb to this path, all we’d have to do is choose to remain under the delusion that we are not intimately connected with everything that exists.
What would Native Americans say?
We need to acknowledge the old Cree proverb: “Only when the last tree has died, and the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, will we realize we cannot eat money.”
We have to begin to salvage the building blocks of our health. Sometimes we’ll only be able to make personal changes. At other times we can work collectively with fellow citizens to change the laws or protest when laws are flouted. We can insist on a “polluter pays” principle, with fines large enough to make an impact on huge corporations’ bottom lines. We can pull out the root of most of our ills by forcing corporations and gifts from lobbyists out of politics. We can support organic farming and local farmers by buying locally and supporting stores that carry these products. We can focus all our creative energies on repairing the catastrophic damage we as a species have done in the past two or three hundred years.
What has Hahnemann’s work produced?
Homeopathic educators and homeopathic clients are ideally placed to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. Homeopathy is one of the greenest medical modalities. It has a very small, sustainable footprint, it doesn’t pollute, and it’s not tested on animals. Furthermore, the experience of taking a constitutional homeopathic remedy can be a profound experience and initiate an awakening to new insights and awareness of the interconnectedness of all living things.
Spread the news
Time will show that materialism, in its many guises, is destroying our beautiful home, the Earth, and that homeopathy is a sustainable medical modality for the 21st Century.
Spread the good news about homeopathy. It’s:
- good for plants
- good for animals
- good for humans
- good for the planet
- good for future generations.
And it’s much too good to keep quiet about! There is a lot that you can do,
- Support the NCH and its work to make homeopathy accessible to all. Join or start an NCH affiliated study group. Share Homeopathy Today with your friends and health practitioners.
- Give to those who are working hard to show what homeopathy can do on a shoestring budget. Organize a private screening of the movie Homeopathy Around the World (www.wholehealthnow.com/world), and collect donations to support one of the projects.
- Seek out like-minded people (permaculturists, farmers’ markets, slow foodies, yoga studios, etc.) and collaborate with them to raise awareness both of homeopathy and of our society’s many Obstacles to Cure.
- Post a short, smartphone video testimonial on YouTube titled, “Homeopathy works for me.” Use Facebook and Twitter to reach out to others and share your experiences.
Footnotes
1. Himmelstein D, et al. Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study, The American Journal of Medicine (2009) 122, 741–746.
2. Watch me lead a “Teach-In on Health” on YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/teachin1
3. Watch Professor Hayes discuss the effects of Atrazine™ in a TED video at: http://tinyurl.com/
frogsatrazine.
4., 5. Cancer Facts and Figures 2011. American Cancer Society.
6. Olshansky, J, et al. A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century, New England Journal of Medicine, 2005; 352:1138–1145, March 17, 2005.
7. Lazarou J, et al. Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. JAMA. 1998 Apr 15;279(15):1200–5. http://tinyurl.com/JAMAreport
8. If you need further proof that Pharma is a sick care system bent on profit rather than wellness, read Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher by Gwen Olsen, a penitent former Pharma rep, or view her videos on YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/pharmarep
Parts of this article were taken from “Occupying Obstacles to Cure” by Mary Aspinwall, ISHom, PCH published in Homeopathy Today magazine, Summer 2012.