An Interview with Will Tuttle, Author of “The World Peace Diet,” Part 1

Today we have Part 1 of a 3-part interview I recently did with Will Tuttle, author of the book The World Peace Diet.

Will Tuttle is a nationally recognized writer, educator, pianist and composer devoted to providing words and music that inspire insight and compassion. An award-winning author and Dharma Master in the Zen meditation tradition, his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley focus on educating intuition, and he has taught college course in music, philosophy, mythology, and creativity.

His book, The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony, has been called one of the most important books of the 21st century: the foundation of a new society based on the truth of the interconnectedness of all life.

It is the first book to make explicit the invisible connections between our culture, our food, and the source of our broad range of problems – and the way to a positive transformation in our individual and collective lives.

It is a brilliant book, and I highly recommend it. It is far-ranging in its scope, and leaves no stone unturned in its quest to help us all understand who we are and where we are going.

To learn more about Will Tuttle, and to buy his book, go to his website, http://willtuttle.com

Will also has a World Peace Diet group on Facebook, which you can join.

Part 2 of this 3-part interview will be next time…

The Low Density Lifestyle book is now out! You can check out an excerpt from the book, and buy it, at the Low Density Lifestyle bookstore.

The Low Density Lifestyle Book is Here and On Sale for the Holidays!!

Just in time for the holidays, and to help you, your friends and your family live a healthier and happier life, from now until Dec. 31, the Low Density Lifestyle book and ebook are on sale!

When you buy one copy of the Low Density Lifestyle book at the regular price of $19.95, you will get a second copy free! And the ebook, normally $12.95, is on sale for $9.95.

Don’t delay – get your copy now, and make your holidays a Low Density Lifestyle one! Just scroll down to the order info below and you’ll be able to make the purchase.

Get your copy now of The Low Density Lifestyle, in book or ebook format!

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The Low Density Lifestyle is the revolutionary new book by Dr. Michael Wayne, author of the groundbreaking book, Quantum-Integral Medicine: Towards a New Science of Healing and Human Potential.

The Low Density Lifestyle is experiencing and living in a more relaxed, less stressed, and calm, clear and focused manner on an everyday basis. It is also a way that can lead you to better health and happiness, along with living a more fulfilled and enlightened life.

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Get your copy now, and get ready to change your life!

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The PETA Interviews, Part 3

Today is the final segment in this three-part interview with Ashley Gonzalez of PETA.

In case you missed Part 1 or Part 2, here’s the links:
The PETA Interviews, Part 1
The PETA Interviews, Part 2

In this interview we talk about talks about PETA”s mission; animal cruelty in slaughterhouses and on farms; the prevalence of E. coli and salmonella in animals and why this occurs; the detrimental effects of eating dairy foods; and PETA’s sexiest vegetarian over 50 contest.

After you watch this video, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it is a very enlightening discussion.

To learn more about PETA, go to peta.org, and to learn about the sexiest vegetarian over 50 contest, go to PETAprime.org.

The PETA Interviews, Part 2

Today I give you the second part of a three-part interview with Ashley Gonzalez of PETA.

The other day was part 1 of this interview, and in this interview we carry on from there.

In this interview we talk about PETA’s outrageous billboard they put up in downtown Glasgow, Scotland; the health benefits of not eating meat; the relationship between eating meat and climate change – meat production is the number one cause of climate change; animal cruelty and the meat industry; how far removed we are from the source of our food; PETA’s educational outreach programs in schools; the origins of the swine flu; and much, more more.

I’m sure when you watch the above video you’ll agree with me that the discussion is an enlightening one.

To learn more about PETA, go to peta.org

This interview will be continued next time…

The PETA Interviews, Part 1

Last week I mentioned that PETA had announced their 2010 sexiest vegetarian male and female over 50 contest, and today I follow that up with the above video, which is the first part of a three-part interview with Ashley Gonzalez of PETA.

I’ve written about PETA in the past – I wrote articles about Mimi Kirk and Julian Winter, the winners of PETA’s 2009 sexiest vegetarian female and male, and I also did a three-part interview with Mimi.

I’ve also written about some of the outrageous things PETA has done with the article The PETA Hijinks. The article covered such things as their banned Super Bowl ad “Veggie Love,” their attempt to pay the city of Topeka, Kansas $6,000 to fill potholes in their streets and mark the repairs with messages condemning Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the billboard they put up in Glasgow, Scotland linking meat eating to man-boobs.

