It is hard for us, born in the second half of the twentieth century, to realize that the kind of medicine we are used to is really a very recent invention. It began with a complete change in medical attitudes around the time of the Second World War, away from natural principles into preoccupation with chemistry and physics, so that drugs and spare part surgery are now the things most people think of when the health service is mentioned.
Long before this modern trend began, many different traditions of medicine or healing already existed in different places throughout the world. Some of these were based on medicines like herbs and homoeopathy, some on physical treatments with water, massage, needling or bone-setting. Many more used ritual of some kind to change the mental state of the patient and even bring about a miraculous change in their bodily functions. Whole cultures have for thousands of years relied on one or other of these healing principles, apparently well satisfied with the experience.
Then western science developed successes of its own, including the system of medicine that prevails in Europe and America today. Scientific doctors pride themselves on having developed a very hard and critical attitude to their own work, analysing it with statistics to satisfy everyone as to which medicine produces what results.
A great deal of effort goes into ruling out false results based on wishful thinking, personal hope and belief, or the inspiration of the doctor. The result is that rather few medicines and operations have been proved to produce definite physical benefit, in a more limited range of diseases than most people think; if we relied only on those medicines and only treated those diseases the National Health Service would be a fraction of its present size.
In practice doctors have to do their best for everyone, whatever their disease and whether or not there are any properly proved medicines to help them.
You would expect this to lead first to much more research aimed at proving more medicines. The trouble with that is partly money: there is an unlimited range of research that could be done and only limited funds available to finance it. But even if the money were available, further research would not produce many sensible results for the wide range of diseases that cause the most suffering today — colds, asthma, backache, headache, stress and nervous tension and pre-menstrual tension are just a few examples. This is because these diseases do not really fit into chemical ideas, so that researchers even have difficulty deciding what they consist of. And if people look for chemical cures for diseases that do not really start with chemical causes, we cannot expect sensible results!
Valuable as science is, it has great limitations. It only works on problems that really are to do with chemistry and physics and nothing much else. Even then its value depends entirely on the kind of questions the scientist asks with it. So science can only be used sensibly to tackle a rather limited range of problems, most of which have been tackled already.
Why therefore do highly intelligent people carry on using science to ask unsuitable questions? Mainly because we have our technology set up that way: scientists like to ask the questions they have the tools to tackle. But why, even then, don’t those tools spit out the questions or shout ‘rubbish!\"? That is because science is what philosophers call a self-consistent system of thinking. For you and me that means it cannot discover its own limitations, or even realize it has any. Instead of telling us a question is out of bounds, science gives us the best answer it can within its own boundaries. Answers like this always make the problem look more complicated and beg a lot more questions, so the scientist always ends up calling for yet more research of exactly the same kind. Unless he uses his common sense one day to wonder where all this is getting him, he can spend the rest of his life pursuing daft questions in ever decreasing circles, happily getting no-where.
If a scientist does realize the truth, it asks of him a very great deal. He has to set his scientific knowledge and experience at far less a value than he is used to and he must start to engage his instincts and human nature in his work. One of the attractions of science is that it seems to separate facts from decisions, leaving the scientist free to pursue the facts for their own sake. When he realizes the falseness of this position a scientist is tied once more; he is obliged to live by the truth he discovers, which is often very uncomfortable. That is why so far, very few highly placed scientific doctors have made that break and why medicine continues to behave as if everything must in the end be a matter of chemistry and physics.
That is absurd, but to talk about it sensibly we must put up an alternative proposition — something the movement towards better medicine has not done very well so far.
Quality and Quantity
We would like to suggest that life goes on at a minimum of two levels at the same time. Many people would argue for three or four different levels and they may be right, but for the moment that doesn’t matter; we only need two levels to make our point.
The first of these levels is very concrete and dense, containing all the objects and substances of which the world and our bodies are made. This is the level where physics and chemistry make sense and where it is possible to deduce facts logically and beyond dispute. This is the world of quantity — of what, when and where. So long as scientists confine their investigations within this realm, what they discover makes logical sense.
But nowhere in this world will you find any feelings such as happiness, pain and pleasure; any thoughts, meaning, understanding or judgements between right and wrong; any personal experience or growth; any will or determination to do things against the odds. These are only available to living creatures, many of them only to human beings. For most of us they are the things that really matter in life.
This is the realm of quality, in which entirely different rules apply to do with who, how and why. Here individual personal experience must be respected and built up as the basis of real knowledge. Different people are allowed to know different things and learn to respect each other’s differences. This is where literature, arts and crafts belong — all ways of setting out one person’s experience and vision for others to see and share.
