How I See Homeopathy

There’s a collection of dads around Lincoln, Nebraska, that share a common denominator. Yes, most of us are strongly Catholic, most of us want an acreage with animals, etc., most of us do DIY, etc. But there’s another, more humorous common denominator that I’ve realized – and that is the fact that we are almost all former-skeptics-now-believers in Homeopathy.

Why?

Because it just works. I’ve seen it work. I’ve felt it work. I’ve seen it work on babies and animals – so that crosses “placebo!” off the list (and even if it were placebo, the healing is so dramatic that, sure, if that’s placebo, I’ll take it anyday. But it’s clearly not.)

As with any health field, you’ll find quacks and esoterics that you need to avoid. But if you’re worried about there potentially being a diabolical aspect to homeopathy because many natural healers dabble in that sort of thing, then let me ask you this: what field of medicine perpetrates the worst, most satanic, most horrific demonic offering that the world has ever known? That would definitely be mainstream medicine – and abortion is just one of the many such offerings (think euthenasia, contraception, eugenics, etc. etc.) So no – I don’t think that merely because I can find homeopathics on a wiccan site that homeopathy is diabolically-inspired. Mother Theresa was known for using homeopathic remedies – if it’s ok with Mother Theresa, I’m all set.

Homeopathy works. But it doesn’t work like we’ve gotten used to “medicine” working. We’ve become used to an idea that in order to be “legitimate” medicine that “works,” the medicine has to have some kind of forceful chemical effect on your body that forces your body to do what it is you intended it to do – sort of a scorched-earth approach.

But think about what healing is. If you were a Martian from Mars, and you landed on earth and were observing humans and healing, you would notice two “categories” of medicine: (1) external intervention, like surgery, etc., and (2) the body’s vastly superior, comprehensive, and innate power to heal itself. When one ponders this latter capability, it is breathtaking how the body just is, and constantly fights off, corrects, repairs, regenerates, rejuvenates, sifts through, etc. etc. etc., innumerable factors, balancing them almost perfectly to sustain your life, every minute of every day.

You can’t externally heal the body. No one can. Only the body can heal itself. Healing – actual healing – is the process of the body restoring itself to the design that God built-in – aka “you.” The best you can do from an external standpoint is to enable your body to do what it already “wants” to do – to do what it was designed by God to do. That’s why every time you put food in your mouth, that’s “medicine” in a sense – because it’s what your body needs (unless it’s junk, in which case the opposite is true) to continue healing itself.

In other words, how you achieve a health result is equivalently important with what result you get. Just because you’re headache went away doesn’t mean you’re “healed.” (For more discussion on this, see this post). Just because you lowered your cholesterol doesn’t mean you solved the problem that was causing your high cholesterol. You, as a living being, are irreducibly “complex” (although strictly speaking this is an insufficient term, since “complex” seems to imply separate parts – you are only a single thing, with innumerable and incalculable interrelated aspects).

If you give the man the fish – he has the fish. But if you teach him to fish, so the saying goes, you’ve fed him for a lifetime. In both instances, he has the fish. But there’s an obvious difference – in one, you’ve externally intervened, “forcing” a solution onto the situation (in actuality, said man may now be less able, because now he may believe he should depend on you for food). In the other, you’ve addressed the root cause of the problem – you’ve moved “up the chain of causality” and solved both the immediate problem, and the immediately-proximate problem that caused it. In the first instance, you’ve made the problem go away – until tomorrow. In the second instance, you’ve actually solved the problem.

That’s the difference between healing and intervention. Notice that mainstream medicine almost never uses the term healing when describing it’s activities – “manage,” “relief,” “treat,” etc. Mainstream medicine is leery of that elusive term “heal” – and with good reason. Healing is tough. In my experience, almost nobody wants to be healed (in our culture at least) – nearly everybody is looking for “relief” – that is, to side-step their symptoms, and keep doing what they’re doing. That’s not healing. Healing is difficult. Healing is painful. It’s slow. It’s involved. It’s all these things, because it’s the difference between your body being “handed a fish” and “learning how to fish.”

Everyone has heard someone say, “well, I could have either toughed my way through it, or I could pop a [some pill] and be done with it.” That’s correct – done with it is right. You handed your body a fish – you didn’t teach it to fish. Now, your body very well may be trained: “when I have that sickness, I can jettison (at least partially) my natural mechanisms to beat that sickness, because I’ll just get a chemical that’ll blast it away from me.” Meanwhile, the problem that caused the sickness – e.g. leaky gut, celiac, etc. – is still there, still vulnerable for the next assault to happen.

But to be fair, we’re not really taught that there’s an option, or even that there’s a difference. Basically, as far as most people know, you can either pop Antibiotics and not die, or you can give it a go with that Tea Tree Oil you got off Amazon. Best of luck.