Today’s interview discusses PETA’s mission, their origins, their work in animal rights, their sexiest vegetarian over 50 contest (and their sexiest vegetarian next door contest), the benefits of a vegetarian/vegan diet, and their famous “Veggie Love” ad.

To learn more about PETA, you can go to PETA.org. And to enter into the 2010 sexiest vegetarian over 50 contest, go to PETAprime.org.

To be continued next time…

Wilhelm Reich – Putting the Body in Mind-Body Healing, Part 3

Today’s article is the last of a three-part article on Wilhelm Reich. The first article in this series, Wilhelm Reich – Putting the Body in Mind-Body Medicine, Part 1, discussed who Reich was and why his ideas were so radical and pioneering for his time, the early to mid 20th century.

In the second part of this series, Wilhelm Reich – Putting the Body in Mind-Body Medicine, Part 2, I discussed Reich’s discovery of orgone energy, and his development of the orgone energy accumulator, or orgone box.
The box was used to heal cancer and other chronic, degenerative illnesses.

Today, in the last part of this series, I’ll discuss why the U.S. government, threatened by Reich’s orgone energy, went after Reich with a vengeance.

Reich’s downfall began in 1947 with an article entitled “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich” that appeared in New Republic magazine.

Authored by freelance writer Mildred Edie Brady, it was filled with distortions and innuendos about Reich’s sexual theories and orgone research. Brady’s most inflammatory claim was that Reich was building accumulators of orgone energy “which are rented out to patients who presumably derived orgastic potency from it.”

Implying that Reich was a danger to the public, Brady challenged the medical authorities to take action against him. Two months later, the article was brought to the attention of the Food and Drug Administration. The result was a ten-year campaign by the FDA designed to destroy Reich’s work.

The FDA focused on the orgone energy accumulator which Reich and his physicians were using experimentally with patients. Convinced that the accumulator was being fraudulently promoted as a sexual and medical device, FDA agents spent years interviewing Reich’s associates, physicians, students and patients, looking for dissatisfied users. None were ever found. As the FDA’s investigation continued, so did Reich’s work.

Reich continued to develop new ways to visualize, measure, and harness orgone energy from the atmosphere. The cloudbuster, for example, was an experimental instrument that could affect weather patterns by altering concentrations of orgone energy in the atmosphere. It comprised a set of hollow metal pipes and cables inserted into water, creating a stronger orgone energy system than that in the surrounding atmosphere.

Water, which strongly attracts and absorbs orgone, draws the atmospheric orgone through the pipes. This movement of orgone from a lower to a higher energy system was used by Reich to create clouds and to dissipate them.

Reich used the cloudbuster to conduct dozens of experiments involving what he called “Cosmic Orgone Engineering (C.O.R.E.).” One of the most notable occurred in 1953. During a long drought that threatened the Maine blueberry crop, several farmers offered to pay Reich if he could bring rain to the parched region. The weather bureau had forecast no rain for several days when Reich began his cloudbusting operations.

Ten hours later, a light rain began to fall. Over the next few days, close to two inches fell. The blueberry crop was saved, and in local newspaper articles the farmers credited Reich.

In February 1954, the FDA filed a Complaint for Injunction against Reich in the Federal Court in Portland, Maine. The Complaint declared that orgone energy does not exist, and asked the Court to prohibit the shipment of accumulators in interstate commerce and to ban Reich’s published literature which they claimed was labeling for the accumulators.

After considerable thought and discussion of this matter, Reich responded with a lengthy letter to Judge John Clifford, explaining that he could not appear in Court, since doing so would allow a Court of law to judge basic scientific research.

He wrote:
“Scientific matters can only be clarified by prolonged, faithful bona fide observations in friendly exchange of opinion, never by litigation… Man’s right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan.

Furthermore, Reich asserted, if his painstakingly elaborated and published findings “…over a period of 30 years could not convince this administration, or will not be able to convince any other administration of the true nature of the discovery of the Life Energy, no litigation in any court anywhere will ever help to do so. I, therefore, submit, in the name of truth and justice that I shall not appear in court as the ‘defendant’ against a plaintiff who by his mere complaint already has shown his ignorance in matters of natural science.”

