|
||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
Forums
Courses
Shop
Diseases
Articles
Journal
Directory|
|
|||||
Interviews |
|||||
|
|
|||||
| Hpathy Ezine - June, 2005 | |||||
 |
Elaine Lewis, DHom<-- Interviewed by Kelly Young |
 |
|||
| I cajoled Elaine into being the June Homeopath In The Hot Seat; afterall, June 20th is her birthday and, remember, I have those piano strings still... Wires, they're piano wires! Oh God, somebody call my agent! Elaine, I think everyone here would like to know more about you. I doubt it. How does a musician become interested in homeopathy? What inspired you or made you look at alternatives to standard medicine? A tough question, but a fair one--which should take several hours to answer. Well Kelly, one day I was in my college bookstore and happened to notice among the New Releases, Vitamin C and the Common Cold by Dr. Linus Pauling. What would possess me to buy such a thing? I hardly ever got a cold and I would be 33 before I would ever get the flu; but, maybe it was because Linus Pauling was a courageous and outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War (as was Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician) that I felt compelled to show my appreciation by buying his book. So, that was it. Could you possibly stretch out your answer? Because you've only spoken for one minute. Really? [Delusion: time, passes too slowly--CANN-I] Well, then, I'll have to embellish some of the finer points I've made. I discovered that only at a place called "The Health Food Store" could one buy vitamin C in capsules, crystals, powder and other things that you can actually swallow! At the health food store, I was always given a free magazine at the check-out counter, the contents of which I found fascinating! Did you know that what we eat, what's considered "normal", can kill you? What an incredible culture this is, where the diet is actually lethal! Well, I just, frankly, couldn't stop reading! I starting buying books; I bought all of Adele Davis' books--Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit, etc.--and especially those by the majestic and marvelous Carlton Fredricks! Does anybody remember Carlton Fredricks? If you do let me know and we'll start our own Carlton Fredricks Admiration Society! I feel really bad that I don't know who he is! He had a radio show in New York, which I could barely get in Philadelphia without a lot of static, but it was worth it. What was he like? Words to describe Carlton Fredricks: aristocratic, scholarly, debonnaire, urbane, witty, with an unabashed aversion to stupidity! Definitely my kinda guy! His audience loved him so much that he used to say, "I can't die, my audience won't let me." If you think that was a joke, here's what happened when he offered a showing of a short film to the public, as he describes in his book Eat Well, Get Well, Stay Well: "Dr. Francis Pottenger had sent me his cat movies, showing in three generations of the animals the progress of degenerative changes we see (but count as normal because they're average) in the faces of human beings when they are products of pregnancies in which all the [food is] cooked. I decided to show the film after my evening broadcast in New York. It seemed unlikely that many listeners would attend at the dinner hour, and I didn't require tickets for admission. This was palpably a mistake, for we had but 500 seats and some 4,000 people jammed the street and the lobby, with the police barring them from the elevators. Mrs. Fredericks, who had planned a quiet restaurant dinner for two after the event, fought her way through the crowd, telling the police, who were blocking her way, "I am Mrs. Fredericks!" A policeman shook his head. "You're the fourth Mrs. Fredericks tonight, and you're not getting in either!" Oh, I love it! Later in the evening a radio listener interrupted Dr. Fredericks' dinner with the incredulous observation that he wore glasses! "I pleaded for mercy," he explained, "on the grounds that my mother refused to take dietary advice from me when she was pregnant." I'm gonna do an Amazon.com search for him! So, what did you learn from him? What I learned from him: The average American's diet is replete with sugar (104 pounds of sugar a year) and white flour, which is essentially the same thing, as white flour turns to sugar in the stomach. These two "foods" not only have no actual food in them, and exist only to benefit the food industry as their shelf-life is infinite, but, moreover, they are actually "anti-nutrients" as they leach vitamins and minerals out of the body. This is because they have none of their own--they lack the nutrients required for their own digestion and must rob the body for this purpose! Yikes! If you have patients/clients/friends who are depressed, anxiety-ridden, phobic, have a tendency to faint, complain of headaches, insomnia, blurred vision, lack of energy, shakiness, muscle aches, getting sick often, who are over-weight or underweight, look pasty and unhealthy; it's not enough to prescribe a homeopathic remedy for these people, you must ask them what they're eating as this may be the whole