Richard G. Petty, MD

Prayer and Healing

We have already talked a little about the associations between active, healthy spirituality and psychological and physical well-being.

Yet another study has highlighted the connection, showing that breast cancer patients who pray in online support groups can obtain mental health benefits.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research did the study that was that was funded by the National Cancer Institute.

The research looked at message transcripts from 97 breast cancer patients participating in an online support group that was integrated with the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) "Living with Breast Cancer" program, a computer-based health education and support system. The patients were recruited from Wisconsin and Michigan.

Surveys were administered before group access and then again four months later. Text messages within the computer-mediated support groups were analyzed using a text analysis program that measured the percentage of words that were suggestive of religious belief and practice (e.g., pray, worship, faith, holy, God). Writing a higher percentage of these religious words within the online support groups was associated with lower levels of negative emotions and higher levels of self-efficacy and functional well-being, even after controlling for patients' pre-test levels of religious beliefs.

One of the researchers had this to say:

"From a psychological standpoint, there are a variety of reasons why cancer patients may benefit from prayer - whether on the Internet or elsewhere. In reviewing the messages, some of the most common ways study participants used religion to cope with their illness included putting trust in God about the course of their illness and consequently feeling less stressed, believing in an afterlife and therefore being less afraid of death, finding blessings in their lives and appraising their cancer experience in a more constructive religious light."

And that is, of course, one set of explanations for the findings.

Or perhaps, as we have seen before, there is a growing body of research to indicate that prayer is effective.

We just have to expect it to be effective. And isn’t that faith?

“Prayer, like radium, is a luminous and self-generating form of energy.”
--Alexis Carrel (French-born American Surgeon, Experimental Biologist and, in 1912, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, 1873-1944)

"Too often we see prayer as a last resort rather than as our first thought. People will say, “I guess all we can do now is pray!” like that's the last thing, horrible thing to do. And your friend says, “Has it come to that?! Is it so hopeless that all we can do is pray?”
--Rick Warren (American Evangelist and Author, 1954-)

“Though God knows all our needs, prayer is necessary for the cleansing and enlightenment of the soul.”
-- John Sergieff of Kronstadt (Russian Priest who, in 1882, Established the House of Industriousness, 1829-1909)

“Man often thinks that, as God is the knower of the heart, there can be no need of any recital or gesture in prayer: but that it would surely be sufficient if he were to sit in the silence and think of God. But this is not so; it is according to the extent of a man’s consciousness of prayer that his prayer reaches God.”
--Hazrat Inayat Khan (Founder of the Sufi Order of the West, 1882-1927)

“Through prayer, the love of God grows and assumes a form which is called supreme devotion. Forms vanish, rituals fly away, books are superseded, images, temples, churches, religions and sects, countries and nationalities - all these little limitations and bondages fall off by their own nature from him who knows this love of God.”
--Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic and Spiritual Teacher, 1863-1902)

“Prayer is part of man's original nature. He can never be satisfied with merely meditative religion, and naturally and involuntarily inclines to move on to the religion of prayer.”
--Toyohiko Kagawa (Japanese Christian Anti-War Campaigner, 1888-1960)

“All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death.”
Thomas Merton (French-born American Trappist Monk and Writer, 1915-1968)

“There is a relationship between prayer and action. Receptive prayer results in an inner receiving, which motivates to right action.”   
-- “Peace Pilgrim”  (a.k.a. Mildred Norman, American Peace Activist, 1908-1981)

Diseases of Discipleship

You will not find them listed on WebMD, but “Diseases of Discipleship” are nonetheless very real. I have mentioned them in Healing Meaning and Purpose and also here. They are the result of sudden access to spiritual energies that can upset the balance of the body, mind and spirit. The great value of having a teacher is to help you balance and work with these energies without being harmed by them.

Several of my own teachers talked a lot about these diseases of discipleship, but I would particularly like to single out Douglas Baker and the writings of Roberto Assagioli, Del Pe, Torkom Saraydarian, Stan Grof and Alice Bailey.

I have also had a great deal of experience with people undergoing spiritual crises. Many have been referred to me by priests, clergy and intuitives, because many of the individuals thought that they were “going crazy,” and some had ben given psychiatric diagnoses. That extensive experience has helped me and some of my students to describe some of the “symptoms” in more detail.

Roberto Assagioli identified five critical points where problems may arise:

1. Just before spiritual awakening begins
2. Crises caused by spiritual awakening
3. Reactions to spiritual awakening
4. Phases of the process of transmutation
5. The “Dark Night of the Soul”

Today I am just going to focus on the crises caused by spiritual awakening, because a great many people are experiencing them at the moment.

Here are some of the more common signs and symptoms include:

• Visual disturbances
• Extreme sensitivity to light and sound
• Paradoxically they often also find a raised pain threshold
• Increased metabolic rate, which may cause a slight increase in body temperature and a little weight loss
• Variable libido: some people lose all interest in sex, but most experience an increase in sexual desire, which can take them and any partners by surprise
• Disturbances in circadian rhythms
• Disturbances in thyroid and adrenal function: the thyroid often becomes slightly – or sometimes more than slightly – overactive and the adrenal glands slightly less responsive to stimulation
• Hypoglycemia
• Hypertension
• Chronic fatigue
• Anxiety and a feeling of “butterflies” in the region of the solar plexus
• Inexplicable sensations roughly corresponding to the channels identified in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine
• Irregular breathing patterns, usually hyperventilation
• Something that feels like electricity under the tongue and under the palate
• Crying for no readily apparent reason
• As peoples’ consciousness rises, it is quite common to experience “Synesthesia” in which senses overlap: people may taste sounds, feel colors and “hear and see” with different parts of the body
• Psychic abilities often begin to appear: clairvoyance, clairaudience, spiritual intuition and the ability to heal
• Many begin to feel and see their own Inner Light and the Inner Light of other people

Not everyone gets all of these symptoms and they may come and go for a while. Some people don't get any at all, but they are unusual. There are two books by Hazel Courteney that detail some of what happened to her, and they are well worth a read.

It is important to emphasize that all of these signs and symptoms can also be caused by illnesses. So although most people who are going through all this want to avoid doctors, it is a very good idea to ensure that everything is okay. I once saw someone who had been told that she was having a kundalini experience, even though she did not have any of the usual features. She became very unwell, but felt much better when an insulin-producing tumor was removed from her pancreas.

The most important thing is to help people remain grounded. I have seen many people become extremely grandiose and even fanatical after going through a rapid spiritual awakening. It is also important to ensure that any physical symptoms - such as thyroid or blood pressure problems - do not continue unchecked.

Helping people who are going through spiritual change or crisis needs the help of a person or persons who understand physical and psychological problems, as well as being some way along the path of spiritual development. By “crisis” I do not mean crisis of faith, but a critical turning point in an individual’s personal development.

There are plenty of good ways of grounding using some physical, psychological and subtle system exercises. I have dozens of excellent techniques that I can publish if you are interested. Sometimes it is also a good idea to eat some heavy food.