Judge Clifford did not accept Reich’s letter as a valid legal response, and on March 19, 1954, a Decree of Injunction was issued on default as if Reich had never responded at all. But the Injunction itself was even more excessive than the initial Complaint:
•    it ordered orgone energy accumulators and their parts to be destroyed
•    it ordered all materials containing instructions for the use of the accumulator to be destroyed
•    it banned a list of Reich’s books containing statements about orgone energy, until such time that all references to orgone energy were deleted

After the initial shock, Reich continued his research, traveling to Arizona to experiment with the cloudbuster in the dry desert environment. While he was there, and without his knowledge, one of Reich’s students—Dr. Michael Silvert—moved a truckload of accumulators and books from Rangeley, Maine to New York City, a direct violation of the Injunction.

As a result, the FDA charged Reich and Silvert with criminal contempt of court. Following a jury trial, both men were found guilty on May 7, 1956. Reich was sentenced to two years in federal prison, Silvert was sentenced to a year and a day. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation—founded in Maine in 1949 by students and friends to preserve Reich’s Archives and to secure the future of his discovery of the Cosmic Life Energy—was fined $10,000.

While Reich appealed his sentence, the government carried out the destruction of orgone accumulators and literature. In Maine, several boxes of literature were burned, and accumulators and accumulator materials either destroyed or dismantled.

In New York City, on August 23, 1956, the FDA supervised the burning of several tons of Reich’s publications in one of the city’s garbage incinerators, including titles that were only to have been banned. Among the materials burned were:
•    Orgone Energy Bulletin (12,189 copies)
•    International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (6,261 copies)
•    Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics (2,900 copies)
•    Annals of the Orgone Institute (2976 copies)
•    The Oranur Experiment (872 copies)
•    Character Analysis
•    Cosmic Superimposition
•    Ether, God, and Devil

•    Listen, Little Man
•    People in Trouble
•    The Cancer Biopathy
•    The Function of the Orgasm
•    The Mass Psychology of Fascism
•    The Murder of Christ
•    The Sexual Revolution

This destruction of literature constitutes one of the most heinous examples of censorship in United States history.

On March 8, 1957, Reich signed his Last Will and Testament. Among its stipulations was the establishment of The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund as the legal entity charged with operating Orgonon (Orgonon was Reich’s 160-acre farm in Maine) as The Wilhelm Reich Museum; protecting, preserving, and transmitting his scientific legacy to future generations; and safeguarding Reich’s Archives.

All appeals denied, on March 12, 1957—two weeks shy of his 60th birthday—Wilhelm Reich was temporarily incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Penitentiary in Connecticut. On March 22, he was taken to the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He died there of heart failure on November 3, 1957, and was buried at Orgonon.

Wilhelm Reich – Putting the Body in Mind-Body Healing, Part 2

In the last article, Wilhelm Reich – Putting the Body in Mind-Body Medicine, Part 1, I discussed how Reich, an Austrian-American psychiatrist who trained under Sigmund Freud, is the person most responsible for uniting mind and body and pioneering mind-body medicine.

And as I mentioned in the article, he is largely forgotten now. Reich died in 1957 a broken man, in prison, having been persecuted by the U.S. government.

The year he went to prison, in 1956, the U.S. government burned tons of his writings and papers. And as a consequence of that, Reich wrote in his will that his remaining papers were to be sealed and not opened for 50 years, in 2007, because he felt that by then a more enlightened society would exist that could appreciate his ideas better.

And what was Reich’s terrible crime that had the U.S. government coming after him?

His crime was his promotion of what he called orgone energy. In the 1930s Reich discovered a physical, biological energy in all living matter that he called “orgone,” and for the next two decades devoted his life to the investigation of its laws and properties.

Through his research, Reich confirmed the existence of this energy in the human body, verified its presence in the atmosphere, developed instrumentation to observe and collect it, and harnessed it for a variety of purposes from cancer treatment to motor power to weather experimentation.

This is what he had to say about orgone energy:
“I am well aware of the fact that the human race has known about the existence of a universal energy related to life for many ages. However, the basic task of natural science consisted of making this energy usable. This is the sole difference between my work and all preceding knowledge.”

Reich had started his career as a protege of Sigmund Freud, but broke with him over differing views of libido and sexual energy.