problem! There's hidden sugar in every packaged food in the supermarket--food where you wouldn't expect to find sugar at all, like peanut butter and ketchup. Even "wheat" bread is not whole wheat bread, as you might expect, it is simply a fancier way of saying white bread; it's only a whole grain product if it says so. Oh, I've seen that plenty of times! "Wheat Bread"! I've always been suspicious of that; and "multi-grain" too--doesn't mean it's whole grain! Oh, yeah, "multi grain", that's another good one! There is often not only sugar in the products you buy, but usually more than one kind of sugar--high fructose corn syrup, dextrose and so on. Explain to your clients and friends that the only food that won't make you sick is actual food that is grown and comes out of the ground and available at produce stands or the produce aisle in the supermarket. A good dinner, for example, is a salad and a baked potato or a stew you actually make yourself with actual vegetables. Ask yourself, what would we have been eating many moons ago in our natural habitat? Whatever that is, it's the food our bodies were genetically programmed to accept; and that would have to be mostly fruit, nuts and seeds; more fruit than vegetables. If we could eat just 50 percent of our diet that way and throw out the junk food, the packaged food, the white flour products like "macaroni and cheese", we'd be reasonably healthy. As for meat, this is another problem! We don't have the teeth that meat eaters have and we don't have the short intestines that prevent meat from fermenting that meat eaters have. How about you, have you been reasonably healthy all your life? Oh my God, no! Absolutely not! I used to be in very bad health! I used to eat this stuff too, you know; I once lived at Dunkin' Donuts! (mmm...donuuuts!!!) I had dizziness, I had frequent headaches, anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, irregular heart beat, sciatica, constipation, couldn't gain weight.... Oy! What did you do? It was a simple matter of switching over to real food, putting packaged food and fast food out of my life, stopping the junk food, switching to brown rice and whole wheat bread, brown rice pasta, etc.; and when I changed my diet, even my dog's health improved because she ate what I ate! What about other family members, besides the dog? My mother was diagnosed with emphysema in the mid 1980's. She was staying with me at the time; she had had to come home from London because of her health. She spent the whole first week after she arrived here in bed without ever getting out of her nightgown, that's how debilitated she was. Based on all the things I had read over the years, I gave my mother a decent diet of whole foods; plus, I gave her raw milk with a tablespoon of mint flavored cod liver oil stirred in it twice a day, a protein milkshake with a banana and lecithin and vitamin C blended in raw milk in the morning, carrot juice in the afternoon, B-complex and vitamin E supplements, an herbal combination for the lungs, calcium and magnesium supplements; I didn't know homeopathy then, but in three months, my mother moved out and moved into her own apartment! A year later she moved to Arizona; (this is an incurable disease, right?) two years later she moved to England; then at some point she moved to Texas (well, I think you get the idea that she got better). Emphysema sounds really serious! I'm surprised your mother didn't go right to the hospital from the plane! It's a good thing she didn't! The hospitals don't have a clue, Kelly! It's shocking! They think they should be able to give someone like my mother a drug! In the absence of that, they're helpless; they say, "There's no cure for this!" What they mean is, there's no drug that we've been able to find, and they don't have the imagination or the creativity or the curiosity or the inclination to look for other solutions! They don't acknowledge any role for food or nutrients in a patient's care; if they did, they couldn't justify their so-called "hospital food", which no one can eat! Dr. Robert Mendelsohn (do you know him? Because I'm perfectly willing to start another fan club on his behalf!) says the following about malnutrition in hospital patients: "Many studies have since discovered malnutrition in anywhere from twenty-five to fifty percent of patients in American and British hospitals. ... Malnutrition is one of the most common causes of death among old people in hospitals. ... Malnutrition obviously puts a person in the worst possible state to fight off whatever disease brought him to the hospital in the first place. ... Why are people malnourished in hospitals? As bad as most hospital food is, if it were eaten it most likely would prevent most of the protein-calorie malnutrition theses studies turn up. The problem is that it is not eaten. Nobody sees to it that the patient eats. At best, the tray is brought in and set beside the bed on a table. And there it sits. At worst, the hospital schedule and staff gang up on the patient to keep him or her from touching the food: time for lab tests, time for therapy, time for drugs, time for this and that. Plenty goes