It can be very helpful to get away form other people for a while. This doesn’t mean becoming a monk or nun, but just to avoid a bad case of people poisoning. In their overly sensitive state they can pick up a lot of negative things from the people around them. I have known a good many people who would begin to experience all the physical and psychological symptoms of the people around them.

Once we have confirmed that the person does not have all this as a result of thyroid disease or anxiety, it is essential to show them what is going on and the best way to approach and conceptualize it.

Next we help people to control some of the impulses that can otherwise swamp them. One of the many reasons for development of the sophisticated mind control techniques developed by Tibetan Buddhism was to help people watch their spiritual unfoldment without being overwhelmed by it.

We also try to help people to transmute psychological energies so that they can be used constructively.

Everybody is different, but in some people acupuncture, qigong, Reiki and homeopathy have all been helpful. Several of the flower essences can be very useful, in particular:
Vervain
Star Tulip
White Yarrow
Pink Yarrow

Every expert that I know in the field of spiritual development agrees with my observation that there are currently more people having major spiritual changes than ever before. It is essential for us all to know how to protect, support and birth them.

“To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance, and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance and benefit of others, by expressing in the world of forms - truth, love, purity and beauty - this is the sole game that has any intrinsic and absolute worth. All other incidents and attainments can, in themselves, have no lasting importance.”
--Meher Baba (Indian Spiritual Teacher who, from July 1925 maintained Silence, 1894-1969)

“You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open.”
--Jalal al-Din Rumi (Afghan Sufi Poet, 1207-1273)

“Life is a series of awakenings.”
--Sri Swami Sivananda (Indian Physician and Spiritual Teacher, 1887-1963)

“What we usually call human evolution is the awakening of the Divine Nature within us.”
--“Peace Pilgrim” (a.k.a. Mildred Norman, American Peace Activist, 1908-1981)

RP On The Radio Part Deux

I mentioned that Kim Colvard and I were going to be having an online discussion. We covered a lot of topics and we’ve had some great feedback.

We are definitely going to do this again!

You can download the file here.

Enjoy!

Communicating About Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Two of the key points about Integrated Medicine are transparency and integration of different approaches.

It is true to say that all healing is ultimately self-healing, but at the heart of healing lies relationship: how we communicate with every part of ourselves, with other people and with our health care providers. At the most mundane level, there is published data that if a health care provider has a good relationship with the person coming to them for help, the chance that the person will follow through on a treatment plan is four times higher than if they meet a health care provider who just grunts at them.

There is also a magic that can happen in strong, dynamic relationships based on partnership rather than dominance: one of the themes of Healing, Meaning and Purpose.

It worried, but did not surprise me to see a study released today.

Most Americans age 50 and older use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), such as supplements, herbal products or acupuncture. The trouble is that - according to a survey conducted by AARP and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine - they often do not tell their doctors or nurses.

It is very much in person's best interests to tell their doctor about the CAMs that they are taking because some unorthodox medicines may interfere with over-the-counter medications, prescription drugs, or other conventional medical approaches. See here for an example of some herbal remedies and supplements that may interact with psychotropic medicines.

As the report says, "Communication between patients and physicians about CAM and conventional therapies is vital to ensuring safe, integrated use of all health care approaches."

It goes on to say something that we have been preaching for years: an open dialog "allows patients and physicians the opportunity to identify CAM practices that might be beneficial and also minimizes risks to a patient from potential therapy interactions."

Among a total of 1,559 individuals age 50 and older surveyed in the spring of 2006, 63 percent reported having used one or more CAM therapies.

According to the survey - which can be found here - people between the ages of 50 and 59 are the most likely to report CAM use.

Forty-five percent of CAM enthusiasts used massage therapy, chiropractic manipulation or other bodywork; 42 percent used herbal or dietary supplements; 15 percent used mind/body practices, including hypnosis and meditation; 14 percent used naturopathy, acupuncture, or homeopathy; and 10 percent had tried energy therapies.

Sixty-six percent of CAM users said they did so to treat a specific health problem; 65 percent for overall wellness; 45 percent to supplement conventional medicine; and 42 percent to prevent illness.

Sixty-nine percent of those who reported using CAM had not discussed it with a doctor.

The intersting qustion is, "Why?"

Forty-two percent said because their doctor never asked; 30 percent said they did not know they should; 19 percent felt there was not enough time during the office visit; 17 percent didn't think the doctor would know about the topic; and 12 percent thought the doctor would be dismissive or tell them not to use CAM.

Women were more likely than men to have discussed CAM use with their doctor (26 percent vs 16 percent) and those younger than age 65 were more likely to discuss CAM use than were older individuals.

The report concludes that "patients need to mention CAM use to their physicians and physicians need to ask about it."

Separation and Integration

“The ego always seeks to divide and separate. The Holy Spirit always seeks to unify and heal.”
--A Course in Miracles (Book of Spiritual Principles Scribed by Dr. Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1975, and First Published in 1976)

Many of us feel that we have lost or forgotten something important and it nags at us. In the Matrix, Morpheus tries to capture this when he says, “There is a splinter in your mind.”

What we have forgotten is the hidden secret not only to who we are but also to what we may become.

There are hundreds of thousands of books, websites, classes, groups and, of course, religions that all say that they have an answer to those two questions. And I tend to believe that they probably all do. But each has only a part of the puzzle.

Integrated Medicine was always designed to provide answers synthesized from the very best of what is already available.

I am always being asked whether Integrated Medicine is an approach toward health and wellness, a method of achieving personal growth and development or some form of holistic treatment?

The answer is “Yes!”

The goal is not to replace other forms of self-care or treatment, but to integrate and enhance them. The reason for using the term “Integrated,” and why it is a little different from Integrative or Integral medicine, is that it aims to:

1. Integrate an individual’s current health and wellness practices into a combined whole
2. Integrate all the parts of a person, for the quotation is true: the role of the ego is to separate itself from the rest of the Universe, and healing come from the Source: your Informational Matrix, your Inner Light or Soul
3. Integrate healing methods that will ensure that each aspect of you being is addressed and respected so that the healing can flow. Not only of your body, but of your mind, relationships, the planet, society, subtle systems and your spirituality
4. Integrate your views about the nature of reality: healing is not simply a matter of fixing a physical machine. In any case, this is not always possible. The objective is not to “use” methods and insights to heal the body. It is rather to ask that your Overself or Higher Self teach you the right perception of your body and your mind. That is why I am always recommending that the first thing that you can do for yourself is to develop your intuition so that it provides a delicate counterbalance to your ability to reason. If you have ever been to a gym, you know the importance of exercising not just your bicep muscle, but your triceps muscle as well. One without the other will make you lopsided. So it is with intellect and intuition.
5. Integrate the personal you with something beyond yourself. The ultimate aim of Integrated Medicine is not simply to stay well, but to return to Wholeness

And all have been done already with tens of tousands of people around the globe.

Will you be next?