Freud had originally discovered that neuroses are caused by the conflict between natural sexual instincts and the social denial and frustration of those instincts. Freud had also hypothesized the existence of a biological sexual energy in the body. He called it “libido,” and described it as “something which is capable of increase, decrease, displacement and discharge, and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body.”

But over the years, Freud and his followers diluted much of this concept, reducing the libido to little more than a psychological energy or idea. By 1925, Freud had concluded that “the libido theory may therefore for the present be pursued only by the path of speculation.”

But Reich’s clinical work and research led him to believe otherwise. He observed that sexual energy is more than just an idea, and that sexual gratification, in fact, alleviated neurotic symptoms. He discovered that the function of the orgasm is to maintain an energy equilibrium by discharging excess biological energy that builds up naturally in the body.

As he continued his research into primordial sexual energy, using technical equipment to measure biological activity and phenomena related to sexual energy, what he found was at the root of this energy was a type of radiation emitted that did not obey any known laws of electricity or magnetism. Reich called this energy “orgone,” because its discovery had evolved from his investigation of the orgasm function, and because this energy could charge organic materials.

He determined that orgone radiation seemed to permeate all substances, which led him to constantly confront questions about the origins of this energy. Where did orgone energy come from, he wondered?

To isolate and collect orgone, Reich relied on the results of several laboratory experiments. These experiments demonstrated that organic or non-metallic materials—such as cotton, wool or plastic—attract, absorb, and hold the energy. Metallic materials —like steel and iron—attract the energy and quickly reflect it in both directions.

On the basis of these findings, Reich constructed small boxes with alternating layers of organic and metallic materials, with the inner walls lined with metal. By looking through a specially designed lens inserted into a wall of each box, one could observe orgone radiation within the enclosure.

Reich now faced the daunting possibility of having discovered a biological energy that seemed to be everywhere, while still pondering the perplexing question of where orgone energy originated.

Reich was living in New York City by this time, and the accumulator quickly became an increasingly vital tool for his research. The accumulator’s organic layers attracted the atmospheric energy which was directed inward by the metal layers. Any energy reflected outward by the metal layers was immediately re-absorbed by the organic material, attracted back to the metal, and directed toward the inside of the box. The result was a higher concentration of orgone energy inside the box. The more layers, the stronger the concentration.

The accumulator now allowed Reich to test the effects of orgone radiation on cancer mice, by simply placing the mice inside the metal-lined enclosure. Because his results with cancer mice were so promising, Reich decided to test the effects of orgone radiation on humans. He constructed accumulators large enough for a person to sit in, and in 1941 began experimental treatments with cancer patients.

They were all terminal cases. Reich promised no cure nor charged any money, as shown by the affidavit that his patients and/or their family members were required to sign:

“I state herewith that I came to see Dr. Wilhelm Reich for possibly helping the case of my _____ who suffers from cancer. I came because I was told of the experiments that Dr. Reich has made with cancer mice and human beings. Dr. Reich did not promise me any cure, did not charge any money, and told me that only during the last few months has he tried the orgone radiation on human begins who suffer from cancer. Death or abscesses could occur as a consequence of the disease. I told Dr. Reich that the physicians have given up the case of my _____ as hopeless. Should death or abscesses occur during the time of the experiment, it will not be because of the treatment.”

Over a period of time, the patients showed marked improvement: relief of pain, healthier blood condition, weight gain, and the shrinkage and elimination of tumors. Despite these positive results, the patients died, reinforcing Reich’s conviction that cancer is a bio-energetic shrinking following emotional resignation, and that the tumors themselves are not the disease, but merely a local manifestation of a deeper systemic disorder. Once again, Reich’s focus became prevention.

Next time: Why the U.S. government, threatened by the concept of orgone energy, went after Wilhelm Reich.

Wilhelm Reich – Putting the Body In Mind-Body Healing, Part 1

During this series on The Roots of Healing, I’ve been writing about different systems of medicine and healing. The last article in this series was on homeopathy.

Today I will veer away from discussing systems of healing to discuss a pioneer in the field, someone who put the body back in mind-body medicine.

His name was Wilhelm Reich, and he was a man far ahead of his time, but unfortunately he is for the most part forgotten.

Born in 1897 in the part of Europe that was once the Austro-Hungarian empire, he went to medical school and became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In the 1920s he became a protege of Sigmund Freud, and was considered one of his top underlings.