on in the Temple of Modern Medicine simply to make you lose your appetite." (Confessions of a Medical Heretic, p. 74) I would add to this the sheer number of tests and proceedures before which the patient is actually asked to fast! They'll even tell emaciated patients to fast; do they really have to run a test to find out that the patient is emaciated? Because that's what the problem is; the patient needs to eat, the patient needs his appetite restored; find something that this patient will eat and give him alfalfa tincture, 5 drops three times a day, which is an appetite restorative; test him later; yes, he may have cancer, but it's the malnutrition that will kill him! And the drugs they give him will make him anorexic and even less likely to eat. They don't care because they're drug-oriented institutions. The patient's vitality is ignored. Do they really expect a drug to restore vitality? It's bizarre. What person do you know who's deficient in a drug; sick because he lacks a drug? Why would anyone think it was a good idea to put some synthetic substance into his or her mouth that can't be digested or metabolized? How is your body supposed to digest something that's unnatural and foreign? No wonder all these side-effects occur, the stuff is inorganic, the body doesn't recognize it and tries to reject it! I never thought of that, but, of course, only food can be metabolized! The reason we have this "medicine" is not because of "science", but because of the ability to patent it and make a profit from it! You can patent an invention. That's what these drugs are-- inventions; they're formulas. Carrot juice, vitamin C, vitamin E, cod liver oil, herbal combinations, raw milk, orange juice (made from actual oranges), etc. are part of nature, they're not going to make anyone rich and, in fact, they're even costly to the hospital--because juices can't be stored, they go bad immediately, real food goes bad. They would have to be made fresh constantly; look at all the man-hours this would involve? They'd have to actually hire people! So, we're stuck with a "health" system that can't cure a single chronic disease--seriously!--and relies entirely on synthetic substances that are toxic to the organs of elimination in order to restore a person's health, who lost it due to poor nutrition! Good luck! I rest my case! Are you still there? So, after gaining what seems to be a huge amount of information on nutrition and natural healing, you went a step further and began studying homeopathy? Well, Kelly, as I said, I kept reading because what I was learning was definitely paying off with my own health! I also took a course in herbology with Dr. Christopher--John R. Christopher, a famous North American herbalist. Herbs solved a lot of my problems! Did you know that garlic oil will get rid of cysts? You can order it from http://www.herbsfirst.com/ . Rub the oil on twice a day, give it two weeks or so. Any more herbal helpful hints? Did you know about Hawthorn Berry tincture for heart disease?It's such a specific; a food for the heart, as Dr. Christopher used to say. When your clients have damaged organs, you have to rely on nutrition and herbs and possibly low-potency homeopathic prescribing--remedies known to have an affinity for the particular organ that's gone awry and that also best match the case as a whole. In Murphy's repertory, the organ-affinity remedies are listed at the beginning of each chapter. For instance, the heart remedies are the first rubric in the heart chapter. You'll see remedies like: Aconite, Aurum, Cactus, Naja, Latrodectus mactans, Spongia, Spigelia, Phosphorus, etc. You may need a high potency in an acute attack, but in a chronic case, such as heart failure, you'd want a wholesome diet as described above, herbs like Hawthorn Berry, supportive supplements like vitamins E, C, and Co-Q10, and a heart remedy that matches the case in low potency, because it's not a one shot deal, it will have to be repeated daily for some time; remember the organ is damaged and shouldn't have to deal with an aggravation from a high potency remedy. (I've written about dosing in other articles, it's really important to get this right.) If you don't believe me about low potency prescribing in cases of serious disease, and I know a lot of homeopaths just love the high potencies, here's what Rajan Sankaran says about treating organ pathology in his latest book, The Sensation In Homeopathy: "Finally there are cases where there is no peculiar local sensation even where one should be found. In such cases there is usually severe local or organic pathology. ... Such cases need to be given the remedy in very low potencies...." (p.328) I learned about homeopathy slowly over a decade. It started with the cell salts. The health food store only sold the cell salts and that was it! I probably read about them in one of those free magazines. My first use of them was Ferrum Phos. 6X every 15 minutes at the start of a cold. I got such good results from this that Ferrum phos. 30C now has a permenant place in the drawer beside my bed! My dog, Larry, was cured of cirrhosis of the liver with Arsenicum 30X given once