“To have a curable illness and to leave it untreated except for prayer is like sticking your hand in a fire and asking God to remove the flame.”
-- Unknown Author (Sometimes attributed to “Sandra L. Douglas”)

"A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
--Abraham Lincoln (American Statesman and, from 1861-1865, the 16th President of the United States, 1809-1865)

“In the integral Yoga, the integral life down to even the smallest detail has to be transformed, to become Divine.”
--- The Mother of Pondicherry (a.k.a. Mirra Alfassa, French-born Indian Spiritual Teacher, 1878-1973)

Medicine and Creativity

The Lancet medical journal has just published this year's themed issue on the topic of 'Creativity and Medicine'.

If you click on the link, you will be taken to a digital edition of the special issue. The digital edition is an exact facsimile of the print copy and is available for one month. You can turn pages just as you would with a print edition and even print off the pages for your own personal use.

The Lancet is one of the journals that you will find in the "Journal" listing on the left of this blog.

Many of the articles are extremely interesting and thought provoking: "Writing and healing;" "Development of children's creativity to foster peace;" "Healing through art therapy;" "Theatre - a force for health promotion;" "Hospital clowns;" "Healing architecture; " "Healing gardens;" "Chance favors the prepared mind" and "What can the arts bring to medical training?" were some of my favorites, and give you a good flavor of what's in store for you.

You will also see how this fits very precisely with a true Integrated Medicine.

One caution: it IS a medical journal and there are one or two articles near the back that are not for the squeamish.

With that caveat, there is much food for thought in these articles, and the Lancet deserves our thanks for making them available for free. Even if it is only for a month!

Growing Evidence for the Efficacy of Homeopathic Medicine

When you first hear about homeopathy it sounds like utter nonsense: "like curing like"; vital forces; miasms and super-dilute remedies that no longer contain a single molecule of the original substance.

The trouble is that - apart from two centuries of clinical experience - there is a respectable and growing body of evidence that there is indeed something to homeopathy. David Reilly from the Center for Integrative Care in Glasgow, Scotland, has written a very useful paper that is available for free download.

Over in the "Resources" section on the left hand side of the blog I have a link to a reading list that I put together for Amazon.com.

There are many good introductory books on homeopathy, and I have mentioned some of the best. There are also a few books that delve into some of the science that could well provide a mechanism by which homeopathy may work.

In the coming weeks I shall be putting together some more reading list as well as summaries of the research into this fascinating field.

There is a final point. Homeopathic medicines, Flower essences and many forms of "Energy medicine" seem to have been becoming more effective over the last few decades, and this observation was one of the reasons for believing that New Laws of Healing are emerging.

Let me give you a simple example. Two weeks ago, I heard about a woman in the first trimester of pregnancy was being seen because of a quite severe mood problem. She had such severe morning sickness that she asked to have a trash can positioned next to her chair. Many experts believe that morning sickness begins as a reflex to expel food toxins that might harm the baby, but then develops into a neurologically-mediated cycle.

The patient had never heard of homeopathy and probably did not understand why she was asked some apparently irrelevant questions. She answered that she would feel better in the evening, if she applied pressure or a wash cloth to her stomach. She also reported that the sudden cold spell had made her much worse, and that stress and spicy foods made her much worse.

She was given the remedy Nux vomica in a very low potency. The nausea and vomiting stopped immediately, never to return. And her mood - which had been bad for many months before she became pregnant - also improved.

This is another one of those "N of one" reports, and the plural of anecdote is not data. But I was trained by homeopaths, some of whom had been in practice since the 1930s, and all had sat at the feet of some of the greatest homeopaths on the last century. Yet they all said that problems like morning sickness normally need repeated treatments over several days. Not a single treatment and it's gone.

If you keep you eyes open you will be amazed to see how the efficacy of some forms of treatment appear to be getting better, while some others are becoming less effective with time.

Healing the Broken Brain

I recently reviewed a fascinating book on adult neurogenesis: the creation of new neurons; something that was thought to be impossible until very recently. It is still thought to occur in certain specific regions of the brain, but even that may be changing.
   
The field is moving forward very rapidly and is important to every one of us, which is the reason for writing so much about the topic.

There is an exceptionally interesting article in the current issue of the journal Neuron. Researchers from Lund in Sweden have shown that cells generated from stem cells in an adult, diseased and damaged brain function as normal nerve cells. Not only do the new cells function like proper neurons, they also try to make connections with other neurons, indicating that they are trying to repair, or compensate for diseased or damaged parts of the brain.

This work was done in rats and is in its infancy, but it part of a global effort to learn more about how new neurons are formed, how they function and whether it is possible to help the brain heal itself after a disease or injury.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that it is possible. In Healing, Meaning and Purpose I described an individual with a severe neurological problem that responded to a novel treatment method using the subtle systems of the body. One of the goals of Integrated Medicine is to establish how best to use such methods in combination with conventional medicine not just to treat someone, but to initiate healing.

“A therapist doesn’t heal, he lets healing be.”
--A Course in Miracles (Book of Spiritual Principles Scribed by Dr. Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1975, and First Published in 1976)

True Integrated Medicine

“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.”
--Count Leo Tolstoy (Russian Writer and Philosopher, 1828-1910)

“The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole.”
--Plato (Athenian Philosopher, 428-348 B.C.E.)

Have you ever woken up in the morning with a feeling that something’s not quite right, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? That is the feeling that we get if something is out of place. Our minds and our brains have evolved with a remarkable ability to pinpoint things in external space: it was once an important survival mechanism. As we became more complex, those same systems began to be able to tell when things were out of place in our internal environment as well as in our relationships. We are social animals and most of the cognitive systems of the brain are designed to aid and abet our social interactions.

The key to health is to have all of our systems working in harmony. It is absolutely true that 70% of human illness is a result behavior born of bad choices. We make those bad choices when we stop listening to our bodies and heeding our hearts.

People love to place us in categories. I am constantly being asked why all my work contains three parts: cutting edge conventional medicine, natural medicine and self-help. I’ve had people in the publishing business say, “Well, is it health OR self-help?” For me, the answer to that is yes!

We cannot attain health and wellness unless we have done some work on ourselves; we cannot heal ourselves and others unless we have something with which to do the healing. If we are fearful, and moving haphazardly through life with little self-control, it is hard to pay attention to your body, mind, relationships, subtle systems or spirituality. A physician too distracted to focus on and respect another person is unlikely to help him or her get better. A therapist without a strong sense of self would find it hard to help a troubled mind, and a spiritual teacher who had no personal experience of the Higher Realms of existence and no clear moral compass, could devastate the spiritual well being of a disciple.

When we talk about Integrated Medicine, people usually assume that we are only talking about integrating different types of treatment. Yet that is only part of it. We are also aiming to integrate the individual: to enable every aspect of the person to be acting in harmony. When all of our systems are in harmony, pulling together in the same direction, when they are listening to each other and communicating with each other, there is a free flow of energy and we achieve a state of coherence.

And it is this coherence that underlies our sense of health and well being.

For coherence is the key to resilience.

“The patient must combat the disease along with the physician.”
--Hippocrates (Greek Physician, c.460 B.C.E.- c.377 B.C.E.)