Now, no doubt someone might point out that mainstream medicine does in fact work – we have a longer life span these days, people can overcome all sorts of things that they’ve never been able to overcome, etc. etc. It’s true – there are indeed certain facets and elements in mainstream medicine that heal (in the meaningful sense of the term that I use it now), most notably physical therapy. But this is by no means the “bread and butter” of mainstream medicine, and it’s certainly not the primary philosophy of mainstream medicine. Mainstream medicine, in my experience, does not start with, “let’s get to the root of this thing, and heal it.” Rather, it says, “let’s force the body to stop XYZ symptom, and leave it at that – hopefully the body will regroup.” And much of the time, body does, or seems to, at least to a large extent.

Again – I’m not saying there’s no place for external intervention. Thank the Lord for surgery (well, I regret mine, especially now that I have a chunk of toxic plastic leeching inside me, but in general). Thank the Lord for Ivermectin. But in my mind, the goal should first and foremost be healing – not “let’s toss the body a fish and hope it finds enough food tomorrow.” Teach the body to fish! (so to speak).

What exactly is healing, and what exactly is external intervention. I don’t know. It’s not always clear, and many things (e.g. supplements) often seem like they’re a mix. That’s true in most cases: I don’t know exactly in every specific scenario what is “healthy” and what is “not healthy,” but I know for darn sure that there’s a difference between health and unhealth.

In general, as far as that goes, (when I’m healthy, not when I’m like this and need targeted remedies all the time) I tend to stick to what I call “health macros” – that is, the big ideas of health. Basically, “health” is so irreducibly interrelated that you’ll never – you could never – balance every aspect of it at once in your mind, in any meaningful way. As a finite human you simply don’t have that capacity. Instead, you just do “big picture” things that will naturally involve, in and of themselves, the balance and proportion that you’re trying to achieve. For example, the most obvious “health macro” is that you’re a living thing – God created living things all together in Genesis for a reason. We’re very similar, on a natural level, in very meaningful ways. So, the more you’re drawing your diet from things that are “alive,” or in a form that is close to being alive, the better – because they had a balance and proportion that you’re seeking. If a pig were pure bacon – yum – it simply couldn’t live (although there are lard pigs that are 70% fat – sheesh!). It would be so out of proportion that it would just cease to be alive. And on the opposite spectrum, when we take living things that over-process them (usually for no good reason other than so they don’t rot when we can ship them from slave-labor countries) we push them further and further away from that living proportion and balance. When we extract a single element from a grain of corn, for example, and combine those single elements into one product and eat that – the balance and proportion is now massively displaced. In order to eat that much of that corn element as found in natural proportions, you probably would have had to carve your way through gallons of corn – but now suddenly you’re awash in it.

Obviously there’s a place for processing and concentrating things. I’m personally a big fan of cooking my veggies until they’re dead – I just like them that way. I know they technically lose some of their nutritional value, but I’d like to think that, even if that’s the case, my body can better access what’s left, than it would have been able to otherwise. But that being said, there’s a big difference between cooking something and refining and reducing it to a state so removed and imbalanced from its original state that even microbes won’t touch it (the same type of microbes that happen to be sustaining your life in your gut, by the way). If you’re impressed because the food from the grocery store lasts forever, I can assure you that your vitally-essential gut bacteria are not impressed.

In other words, aside from acute or acute-ish scenarios, you simply can’t be “healthy” from starting from the details – adding THIS vitamin, or THAT supplement; eating THIS food or doing THAT exercise. Doesn’t work like that. Rather, if you think in terms of health Macros – eating the whole animal, eating things that you have a relationship with – the earth, air, sky, and fire around you, minus the poisons – those minute details will naturally fall into place. You notice this when you really dig in to functional medicine – any one part of “health” is like an elusive merry-go-round that forces you to chase after the next, the next, the next underlying cause – your gallbladder issue is caused by your thyroid is caused by your circulation is caused by your… you get the idea. There is no “do these 5 things,” because you’re a single unity – a living entity – that God created in a delicate and supreme simultaneous balance. (Again, in acute situations, you sort of have to chase down details – but I’m talking generally).

I’m going to have to rein in if I don’t want to be sued for false advertising – I did say this post was about homeopathy. But basically, I’ve already said most of what needs to be said, I think, at least on a basic level. Homeopathy works. Once you recognize that, and understand the basics of how it seems to work (i.e. nanoparticles, like cures like, etc.) then you see how homeopathy can only be healing. However it works, it’s clearly not an option that it’s chemically intervening and forcing your body to do XYZ. Rather, it’s almost like it’s dropping your body a hint – much like what happens when your immune system chomps a virus – from which your body can then, so to speak, “learn to catch fish” and heal the cause of the symptom. In one sense, homeopathy is annoying – because once a remedy works (in certain scenarios), it drives away the problem, and now you’re left with the next problem to deal with – e.g. once my celiac is healed, then I’ll be working on my leaky gut, etc. But, as I said – healing is annoying. And that, as far as I have been able to tell from experiencing it, is how I see homoeopathy.

*I should add, if you actually want to get into how homeopathy works, or how it’s used, I’m not talking about that here. I guess I’d start with something like Joette Calabrese’s blog, etc. I’m not thinking of this post as a “how to” manual; rather, as a “big picture, philosophy of” post.