a day by our homeopathic veterinarian in Yardley, Pennsylvania. Larry had stopped eating for the most part when we started treatment and he totally bounced back from what was certain death! It generally takes a long time to become a convert to homeopathy--it's so unlike what we're used to; but, once you get into it, it's like a black hole! I know what you mean, there's no coming out, there's no going back! The fascination just never ends! The implications, the need for a better understanding, it just goes on and on; and the odd thing is that the more you study homeopathy, the less you're sure of! Every well-trained homeopath will tell you this! So, I actually know nothing! Is there anything else you want to know? So the more you learn the less you know? Well, as a newcomer to homeopathy, I can attest to that! This is alot of information to digest. While I attempt to do so, can you tell me about your first "official" case as a homeopath? What about your favorite case or maybe least favorite? Before I do that Kelly, I just want to say, for the record, because I've done a lot of "drug-bashing" here, that one of the reasons I feel I can do this is because homeopathic remedies can actually take the place of most of these drugs and do a better job, because what homeopathic remedies do is mobilize YOUR OWN PHARMACY, the body's pharmacy, which knows exactly what to do and when to stop--how much and how little. If we didn't have such a pharmacy, you'd find out pretty quick what it means to have AIDS, which is a disease that causes your own inner pharmacy to disappear! So, why doesn't our "inner pharmacy" just fight our diseases then and get it over with, if it's so great? I explained about the diet already in previous paragraphs, but the other reason is that the immune system is often just as confused about what's going on as we are! Viruses, for example, are often in disguise, hiding in our own cells, undetected! But a homeopath can give a remedy--a "similar" remedy, which is like a caricature of the disease--an "image" of the disease, and the immune system makes quick work of it! When the immune system can see a problem, it can act! This is the beauty of homeopathy. The remedies are catylists; they're mobilizers; it's your own body that does the work, and in that sense, it's totally natural and without side effects. Ok, my first official case: my brother-in-law, whom we can call Joe. "Joe" was a real jerk! No, really. (I don't use diagnostic terms like "jerk" haphazzardly!) He was a womanizer, unfaithful, stingy, making my sister's life miserable, constantly on the verge of asking for a divorce and hinting that he wouldn't be able to afford her next semester's graduate school tuition and so on; so, I offered to help. I said to my sister, whom we can call ... oh, I don't know ... Aretha Franklin, "You know, 'Aretha', there is this, well, 'therapy', for lack of a better word, called 'homeopathy' that can actually change pathological mental/emotional behavior back to normal. What I can do is try to match your husband's symptoms to a homeopathic remedy. You can tell him it's for something else, like, since he has an enlarged prostate, you can tell him it's for that, since it will probably work for that too." I delved into this case, which now seems kind of obvious: Desire for sweets ("Aretha" says he can eat an entire box of chocolates in one sitting!) Intolerant of cold drinks Miserly Fault-finding Domineering Enlarged prostate Aversion to responsibility closed rooms aggravate, better fresh air/open air Well, it's a clear case of Lycopodium; though, at the time, I struggled with it. And the womanizing, the unfaithfulness, is all part of Lycopodium's inability to commit, to accept responsibility. So, I gave "Aretha" a bottle of Lycopodium 10M, which, of course, she lost! So, I went out and bought another bottle and she lost that too! This was really starting to get on my nerves! Finally, out of desperation on her part, she managed to keep track of a third bottle long enough to put a dose in his tea, and I didn't hear from her for a month. When I finally spoke to her again, she told me that Lycopodium had not worked. "Oh no!" I exclaimed. Well, listen," I said, "don't feel bad, there are other remedies; I can present his case to my study group...." "No need for that," she replied, "because he's completely changed for the better!" "Huh? I thought you said the remedy didn't work!" "It didn't. It was Therapy! Finally, therapy kicked in after five years! Come on, you don't really believe that those little white pills can change someone's entire personality! That's ridiculous!" So, there you have it, Kelly: my first case, my favorite case, and my least favorite case, all in one! By the way, he was a Republican before the remedy and now he's a Democrat! I rest my case! Thank you Elaine for being on the Hot Seat this month! How can people get in touch with you? If they're in Philadelphia, they can call me at 215-498-4131. If they're too far away, I take online cases and can be reached at LEWRA@aol.com. (And let's not forget there are seven shopping days left 'til my birthday!) |
|||||
|
|||||