“Those whose consciousness is unified abandon all attachment to the results of action and attain supreme peace. But those whose desires are fragmented, who are selfishly attached to the results of their work, are bound in everything they do.”
--Bhagavad Gita

Music and the Mind

The next book in the Healing, Meaning and Purpose cycle will be entitled Sacred Cycles. One chapter is entitled Music and the Mind. I am in no doubt that music can produce incredibly powerful healing.

I was interested to read about a small study published in the journal Brain.

Canadian scientists from McMaster University compared 6 children aged four to six who took music lessons for a year with 6 children who did had no music lessons outside school. The six who had lessons attended a Suzuki music school, using a Japanese approach that encourages children to listen to and imitate music before they attempt to read it.

They found the musical group performed better on a memory test also designed to assess general intelligence skills such as literacy and mathematical ability.

The investigators also measured changes in the children's brain electrical responses to sounds during the year. They measured brain activity using a technique called magnetoencephelography while the children listened to two types of sounds: a violin tone or a burst of white noise.

All the children recorded larger responses when listening to the violin tones compared with the white noise - indicating that more of the brain’s activity was being deployed to process meaningful sounds.
All the children responded more quickly to the sounds over the course of the year of the study - suggesting greater efficiency of the maturing brain.

However, when the researchers focused on a specific measurement related to attention and sound discrimination, they found a greater change over the year among the Suzuki children.

In the group having music lessons, there were measurable changes in as little as four months. Previous studies have shown that older children given music lessons recorded greater improvements in IQ scores than children given drama lessons, but this is the first time that such young children have been tested.

Though this is only a small study, it strongly suggests that music is good for children's cognitive development. I ifnd this particularly interesting after researchers appeard to have dismantled the "Mozart Effect." Perhaps they were premature in doing so.

I also take my hat off the researchers. As someone who’s done a lot of scanning and measurement, I know only too well, that to get young children to stay still enough to get meaningful readings must have been a Labor of Hercules!

I’d also like to mention a conference in November that sadly I shall not be able to attend, but promises to be a splendid event. It’s the International Sound Healing Conference, taking place on November 10-14 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They have a stellar group of presenters, including Jill Purce, Don Campbell, Fabien Maman, James D’Angelo, Master Charles Cannon, John Diamond and a host of other experts in the fields of sound and healing. It should be quite an event!

“Words are the pen of the heart, but music is the pen of the soul.” --Shneur Zalman of Liadi (Rabbi and Founder of Chabad Lubavitch, 1745-1812)

“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.” --Robert Fripp (Musician, Guitarist and Spiritual Seeker, 1946-)

Chronic Fatigue, RNase Deficiency and Spiritual Development

I was very sorry to hear that Ken Wilber, whose work I admire enormously, has recently been very unwell. While weakened by an underlying chronic illness, he took a nasty fall that has left him pretty badly bruised, and with some possible neurological problems. Fortunately he is already somewhat better.

According to Ken, his underlying illness is a form of chronic fatigue syndrome called or caused by RNase-L Enzyme Dysfunction. People with the problem develop a number of bizarre symptoms apart from fatigue, including muscle weakness, fevers and immune dysfunction. The RNase enzyme is normally activated when a cell has to deal with viruses, some toxins and some bacteria. There is a good introduction here.

There is a growing literature on the subject: investigators from Brussels have recently shown a link between exercise performance and immune dysfunction in some of these patients. It may be that elevated RNase-L enzyme activity may provide us with a biological marker for some cases of chronic fatigue syndrome. Despite this research, I still have many colleagues who continue to say that chronic fatigue syndrome and a probably related condition, Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, are purely psychological problems.

I am quite sure that they are wrong.

Not least because there are very few illnesses that can be reduced to just psychological or just physical causes. These artificial distinctions do little to help people suffering with genuine problems. (You may be interested to have a look at a brief piece that I wrote about this artificial distinction.)

I do know that the most difficult problems that I have ever faced in clinical practice have been the chronic fatigue syndromes and a possibly related problem: interstitial cystitis. The only things that have helped have been approaches employing the five dimensional approach: physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual.

And now I’m going to go out on a limb and do something that normally I do not. I will normally not make even the broadest comments about someone’s diagnosis and treatment unless I’ve seen them myself: there are few things worse than people trying to diagnose at long range and when they only have half the information. But when I see symptoms like these: fatigue and fever, physical weakness and sometimes profound psychological effects, I have to ask whether the biochemical markers are actually telling us something different: that some people with these problems may actually have what used to be known as “diseases of discipleship.” An old-fashioned term used to describe some of the physical challenges and changes that may accompany spiritual evolution. If I am correct, I would predict that Ken - and many other sufferers - should also have profound disturbances of their normal circadian rhythms, some predictable but subtle endocrine disturbances, and otherwise inexplicable sensations roughly corresponding to the channels identified in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine.

One of the most startling recent discoveries in medicine has been that some of the time-honored laws of healing are changing, because we are ourselves changing very rapidly. In Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I spent a long time talking about some of the reasons for coming to that understanding, and how to use it to improve our health and well-being. I fully expect to spend the remainder of my career showing people how these new laws and principles can help us all, as well as ensuring that appropriate research continues to help us develop these new understandings about health and wellness.

So I’m going to suggest that Ken’s problems might never have happened if he hadn’t been on such a deep spiritual quest, and if he hadn’t been turning up a lot of answers that matter.

Get well Ken!

Technorati tags: Ken Wilber Chronic fatigue syndrome RNase deficiency Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome Interstitial cystitis Spiritual development Circadian rhythm Integrated medicine Integrative medicine Laws of Healing 

Healia.com

Carol Kirshner, web mistress extraordinaire, has just alerted me to a great resource for anyone looking for information on health, wellness and healing, called Healia.com.

Carol's review is excellent, and now that I've tried out the website, I really do share her enthusiasm.

One of the reasons for creating my own blog is that the internet is full of medical misinformation. I have just been writing an article that I am going to post tomorrow. My initial reactions to some of the statements that I found on line would not have been fit for you gentle reader. Suffice to say that there were comments on some websites that betrayed a complete ignorance about the workings of the human body and recommendations that can best be described as bovine excreta.

Healia.com seems to be very different. I have been putting it through its paces, and I've so far not found a single problem or contentious area, despite throwing a lot of unusually tough questions at it. I fully anticipate that it's going to become one of my major research tools, and for matters pertaining to health, it seems to be better than any other search engine that I've found.

Technorati tags: Internet search engine Health Healing Wellness

 

Human Evolution

For more than a century, the received wisdom has been that humans finished their physical evolution between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago, and that there have been only minor changes in cognitive abilities over most of that time.

I have always found those assertions to be fundamentally flawed. Our bodies have changed beyond all recognition in the last few hundred years, as I’ve pointed out in my last book and CD series Healing Meaning and Purpose. Even more than that we have changed and are changing mentally. If we were to go back in time ten thousand or even one thousand years, we would find that people were cognitively, emotionally and morally quite different from modern humans. Not simply because of technology and the explosion of knowledge about the external universe, but because there is a dynamic relationship between our development as a species and our creations, with each feeding off the other.