Yet as the years progressed, Reich saw limitations in the traditional psychotherapeutic approach, and felt that just working with the mind was insufficient in helping people free themselves of their burdens. He maintained that the body needed to be involved in psychotherapy also, and he founded the entire approach of body-centered psychotherapy, of which to this day there are many schools of thought.

Thus, the entire realm of mind-body medicine has Wilhelm Reich to thank, because he was willing to break with the convention and doctrine of his time and take medicine and healing into new frontiers.

Many well-known psychiatrists and psychologists followed Reich’s lead and developed new body-centered psychotherapies.

The first generation of Reich followers were such people as Alexander Lowen, who developed Bioenergetic Analysis; Fritz Perls, who developed Gestalt Therapy; Arthur Janov, who developed Primal Therapy; and Ida Rolf, who developed Rolfing.

Thus, without the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich, there would have been none of these other breakthrough therapies.

Yet today, Reich is sadly forgotten. Part of that is because he died in jail a broken man, in 1957 at the age of 60, completely humiliated by the U.S. government. He was sentenced to two years in prison in 1956, for the crime of inventing something called an orgone energy accumulator, which he claimed could heal illness and restore a person’s energy field.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigated the orgone accumulator and decided it had no merit, and put a cease order on their sales. When an associate of Reich’s violated the order by selling some, the FDA came after Reich and threw him in jail.

Also in 1956, in conjunction with Reich being jailed, in one of the worst incidents of censorship in U.S. history, several tons of Reich’s publications were burned by the FDA.

Reich was living in Germany in 1933 when Hitler and the Nazis came to power, and he immediately left, going to Vienna, then Scandinavia, and then eventually settling in the U.S. in 1939.

His pioneering work broke many taboos of psychiatry. The field was dominated by the work of Freud, and focused on individual neuroses. But Reich was more interested in character structure.

From 1930 onwards, Reich became more interested in his patients’ physical responses during therapy sessions, and toward the late 1930s, he began to treat patients outside the limits of psychoanalysis’s restrictions, though well within the scope of general medicine.

He began to sit next to his patients, rather than behind them, in order to make stronger “contact.” He started touching them, to both increase awareness of tension and contraction and to relieve it directly. He began talking to them, answering their questions, rather than the stock, “Why do you ask?” analyst’s response.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, this undermined the position of neutrality. The analyst is meant to be a blank screen onto which the patient projects his old desires, his loves, his hates, his neurosis—a process known as transference.

Reich wrote that the psychoanalytic taboos reinforced the neurotic taboos of the patient. He slowly broke away from them, writing that he wanted his patients to see him as human.

He would press hard on their “body armor,” his thumb or the palm of his hand pressing on their jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve their physical and mental rigidity. He wanted to see their movements soften, their breathing ease.

This dissolution of the “body armor” also brought back the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression, he wrote. If the session worked as intended, he wrote that he could see waves of pleasure move through their bodies, a series of spontaneous, involuntary movements. Reich called these the “orgasm reflex.”

The two goals of Reichian therapy became the attainment of this orgasm reflex during therapy, and orgastic potency during intercourse. Reich called the flow of energy that he said he observed in his patients’ bodies, “bio-electricity.”

He felt this could free their body, mind and emotions, and lead to a full recovery of their health problems.

And herein is where Reich touched a raw nerve: he delved into the taboo area of sex in a way that Freud had never. Whereas libido and sexual repression was an important part of Freudian psychology, it was all still conceptual, and the work with patients was all conventional psychotherapy.

Reich took it one step further, and worked with people to break free of what he called the body armor, the holding patterns that caused rigidity of the body, mind and emotions.

Reich’s work was like a breath of fresh air for 1940s America, and he enjoyed a largely uncritical press in the U.S. Along with that, his psychoanalytic theories were taught in universities and discussed in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry.

To be continued next time…

A Look at Homeopathy, Part 4

The four-part article on homeopathy concludes today with a continuation from last time on the topic of homeopathic remedies.

