Homeopathy Tips Newsletter

Shingles (herpes zoster) is infection with the Varicella-zoster virus that produces a severely painful skin eruption of fluid filled blisters. This happens when immunity is low, in individuals mostly over the age of 50, who have had chicken-pox previously in their life. The shingles is the re-emergence of the virus that lays dormant in the persons spinal or cranial nerves. When reactivated it spreads through the nerve to the skin where it produces painful sores resembling the original chicken-pox. The outbreak is usually always limited to the  strip of skin where the nerve fibers are located, most often the abdomen or chest or head.

Common symptoms with shingles are chills, fever, nausea, diarrhea, or difficulty urinating in the previous 3-4 days prior to the skin eruption. Others experience pain, itching or tingling sensation as the eruption appears. Clusters of small, fluid filled blisters usually appear. Most often the blisters appear on the trunk and only on one side....

Happy New Year! It is another year and another opportunity to take stock of the world and where we are now. It seems that in this new millennium the changes have come quickly and with more consequence. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the more daily challenges in life and miss the bigger picture of the even greater challenge that is facing all humanity on this planet right now. When I look at how homeopathy can play a part in our unfolding future I see that it is more important than ever.

One of the biggest changes I have seen in peoples health has been in the realm of digestive issues. Without exaggeration I would say that 40-50% of all clients have digestive issues. This has changed significantly in the last 15 years. One has to wonder why this is so. It is my belief that the food we are eating is poisoning us. Modern agriculture and Genetically Modified Organisms have change the health of humans on this planet. We are guinea pigs in a giant experiment. No long term testing has...

Remedy keynotes play a big part in any prescription but they must be used with care. Often in the course of learning homeopathy we are encouraged to study the keynotes of many remedies. This is a good way to learn a little about remedies but never speak to the totality of the remedy energy.

     Yasgur, in Homeopathic Dictionary, describes keynotes as "a symptom that is so apparent, or striking that it strongly suggests or points to a single remedy. For example, pain in the right shoulder blade points to Cheledonium."  Guernsey describes the keynote as "the predominating symptom which readily directs attention to the totality."

      Rarely in case-taking will the client give his story and all of the sympotoms fit in the totality of a single remedy. Often during repertizing we will have 10 or more remedies covering the symptom of a case. If we were to prescribe on keynotes of the remedy only we would still have to choose one or two...

To understand the dilemma of destiny in the human condition one needs only to study the lives of our ancestors. Hahnemann recognised our inherited and acquired tendencies and wrote about this in Chronic Diseases. He described miasm as noxious influence. This is something that affects the vital force. It is spiritual and dynamic in it's influence. We only need to look to many different traditions to see this idea is not new.

The bible quotes in Lamentations 5:7, "Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities."  This means that we have inherited the inequities of our fathers. The American Indians recognised that seven generations pass before their errors are corrected.

More recently the work of Marc Frechet, a brilliant French psychologist and researcher, is being recognised. He proposed that the entire time around a child's birth, from conception to birth and later until the child separates it's identity from the mother...

You can not have missed all of the press that Ebola virus has been given in the last two weeks. It seems that everywhere you turn there is more fear being spread through the main-stream media. I felt it is important to address some of the issues around Ebola and how homeopathy can help.

Ebola is a virus in the Filoviridae genus of viruses. There are five strains of this virus and four of them are transmittable to humans. These strains were first identified in Africa in 1976 near the Ebola River in what is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then there have been several outbreaks over the years with up to hundreds dying from the disease. This year alone there are over 4,000 known cases and upwards of 8,000 suspected cases. The sudden rise in infection has caught the attention of the world.

The virus is a bundle of DNA that can attach to a cell, breaking the cell wall down, injecting its DNA into the cell to replicate. As the viral load count goes up in humans the...

The disaster at Fukushima is a global disaster.  It is amazing to me that the interest in this is so minimal. Possibly it is the nature of radiation because it is silent, and can't be seen, smelled, tasted, or felt when the exposure comes in the form of nuclear fallout.

I also have another idea that is based on the principle of normalcy bias. Normalcy bias is the mental state of people entering a disaster. It causes people to underestimate the possibility and the effects of a disaster. People with normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something that is unfamiliar. They tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible. They will tend to infer a less serious situation from any ambiguities in warnings.

Due to the fact that the Fukushima disaster is not being reported with the mainstream media and a normalcy bias existing within the population, it seems that it is not on many peoples minds.   There is limited research being conducted and our...

When Hahnemann started to experiment with dilutions and potency he used the 10X dilution (1 to 10 dilution) in creating the potency. He found that his medicines were equally as powerful if diluted to the one to one hundred dilution ratio or C potencies. After having sensitive clients who would have severe aggravations he was perplexed as to how to help them. In the final edition of the Organon he described the LM potencies. These have been diluted to the 3C potency and then after this to the one to 50,000 dilution. With all of his potencies he did succussions after each step of dilution. He described the LM potencies as very strong, yet gentle. This has been my experience also.

I rarely prescribe the X potencies except in cases of very gross pathology. These are cases of infection or acute inflammations. I find them to work well at this acute level.

I prescribe the C potencies in the low range (6C,9C and 12C) on a daily basis in starting most...

"Keep your mouth closed and your bowels open and you will never need a lawyer or a doctor" Wilton Herz.

These are words of wisdom. And so much of our health resides in the bowels. The bowels are the lower part of our digestive tract. This is the tubular structure from mouth to anus and the bowels are the small intestine and large intestine. Included in the large intestine are the ascending colon, transverse colon, descending colon, sigmoid colon, rectum and anus. These structures perform the final stages of digestion and elimination.

The function of the bowel is to extract water from the fecal matter making a solid stool that is easy to pass. As this water is extracted final digestion is accomplished by the many microbes present in the bowels. Most of our immune response takes place here. Useful bacteria compete with unfriendly bacteria to maintain a healthy balance. Completing the digestion process we then have a normal bowel movement to expel the waste from our system. This...

A topic of the day now is opioid addiction. It is epidemic in America at this time because of the acquired dependency on commonly prescribe pain-killers. But addiction is not just limited to drugs. We can become addicted to anything. The most common addictions are drugs, alcohol, food and sex.

Addiction is the disruptive behavior or activity associated with a habitual inclination.

We can have many types of addiction, some of which are positive. We can be addicted to exercise or even homeopathy for instance. (I know I am). These usually do not cause a disruption in normal activity even though they can be habitual. It is the seeming lack of control and choice that leads to addiction. Homeopathy can help some addictions. But some addictions are much more difficult to address with homeopathy.

I will explain a few of the addictions that you may come up with in your practice. Drug addiction is the leading addiction and is the most difficult to treat homeopathically. This is because the...

The greatest challenge for any homeopath is to truly perceive the case. It is imperative that we understand what the vital force is expressing. Only when we can perceive this accurately can we know what is asking to be healed.

During our most recent class at Resonance School of Homeopathy I became painfully aware that the greatest challenge for all students as well as professional homeopaths is to be able to clearly define the case before them. We hear a big story sometimes. Other times we do not get much of a story at all from the client. It is our job as the homeopath to be unprejudiced and simply understand the case for what it is.

I find that the biggest hurdle for most homeopaths is to distill the information in to a central core disturbance. This ALWAYS comes out of the testimony of the client and the observations of the homeopath. This process is not an easy one. There is NO ONE SINGLE WAY to come to this because not all cases are the same.

There comes a time in the case when...