It is only recently that a number of theoreticians, philosophers and psychologists have begun to look at the ways in which we are continuing to develop and what it means for all of us.

The German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers first pointed out the great moral leap forward in what he called the Axial Period, between about 700-200B.C.E., during which the foundations of many of the world’s great religions first appeared, probably in response to the prevailing violence and unpleasantness of the time. More recently the Polish-born Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser started developing intriguing models of the transformations of human consciousness. In the United States, the psychologist Clare Graves developed a revolutionary concept of developing levels of development of the personality, that has evolved into Spiral Dynamics. (You may be interested to look at a review that I have just written about an excellent CD program detailing the latest developments in this field.)

And then there is Ken Wilber whose work in this field is remarkable, and whose creation of the Integral Institute promises great things. To these luminaries I now add Dudley Lynch a writer whose work I have only recently discovered.

Dudley recently wrote a very sensitive blog item about the efforts of a person with a mental illness trying to keep himself integrated in a sea of psychic chaos. He was kind enough to publish my brief response, which needs a little more detail.

The reasons for raising these points about continuing human development are these:

1.The manifest physical changes in people over the last few hundred years have enormous – and largely neglected - implications for clinical medicine.

2. It is likely not just peoples’ physical bodies that have changed, but also their subtle systems. I pointed out in my last book and CD series that the chakra system has developed to its current point only within the last few thousand years. This continuing development is also one of the reasons why some therapies that once only worked occasionally are now becoming more stable and predictable, and why some new forms of therapy – like the tapping therapies - are now being discovered.

3. It is because of these profound changes that new forms of therapy are now being developed. Not just using a supplement here, or a breathing exercise there, but precise combinations that help guide the healing of every aspect of an individual and his or her relationships and spiritual connections.

4. Some people who appear to have psychotic illnesses are moving into new developmental stages without having passed through the necessary intermediate stages. I have just read a first person account of an English journalist who could easily have been diagnosed with a manic illness, but was almost certainly undergoing a spiritual emergence.

5. Major emotional, cognitive, moral, conscious and spiritual shifts can be profoundly frightening to many people, and are doubtless one of the reasons for the profound feelings of social dislocation and violent reactions that we are observing throughout the world.

6. It is no surprise that new spiritual pathways are now emerging. Many will doubtless be very helpful to many of the thirty million Americans who count themselves as spiritual seekers, but have not yet found what they are looking for.

7. Taken together, these new understanding about the longitudinal development of people, relationships and whole societies are already having extraordinary effects on our ability to guide them all in more healthy and integrated pathways.

Technorati tags: Human evolution Axial period Ken Wilber Karl Jaspers Alternative medicine Complementary Medicine Integrated Medicine Chakras Subtle energy

Tools of the New Laws of Healing: Extra Reading

Gentle reader, if you have been here before, you know that I am convinced that the laws of healing are evolving.  I recently wrote a series of articles for Success.com on the tools of the new laws of healing.  I wanted to post them here in case they may be helpful.

The tools of the new laws of healing 1: Acupuncture

The tools of the new laws of healing 2: Energy Medicine

The tools of the new laws of healing 3: Qigong

The tools of the new laws of healing 4: Homeopathy

The tools of the new laws of healing 5: Flower Essences

These articles encorporate research and information found in a number of the books that I have placed in my Amazon lists of the corresponding names. Links to these lists can be found here in the sidebar.  I hope that you find these useful. 

As always, if you have comments or questions, please leave them here.  I enjoy the conversation.

Technorati tags: Acupuncture, Energy Medicine, Qigong,Homeopathy, Bach Flower Essences, Health

Adjunctive Homeopathy in an Intensive Care Unit

Although we normally try to get articles quickly, we are sometimes thwarted and they can be delayed in arriving. I have only just got my hands on a study abstract that was published by a research team from Graz in Austria last October. The investigators from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Homeopathy examined the use of homeopathy in a group of severely ill people in an Intensive Care Unit.

This was a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to see whether homeopathy would be able to influence the outcome of critically ill people with severe sepsis. Seventy people entered the study, and 35 received homeopathic treatment and 35 received placebo, in addition to their regular treatment. The main outcome measure was survival. At day 30 there was no difference between the survival rates of the people receiving homeopathy and placebo. But at day 180, the survival rate in the homeopathy group was 75.8% compared to 50% in the placebo group.

One study does not make a revolution, and it is still early days for this kind of experimental work. Yet two things stand out from this small investigation:

1. The homeopathy was being used as an adjunct to conventional medical care. I sometimes get worried when practitioners of unorthodox medicine say that they would ONLY use herbs or homeopathy. The best approach has to be to combine conventional treatments with those unorthodox ones that can be shown to be helpful.

2. Trained homeopathic physicians did the prescribing. This is important: some studies have foundered because the studies tried to test just one remedy. Yet homeopaths individualize each treatment. So two people may have the same infection, but because they have different personalities and constitutional make-ups, they will receive different treatments.

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Technorati Tags: homeopathy, complementary medicine, integrated medicine

Migraine and Hormones

Migraine (can be a frightfully difficult problem to treat. It is such an interesting puzzle, that the first book that I ever wrote was on migraine and other types of headache. Migraine is a great deal more than just a severe headache. It is can also be associated with neurological symptoms, and people often become exquisitely sensitive to light and sound. Additionally, at the beginning of the attack, the stomach stops working properly, which can make the absorption of medicines very difficult. Then comes the vomiting and sometimes diarrhea.

Although migraine is usually described as a “vascular” headache, there are strong reasons for thinking that it is more than that. People who suffer from the classic type of migraine often have spreading visual problems or partial visual loss, which goes on for between ten and sixty minutes. These visual problems are likely the result of a spreading wave of neurological depression spreading over the visual cortex at the back of the brain. The sensitivity to light and sound suggests that something is going wrong in the neurological systems that normally filter sensations, and the gastrointestinal problems indicate that something is going wrong in some of the control centers of the brain. There are some real oddities about migraine: it is exceptionally uncommon in people with diabetes; appears to be slightly more common in people who are left handed and is one of the only illnesses that tends to gets better as we get older.

There are a number of well-known triggers to migraine attacks. Though the scientific literature on triggers is not conclusive, here are some of the more common ones, that if avoided, have helped a great many people:

• Stress (either during stress, or when the pressure comes off)
• Cheese
• Chocolate
• Coffee
• Citrus fruit
• Red wine
• Changes in the weather (especially when there are a lot of positive ions in the atmosphere)
• Mono-sodium glutamate (MSG)

One of the best-known features of migraine is that it is considerably more common in women and that there is often a relationship between headaches and phases of the menstrual cycle, in particular during the pre-menstrual days. There have been many small studies that have indicated that oral contraceptives might increase the risk of suffering from migraine. A new study from Trondheim in Norway, has confirmed a link between oral contraceptive and migraine. The Nord-Trøndelag Health Study was done between 1995 and 1997. It included 14,353 pre-menopausal women, of whom 13,944 (97%) responded to questions regarding their use of contraceptives. There was a significant association between migrainous and non-migrainous headaches and the women’s reported use of estrogen-containing oral contraceptives. An important finding was that there was no relationship between the number of headaches and the amount of estrogen in the contraceptive pill.