In case you missed the other three articles in this series on homeopathy, here are the links to the other articles:
A Look at Homeopathy, Part 1
A Look at Homeopathy, Part 2
A Look at Homeopathy, Part 3

Dilution debate

Not all homeopaths advocate extremely high dilutions. Many of the early homeopaths were originally doctors and generally used lower dilutions such as “3X” or “6X”, rarely going beyond “12X”. The split between lower and higher dilutions followed ideological lines. Those favoring low dilutions stressed pathology and a strong link to conventional medicine, while those favoring high dilutions emphasised vital force, miasms and a spiritual interpretation of disease.

Some products with such relatively lower dilutions continue to be sold, but like their counterparts, they have not been conclusively demonstrated to have any effect beyond the placebo effect.

Provings

Samuel Hahnemann experimented on himself and others for several years before using remedies on patients. His experiments did not initially consist of giving remedies to the sick, because he thought that the most similar remedy, by virtue of its ability to induce symptoms similar to the disease itself, would make it impossible to determine which symptoms came from the remedy and which from the disease itself.

Therefore, sick people were excluded from these experiments. The method used for determining which remedies were suitable for specific diseases was called proving, after the original German word Prüfung, meaning “test”. A homeopathic proving is the method by which the profile of a homeopathic remedy is determined.

At first Hahnemann used material doses for provings, but he later advocated proving with remedies at a 30C dilution, and most modern provings are carried out using ultradilute remedies in which it is highly unlikely that any of the original molecules remain.

During the proving process, Hahnemann administered remedies to healthy volunteers, and the resulting symptoms were compiled by observers into a drug picture. The volunteers were observed for months at a time and made to keep extensive journals detailing all of their symptoms at specific times throughout the day.

They were forbidden from consuming coffee, tea, spices, or wine for the duration of the experiment; playing chess was also prohibited because Hahnemann considered it to be “too exciting”, though they were allowed to drink beer and encouraged to exercise in moderation. After the experiments were over, Hahnemann made the volunteers take an oath swearing that what they reported in their journals was the truth, at which time he would interrogate them extensively concerning their symptoms.

Provings have been described as important in the development of the clinical trial, due to their early use of simple control groups, systematic and quantitative procedures, and some of the first application of statistics in medicine. The lengthy records of self-experimentation by homeopaths have occasionally proven useful in the development of modern drugs: For example, evidence that nitroglycerin might be useful as a treatment for angina was discovered by looking through homeopathic provings, though homeopaths themselves never used it for that purpose at that time.

The first recorded provings were published by Hahnemann in his 1796 Essay on a New Principle.

His Fragmenta de Viribus (1805) contained the results of 27 provings, and his 1810 Materia Medica Pura contained 65.

For James Tyler Kent’s 1905 Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica, 217 remedies underwent provings and newer substances are continually added to contemporary versions.

Repertory

Homeopaths generally begin with detailed examinations of their patients’ histories, including questions regarding their physical, mental and emotional states, their life circumstances and any physical or emotional illnesses. The homeopath then attempts to translate this information into a complex formula of mental and physical symptoms, including likes, dislikes, innate predispositions and even body type^.

From these symptoms, the homeopath chooses how to treat the patient. A compilation of reports of many homeopathic provings, supplemented with clinical data, is known as a homeopathic materia medica.

But because a practitioner first needs to explore the remedies for a particular symptom rather than looking up the symptoms for a particular remedy, the homeopathic repertory, which is an index of symptoms, lists after each symptom those remedies that are associated with it. Repertories are often very extensive and may include data extracted from multiple sources of materia medica. There is often lively debate among compilers of repertories and practitioners over the veracity of a particular inclusion.

The first symptomatic index of the homeopathic materia medica was arranged by Hahnemann. Soon after, one of his students Clemens von Bönninghausen, created the Therapeutic Pocket Book, another homeopathic repertory.

The first such homeopathic repertory was Georg Jahr’s Symptomenkodex, published in German (1835), which was then first translated to English (1838) by Constantine Hering as the Repertory to the more Characteristic Symptoms of Materia Medica. This version was less focused on disease categories and would be the forerunner to Kent’s later works.  It consisted of three large volumes. Such repertories increased in size and detail as time progressed.

Some diversity in approaches to treatments exists among homeopaths. Classical homeopathy generally involves detailed examinations of a patient’s history and infrequent doses of a single remedy as the patient is monitored for improvements in symptoms, while clinical homeopathy involves combinations of remedies to address the various symptoms of an illness^.