But nothing in words or pictures can ever convince you logically of your own quality, or quality in general; you are obliged to discover it for yourself, as it arises in your own experience.
Although quality and quantity are so different, they obviously overlap very closely. Quality behaves like the architect and blue-print from which the quantity of your body and surroundings are constructed and maintained. Quality provides the reason for your actions and the way you set about them: quantity defines for you the setting and the tools.
No scientists have ever established any connection between the quality of our lives and the quantity of our bodies, though they still maintain there is one — that for instance our minds can be explained entirely by the way our brains work. Indeed the main achievement of science to date has been to reduce our humanity to less than we feel it deserves or is capable of and to undermine our confidence in all those illogical instincts, intuitions and high ideals that scientists cannot trace or get to grips with — and they have certainly tried.
These ideas give you a vantage-point from which to see the inadequacies of science and enable you to see much more clearly what disease means, and how to deal with it.
Medicine and healing in perspective
Living and health are first and foremost about quality. Symptoms or disease are really the first signs that the balance of your health is wrong. Symptoms are real qualities that you experience only too vividly, but to begin with they represent no quantity change in your body — no disorder. It sometimes takes ten or twenty years of wear and tear in the quality of your life before any quantity effects show in your body, where a doctor can find them by examining and testing you.
So disease is a matter of quality, and doctors are mainly concerned with quantity. As a result they usually miss the real cause of your disease by many months or years and will rarely find a real cause or the true cure in any medicine or surgery, since these are confined to quantity.
Now all the traditional forms of medicine and healing take full account of quality as well as quantity and realize that all causes of disease and disorder start with something wrong in the quality of life. If this is true, then modern technology can never expect to find the causes of most diseases. What is more, modern scientific method can never be used to study the causes of disease or to assess alternative cures based on quality, because science too is confined to quantity!
We could very well develop a science of quality if we wanted to — indeed it already exists. Rudolph Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, eighty years ago devised a spiritual science which is still waiting to be explored; Taoist and Yogic philosophy speak from very similar principles since ancient times. Anyone who does not dismiss another person’s experience just because it doesn’t fit in with their own, is taking their first steps in qualitative science. But our great research institutions and teaching hospitals are not yet ready for that, having founded their reputations on dismissing quality in favour of verifiable quantity alone. Whilst they maintain that position they never will see any merit in anything but drugs, surgery and some physical treatments — and they will have nothing useful to say about most of what bothers their patients.
That is why so many people lately have turned to alternative practitioners and holistic doctors, despite the fact that they usually have to pay privately. In our Complementary Medicine section we look at each of these in turn, to help you get your bearings in the market and to prepare you for what to expect. In the remainder of this pamphlet we show how the different therapies relate to each other and to health.
What is holistic medicine?
Unless you understand that there is a fundamental difference between the quality and quantity of life, holism is something you will not understand either. You are in the same difficulty as a creature from two dimensions who understands area but is struggling to understand what volume is — it needs an extra dimension that his world does not contain. Quality is the extra dimension that makes sense of holism.
Holistic medicine starts from the idea of wholeness and points out that a whole is always greater than the mere sum of its physical parts. A whole is a quality, created by a balanced relationship. A good marriage and a good body both depend on this principle for their health. So a holistic doctor or therapist is prepared to take qualities into full account and to employ treatments that help to strengthen and re-balance qualitative wholeness.
There are not really any holistic therapies, only holistic therapists. You will find many people campaigning on behalf of one or other holistic therapy who are really only doing what orthodox medicine has always done — splitting up into specialities and factions. On the other hand there are many very traditional doctors who turn out to have surprisingly holistic attitudes and methods; good medical teaching has always maintained that there are no diseases, only patients.
So you may find the help you want in some unlikely places and should not be afraid of shying away from a practitioner who offends you, makes you uneasy, or seems to be hanging on to your case long after they should have been getting results. Never stay with anyone who behaves as if you need them and are lucky to have found them. One advantage of the private system is that you are free to hire and fire, just as you please.
Complementary and alternative therapies
A disadvantage of the present situation is that most holistic therapies are far less organized than doctors, dentists, nurses, physiotherapists and chiropodists. They do not have one central board of registration but several, sometimes with competing claims. And there are many courses of training which award qualifications and diplomas that are less impressive than they look because they do not guarantee sufficient experience or competence for even basic professionalism.
To get round this we have limited our remarks about each discipline to what we know from direct experience, or from the experience of medical patients we have referred to them. As a result we have left out several therapies because we have no experience of them. That does not mean we disapprove — more likely that we lack a local practitioner. For this reason Templegarth Trust has supported moves at various levels to establish a consolidated register of holistic therapists. Until these efforts succeed, the following notes about each therapy we know about are offered as general guidance. For more detailed assistance, qualifications, addresses and self-treatment ideas (where appropriate) see the web page referred to in each case.