There is one more thing to factor into the equation. Over the last two decades, there have been many reports of an association between certain types of migraine and cerebrovascular accidents (“strokes”). In the largest analysis of the data, that was published in the British Medical Journal, there was indeed a higher rate of strokes in women who had migraine and who were taking oral contraceptives. These studies included some of the older ones done in the days when the doses of hormones were higher than they are today, but when making decisions, it is important to be aware of this rare association.

An editorial in the British Medical Journal made these recommendations, with which I agree:

1. In an otherwise healthy young person, there is little cause for concern because the absolute risk of stroke is very low.

2. People with migraine who are on oral contraceptives have another reason for not smoking

3. Use low dose estrogen or progesterone only contraceptives in young women with migraine.

4. Although there isn’t much good evidence, many neurologists suggest stopping oral contraceptive pills if the migraine becomes more frequent or changes in character.

5. The risk of stroke gradually increases over age, particularly in smokers, so a slightly older smoking woman with migraine, should probably not be taking an oral contraceptive, unless it is the only option for her.

Technorati tags: migraines,hormones, headache, womens health

Integrated Health and Aging

An important principle of the emerging laws of health and healing is that anything helpful should help more than one system of the body at a time. So a diet that might help mitigate the effects of aging in the skin should also have beneficial effects on the major organs of the body.

So I was encouraged to see a new report indicating that cardiovascular health and a healthy lifestyle are associated with maintaining the health of our brains as we age. This is, of course, intuitively obvious, but it is always nice to see such things confirmed by empirical research.

The new report is from a multi-Institute collaboration of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published online in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. The chair of the committee was Hugh Hendrie, the Scottish-born professor of psychiatry from the University of Indiana, and the committee members were many of the most eminent people in the fields of aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

What is encouraging about this new report is that many of the factors associated with cognitive decline as we get older are eminently remediable: we have within our reach a set of potential interventions that could significantly reduce our personal risk of developing cognitive problems later in life. These are the things that we need to work on if we want to reduce our risk of developing cognitive decline later in life:

1. Hypertension: There is excellent evidence that inadequately treated hypertension correlates strongly with cognitive decline.
2. Physical activity: There is good evidence that elders who exercise regularly are less likely to experience cognitive decline. This is over and above the general improvement in quality of life that accompanies regular exercise. The earlier in life that we start, the easier it is to continue.
3. Increased mental activity throughout life, including learning new things and going through higher education may benefit the health of the brain.
4. Moderate alcohol use and the use of vitamin supplements also seem to be brain protectors, though the report does not specify which supplements.
5. Social disengagement and depressed mood are both associated with poorer cognitive functioning, so it is important to be alert to signs of depression, and to maintain a social network. I discuss this in more detail in my book Healing Meaning and Purpose.

There are doubtless some genetic and environmental factors about which we can do little. But the idea that we now have a list of things that we can do to protect our brains is very exciting.

This report also signals another important change. In recent years we have seen the growth of Positive Psychology, the study of how to improve ourselves rather than the constant focus on psychopathology. This report calls for the research community to study health maintenance of the brain with the same energy that it has brought to bear on the study of diseases of the brain. To which I would add, that we must not just focus on how to maintain the health of the brain, but how we can enhance it’s function so that we can all reach and exceed our full potential.

Technorati tags: aging, Integrated health, Positive Psychology, healthy lifestyle,

Acupuncture Without Needles

There are, in the United States, over 7 million people who are partially or completely disabled by back pain and another 40-50 million people who suffer from chronic recurrent headaches. Frustrated with my inability to help all my patients with conventional treatments, I have been using acupuncture since 1981. But about ten years ago I started using more acupressure, particularly since I could teach a lot of people to continue treating themselves.

Last month we saw evidence from a study using magnetoencephelography (MEG) scanning equipment that acupuncture reduces the activity of regions of the limbic system of the brain. MEG is a relatively new technology that measures the very faint magnetic fields that emanate from the head because of brain activity, instead of measuring electrical activity itself, which is a fairly blunt instrument. This reduced activity only occurred with deep needling, and when the patient experienced what is known as de qi. In Chinese medicine it is normally considered that the needle has not been correctly positioned until the patient and the practitioner both get the sensation of de qi. By contrast, superficial needling just caused activation of sensory areas of the cortex. Many doctors trained in needling techniques ignore the de qi experience, which is, I think, a mistake. When you are able to elicit it, the efficacy of acupuncture increases enormously.

Keep in mind what I have said before: just because acupuncture is associated with neurological changes, does not mean that they are responsible for the effects of acupuncture.

In this week’s British Medical Journal is an article from Taiwan, showing the effectiveness of acupressure in 129 patients with chronic low back pain. Like every study ever done, it is possible to pick some holes in this one, but overall it appears to be sound.

Now I am interested to see a press release about a form of needle-less therapy. I have written before about Thought Field Therapy (TFT), and the subject of the press release is a development of it called Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT. While TFT uses tapping at specific points, together with humming, counting and eye movements, EFT is much simpler. It combines gentle fingertip tapping on key acupuncture points with focused thought. It is claimed to effectively reduce – and often permanently eliminating – chronic pain. According to its practitioners, EFT is more than 80-percent effective in treating headaches, back pain, cancer pain, arthritis, and pain from other conditions.

There is the rub: I could find no published research when I did a Medline search. That being said, I have reported elsewhere that I went to California to debunk TFT and became a convert after being treated by its inventor, Roger Callahan. There is a small amount of research on TFT that appears to confirm its effectiveness in some conditions, and I have certainly found it to be very helpful for many people.

Whether the claims of EFT will be born out remains to be seen. I have seen the techniques work, and I have to give credit where it is due. In exchange for your email address Gary Craig, who developed EFT, allows you to download a EFT manual from his website. You may also purchase DVDs from his site to learn more about this treatment modality. As always, I do not suggest using EFT or any other method in place of tried and tested treatments, but it may be a good adjunctive treatment for mild conditions.

In future message and in my newsletter I shall share some of the precise techniques that I have found useful, as well as ones that did not work out for me.

Technorati tags: Emotional Freedom Technique, headaches, acupuncture, acupressure, chronic pain

Attention Deficit, Money and Motivation

People often say that I’m someone who’s glass is always half full. Well, that’s not quite correct: I’m a huge realist, but I don’t like the idea of pathologizing everything that happens to us. One example of this is ADD.

Though untreated clinical ADD can lead to a great deal of distress and the ever-present risk of impulsive behaviors and substance abuse, I am also eager to examine the positive aspects of having attentional problems. Many of the young people and adults with ADD are also extremely successful in settings that don’t require the academic type of concentration. I have met entrepreneurs with ADD, as well as some highly creative people and athletes. A question has been whether ADD might confer some others gifts, benefits or advantages on people.