A Look at Homeopathy, Part 3

Remedy is a technical term in homeopathy that refers to a substance prepared with a particular procedure and intended for treating patients.

Homeopathic practitioners rely on two types of reference when prescribing remedies: Materia medica and repertories. A homeopathic Materia medica is a collection of “drug pictures”, organised alphabetically by remedy, that describes the symptom patterns associated with individual remedies.

A homeopathic repertory is an index of disease symptoms that lists remedies associated with specific symptoms.Homeopathy uses many animal, plant, mineral, and synthetic substances in its remedies. Examples include Arsenicum album (arsenic oxide), Natrum muriaticum (sodium chloride or table salt), Lachesis muta (the venom of the bushmaster snake), Opium, and Thyroidinum (thyroid hormone). Homeopaths also use treatments called nosodes (from the Greek nosos, disease) made from diseased or pathological products such as fecal, urinary, and respiratory discharges, blood, and tissue. Homeopathic remedies prepared from healthy specimens are called sarcodes.

Some modern homeopaths have considered more esoteric bases for remedies, known as imponderables because they do not originate from a material but from electromagnetic energy presumed to have been “captured” by alcohol or lactose. Examples include X-rays and sunlight. Recent ventures by homeopaths into even more esoteric substances include thunderstorms (prepared from collected rainwater). Today there are about 3,000 different remedies commonly used in homeopathy.

Some homeopaths also use techniques that are regarded by other practitioners as controversial. These include paper remedies, where the substance and dilution are written on a piece of paper and either pinned to the patient’s clothing, put in their pocket, or placed under a glass of water that is then given to the patient, as well as the use of radionics to prepare remedies. 

Preparation

In producing remedies for diseases, homeopaths use a process called dynamisation or potentisation whereby a substance is diluted with alcohol or distilled water and then vigorously shaken by ten hard strikes against an elastic body in a process called succussion.

While Hahnemann advocated using substances which produce symptoms similar to those of the disease being treated, he found that material doses would intensify the symptoms and exacerbate the condition, sometimes causing what amounted to dangerous toxic reactions. He therefore specified that the substances be diluted. Hahnemann believed that the process of succussion activated the vital energy of the diluted substance. For this purpose, Hahnemann had a saddle maker construct a special wooden striking board covered in leather on one side and stuffed with horsehair. Insoluble solids, such as quartz and oyster shell, are diluted by grinding them with lactose (trituration).

Dilutions

Three logarithmic potency scales are in regular use in homeopathy. Hahnemann created the centesimal or C scale, diluting a substance by a factor of 100 at each stage. The centesimal scale was favored by Hahnemann for most of his life. A 2C dilution requires a substance to be diluted to one part in one hundred, and then some of that diluted solution diluted by a further factor of one hundred.

This works out to one part of the original substance in 10,000 parts of the solution.

A 6C dilution repeats this process six times, ending up with the original material diluted by a factor of 100⁻⁶=10⁻¹² (one part in one trillion)(1/1,000,000,000,000). Higher dilutions follow the same pattern. In homeopathy, a solution that is more dilute is described as having a higher potency, and more dilute substances are considered by homeopaths to be stronger and deeper-acting remedies. The end product is often so diluted that it is indistinguishable from the dilutant (pure water, sugar or alcohol).

Hahnemann advocated 30C dilutions for most purposes (that is, dilution by a factor of 10⁶⁰).  In Hahnemann’s time it was reasonable to assume that remedies could be diluted indefinitely, as the concept of the atom or molecule as the smallest possible unit of a chemical substance was just beginning to be recognized. The greatest dilution that is reasonably likely to contain one molecule of the original substance is 12C.

Some homeopaths developed a decimal scale (D or X), diluting the substance to ten times its original volume each stage. The D or X scale dilution is therefore half that of the same value of the C scale; for example, “12X” is the same level of dilution as “6C”. Hahnemann never used this scale but it was very popular throughout the 19th century and still is in Europe.

This potency scale appears to have been introduced in the 1830s by the American homeopath, Constantine Hering. In the last ten years of his life, Hahnemann also developed a quintamillesimal (Q) or LM scale diluting the drug 1 part in 50,000 parts of diluent. A given dilution on the Q scale is roughly 2.35 times its designation on the C scale. For example a remedy described as “20Q” has about the same concentration as a “47C” remedy.

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