Although a year old, we recently came across an item that is not as well-known as it should be. Studies using fMRI have indicated that some of the regions of the brain that do not normally show much activity in young people with ADD become highly activated by monetary rewards.

This is not to say that giving young people money is the way to “conquer” ADD. Instead it suggest that rather than just thinking about people with ADD as just having an attention problem, we should also think of them as people who derive pleasure from different things than the bulk of the populations. Not having to spend all their time attending to linear learning may actually lead to greater freedom of imagination, creativity and emotional expression.

People with sever attentional problems can run into a lot of problems in relationships, even losing attention during sex. But it may be that may also be that minor degrees of loss of attentional focus may also enhance some people’s ability to feel empathy.

Technorati Tags: ADHD, ADD, reward, Motivation, Creativity

Healing and Spirituality

For thousands of years, spiritual teachers and healers were one and the same. The first hospitals in Europe were founded by religious orders. There was always a rather interesting split: folk healers were primarily, though not exclusively female, while the hospitals were male dominated. One of the fruits of the Enlightenment was the separation of healing from faith. The separation of body and spirit was pursued vigorously by medical science as it advanced. Indeed, many in the medical establishment echoed Freud in comparing religion to a neurosis. A well-known figure in British medicine has made no bones about his opposition to the involvement of spirituality in medicine, which he says is the proper business of the church, and has nothing to do with science.

Over the last two decades, things have been changing. A number of physicians and scientists have recognized the importance of re-introducing a spiritual perspective into medicine. But do they have any right to do so? The answer is a definite “Yes”! There has been a gradual build up of scientific evidence that prayer and faith can protect health. A second area of investigation is whether religious or spiritual practice, in particularly intercessory prayer, can affect the health of those being prayed for?

First is the clear observation that faith and prayer can support physical and emotional well-being as well as the health of relationships. One school of thought is that this is all the consequence of an internal healing mechanism. Over 30 years ago Herbert Benson at Harvard first described the “Relaxation response,” a simple method of using techniques derived from Transcendental Meditation for changing a person’s emotional response to stress. He then demonstrated that prayer could also elicit a relaxation response.

In recent years, there has been a global effort to research the connections between faith and health, and I have been particularly impressed by the body of work being generated by the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University, that has provided incontrovertible evidence that religious people live longer, healthier lives. This seems to be more than just the stress-reducing impact of prayer and meditation.

We also have evidence that thankfulness and an attitude of gratitude may have a lasting impact on your mood and state of health and well-being.

Second is intercessory prayer. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the psychiatrist Daniel Benor. Like most people trained in Western medicine, he was very skeptical about spiritual healing until he saw a tough case that failed to respond to conventional medicine but was cured by a spiritual healer. He then started to study spiritual healing and has written the standard textbook on the subject, which runs to FOUR volumes. He once told me that the evidence for spiritual healing is stronger than the evidence for almost any other field of unorthodox medicine and stronger than the evidence for quite a number of practices in orthodox medicine!

The moral of the story? Do not neglect your own spirituality or the spirituality of those around you, and remember that empirical scientific research is showing us yet again, that the power of worship and prayer are far from being neuroses or primitive superstitions.

Technorati tags: spirituality, healing, thankfulness, prayer, Herbert Benson, Daniel Benor

Stressful Marriages Can be Damaging to Your Health

There is an extremely interesting article in the month’s Archives of General Psychiatry, which was picked up by the media that examined how marital stress effects healing.

Most people now accept that the mind has powerful effects on the body, though as recently as the 1970s this was still regarded as rank heresy by many in the medical community. This new study is important for our understanding of the relationship between stress and physical health, and gives us further insights into how we can help ourselves stay well.

The study was done at Ohio State University and examines 42 married couples. Each person was given small skin lesions, and the startling finding was that in hostile couples, the wounds healed 60% more slowly than they did in non-hostile couples. The investigators even identified an inflammatory mediator called interleukin-6 (IL-6), as the biochemical link between hostility and slow wound healing. IL-6 levels are linked to long-term inflammation, which is in turn implicated in a number of illnesses, including diabetes mellitus, arthritis and cardiovascular disease.

A thirty-minute disagreement with a spouse could push back wound healing for 24 hours. The skin is the largest organ in the body and is exquisitely sensitive to stress: just thing of blushing and getting zits when under stress. So it is difficult to extrapolate from these findings in the skin, to try and predict what would happen with healing of internal organs. But we do have enough information already to say the following:

1. Allowing yourself to become involved in an argument may have long-term physical effects on you.

2. Some years ago I worked with a group of fine people who did just one thing that I did not like: they were wedded to the idea that it is a really good idea to vent your feelings. They would go as far as allowing patients to hit walls and other inanimate objects. I was never keen on this, feeling that expressing a lot of negative emotion could be counter-productive. After a patient broke bones in his hand after striking the wall, I quietly put an end to the practice. This new research indicates that I was correct to do so.

3. If you are going to have surgery, it is a good idea to be in a calm and peaceful frame of mind.

4. Stress is often unpredictable so it is a really good idea to be engaged in some ongoing stress management practice, so that you are better able to deal with the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as Shakespeare put it over four hundred years ago. Clearly this doesn’t mean that you have to walk around like a burned out hippy on Quaaludes. Unless you really want to…. The best techniques that I know of for dealing with stress are the Sixty Second Peace Technique, Qigong and Yoga Breathing. If you have your own method, then stick with it. Otherwise you may want to check out some of the materials that I have written and recorded.

Technorati tags: stress, marriage, arguments, healing

Homeopathy R.I.P.?

Homeopathic medicine has now been in use for over two centuries since its basic ideas were rehabilitated by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. And its essential concepts have always seemed strange to anyone with any scientific training. The central idea is that people have a life force that, if disturbed, can lead to illness. The second idea is the "doctrine of similars, " or of "like curing like." If you peel an onion, then your eyes and nose may start to run. So one treatment for a person with runny eyes and nose might be onion. The third peculiarity of homeopathy is the use of super-dilute remedies that are prepared in a very precise way. There is a nice summary article of some of the basic ideas.

There is an important principle in scientific research which sometimes gets forgotten: there are many different types of study and one of the most fundamental of errors is to mix up pragmatic (does it work?) and mechanistic (how does it work?) experiments. Pragmatic studies usually follow on from clinical observations, and even if something is shown to work, it can take years to work out the mechanisms. Aspirin would be a good example: it was used in various forms for over a century before it was discovered how it worked.

In August of this year the Lancet published an article on homeopathy that has been taken to signal the end of homeopathy. In fact in an accompanying editorial, there was a call for homeopathy to be abandoned, altogether. However, in the three months since then, a number of us have been through the Lancet study very carefully, and have found some snags in it. So far the Lancet has chosen not to publish responses to the article, and the authors themselves have, as of now, refused to disclose exactly which studies they analyzed. This is highly unusual, and should give pause to gleeful skeptics who have taken this one study to be the death knell of this form of treatment. Worse yet, the folk who have dismissed homeopathy based upon media reports of the study, without examining the original.

As examples of some of the astonishing problems identified in the Lancet publication: there was no clear statement of aim. This is normally required before you even begin a piece of research. The investigators first look at every homeopathic study that they could find and then decided which studies to include. This is again a very unusual way of doing things. And then there are a lot of questions about the statistical analysis. We all know that you can use statistics to prove almost anything that you want to, and the debate about the appropriateness of the methods used is going to go on for a very long time. 

The next time that somebody tells you that homeopathy is now a dead duck, tell them that the study is still being discussed. And as I have said on previous occasions, we do not make progress on the basis of one single paper. Even Watson and Crick’s model of the structure of DNA had to be confirmed before it was accepted, and going back further, some of the brilliant insights of Albert Einstein were not confirmed for almost fourteen years. But this study has already led to the Swiss Government deciding to reduce reimbursement for homeopathic treatment.

I have also seen some violent criticism of a six-year study involving around 6,500 patients who attended the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in England.  This was a simple naturalistic study that asked a simple question: of all the people who visited the hospital, how many felt better afterwards? This is the kind of audit that is being done all the time to see how people have got on with a hospital or a treatment. It does not "prove" or "disprove" homeopathy, it just asks people how they feel. And most said that they had benefited. To criticize it for not being randomized or placebo controlled is a bit like going to an Italian restaurant and complaining that they don’t serve Chinese food!

Homeopathy is no "cure all," but I will not abandon it unless we get some far more impressive data than that from the Lancet paper, for not only have I seen it work in patients and in animals with monotonous regularity, but because behind the scenes, we have been seeing more and more research coming not from patient studies, but from physics and cell biology laboratories, that seems to be giving the specialty a firm theoretical footing.

I shall continue to report both the positive and the negative studies as they are published, and offering guidance about how we can use different forms of treatment in combination.

Technorati tags: homeopathy

Energy Medicine

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V)

--William Shakespeare (English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616)

There has been a lot of talk recently about energy medicine, energy psychology and even energy psychiatry.

What exactly are they, and why do we believe that these therapies only have half the answer?

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine divides energy medicine into veritable and putative. I find these terms a little clumsy. By veritable they mean energies like light, sound and electromagnetism that can be measured. They use the term putative energy fields, also known as biofields, because they have not been measured in a reproducible manner. Treatments like Reiki, Qigong, Shiatsu, Healing touch, Thought Field Therapy and perhaps prayer can all be included under the heading of energy medicines.

A note of caution here. The Scientific and Medical Network, which I had the privilege of serving for a number of years, has had a high-powered study group looking into energy medicine. At its inaugural meeting, the Nobel Prize-winning Physicist Brian Josephson made the important point that we need to be careful about our definitions. Let me clarify that, and tell you why this is such an important issue.

In my book Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I reported the stunning discovery that scientists seem to have "overlooked" more than 90 percent of the universe. This missing piece is being referred to as "dark" matter and "dark" energy. We know very little about it, but some visionary scientists are already wondering if this dark matter and dark energy may have something to do with the burgeoning evidence for the existence of "subtle" systems associated with the body. These subtle systems appear to be of many types, and in Asia have been given names like Qi (Chi) and Prana, or in the West were called the Etheric or the Fifth Element, after Earth, Fire, Air and Water. Why do I say that much that these therapies have only half the answer? I prefer to use the term subtle "systems", to be a little more precise than saying "energies", for these subtle systems are composed of the inseparable twins:

1. Subtle energies and

2. The subtle fields that carry them.

Without energy the fields could not actualize, and without the fields, there would be nothing to carry the energy.

The next point is that underlying the subtle systems is the key to healing. Before even there were the subtle systems, there was an Informational matrix. This is a very scientific and clinical term for something that we also know as the Inner Light or your Inner Divine Spark. You have it: we all do. Aging, illness and death occur when this matrix degrades. Then the subtle systems become chaotic and the biochemical and cellular systems follow. When we treat someone with acupuncture or Reiki, it is not so much that we are squirting "energy" into him or her, but that we are giving that person’s whole organism some cleaned-up information that has a positive effect on the person receiving the treatment.

"Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life."

--Smiley Blanton (American Speech Pathologist, Psychoanalyst, Writer and Founder {with Norman Vincent Peale} of the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, 1882-1966)

Technorati Tags: More blogs about Energy+Medicine.
Reiki Energy Healing

We Need Our Pets

In this week’s British Medical Journal there is a report on the effectivenesss of swimming with dolphins on alleviating mild to moderate depression.

This is just the latest, but perhaps best executed of reports of the beneficial effects of interacting with animals. Humans need touch and connection. We are the only higher mammal that does not routinely engage in mutual grooming. And we miss it.

There is more and more research evidence of something that every pet owner knows: that animals can experience emotion. They seem well able to experience happiness and pleasure. Though science hasn’t proven it, they can almost certainly also feel sadness and unhappiness. I have a horse whose original human friend passed away. I was told that he was not well, and my first question was, "Has anyone told him what happened?" This may seem an odd thing to say. But when I met the horse, he showed all the signs of clinical depression. And yes, I did talk to him, and explain what had happened to his human companion. He nuzzled me as he grieved. And today he is the happiest horse you could ever hope to meet.

The Chalice and the Blade is the title of an extraordinarily fine book by Riane Eisler, in which she shows that beliefs about society, nature and the world about us were very different just a few years ago, and utterly different a few thousand years ago. We have all been raised in educational and social systems that stress an unhealthy "dominator" model of society, in which one person dominates another, or we dominate and control nature. It should not be this way, and Eisler stresses a "partnership model" in which all relationships should be expressions of partnership, containing respect, harmony and love.

One of the most helpful and yet neglected things that we can do for ourselves and for others is to explore our relationships with other living things. Do you have any relationships with animals? Are they dominator or partnership? Do you talk about owning an animal or of sharing your life with one? Do you make time to be with animals? Do you notice any differences in the animals after they have spent time with you? Do you notice any difference in yourself?

We have just mentioned the new study and there here has been a lot of work on using horses in therapy, and there is good evidence that they can bring a wonderful new dimension to treatment. Some therapists have introduced visualization exercises based on horse riding to help people cope with anxiety, and have found that not only did it help with anxiety, it also deepened peoples’ sense of connection with themselves and with nature. And don’t neglect other creatures: how would you characterize your relationships with insects? Do you have a dominator relationship with them? Do you squish something you don’t like?

Think about it.

(As an aside to this story, I was musing about researchers based in the notoriously cold and wet English Midlands having the wisdom and perspicacity to do their research in Honduras. I’ll have to remember that the next time that I’m writing a grant proposal...)

Addendum:  MSNBC has written a story "Into the Wild: A Scientific Approach" about the dolphin study published in the BMJ.

Technorati Tags: Pets Horses More blogs about Animal therapy.