Anthroposophy
We put this first because it is one of the most mature, impressive and comprehensive philosophies of living to have arisen in Europe in modern historical times. It was founded by Rudolph Steiner in Germany during the first half of this century and has a large following in continental Europe. In Britain there are a great many schools founded on Steiner principles, and the Camphill Community Trust has a well-deserved reputation for creating healthy communities for handicapped and normal people living together.
There are, however, only a few doctors in this country who have any respectable qualification in anthroposophical medicine and only one established residential treatment centre at Park Attwood near Birmingham.
Anthroposophical medicine starts with a clear vision of the three-fold dynamic nature of human life and works from there. This leads to an account of disease processes that sounds very strange to chemically-oriented doctors and uses therapeutic principles based on natural laws, herbs, crystalline forms, homoeopathic dilutions, aromas, movement and rhythm, massage, art and sound to correct imbalances between the three forces at work in us.
Many of the remedies are safe enough for you to use yourself and the Weleda company provides information and supplies to help you. However many doctors use anthroposophy to some extent and Weleda may be able to help you find one. Anthroposophical medicines are prescribable under the N.H.S.
Acupuncture
Acupuncture is not really a system of medicine in its own right but the best known aspect of the traditional Chinese system of medicine. Its origins are far more ancient than any of the other alternatives dealt with in this pamphlet, although it combines elements of several of them.
The most impressive feature of Traditional Chinese Medicine is the beautiful philosophy of health, human nature and disease on which it is based. It rather resembles a zodiac, with many overlapping cycles of interaction between forces and elements which at first encounter sounds more like a mythological saga than a philosophy. But its chief practical attribute is to focus primarily on the maintenance of health, rather than on the treatment of disease.
Traditional Chinese Doctors are completely at home giving you a comprehensive assessment and account of your health. The result is that Chinese medicine is based on health maintenance and so is the traditional fee structure. In ancient China you paid your doctor to keep you well and expected him to treat your illnesses free of charge. Although our National Health Service aspires to something of this kind, just imagine the reception this sort of fee structure would get from your own doctor!
If you attend a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner for some form of disease, he will first assess your whole system by examining your pulses closely and making certain diagnostic needle punctures. He will very likely employ heat from burning a dried herb called moxa in the course of these assessments. All this will tell him what qualitative imbalances have given rise to your condition and what your inherent weaknesses and strengths are. That will enable him to plan treatment to stimulate the main lines of energy flow in your quality-body — your acupuncture meridians.
All those quaint and inaccurate charts of acupuncture meridians represent your quality-body and have no structural counterparts in your physical body — hence the difficulties Western doctors have in coming to terms with them.
Once your system is re-balanced a Chinese-trained doctor will aim to see you at the turn of the seasons, four times each year, to keep your balance tuned up. By this stage you are into the best established health maintenance system in the world.
Homoeopathy and Tissue Salts
Hahnemann devised homoeopathy at the end of the eighteenth century, apparently nourished by the same vision that Steiner was later to develop into a complete philosophy. He not only re-discovered the importance of quality but worked out a method for separating the quality of a substance from its quantity.
What is more, he demonstrated that the characteristic quality of a substance is quite the opposite of its quantity effect, so that quality can be used to neutralize the quantity effects of a substance. Shuessler explored this principle particularly as it affected the minerals of which the body is composed and devised a system of medicine that employed low potency homoeopathic dilutions of these minerals — the biochemic tissue salts.
In practice homoeopathy claims that if you poison yourself with sulphur, you can cure the effects with homoeopathic sulphur. To the drug scientist this means that the dose curve for a substance can be drawn backwards through zero — a negative dose has a negative effect! It does not take much imagination to realize how hard that it for pharmaceutical scientists to swallow, but just why many teaching hospital doctors are so contemptuous of homoeopathy is hard to understand.
Despite this there is now quite a large number of conventional doctors who are prepared to prescribe homoeopathic medicines and many do so as part of their N.H.S. work; there are many gaps in the range of drug therapies which homoeopathy fills nicely, including the whole range of treatment during pregnancy when drugs of any kind are undesirable.
Apart from those doctors who use homoeopathy, there are many non-medically qualified homoeopaths in practice in Britain and one of these is likely to be your nearest available practitioner. Unfortunately these two groups of practitioners, medical and non-medical, do not see eye to eye with each other as they ideally should; you will have to decide for yourself whether your nearest practitioner is well enough qualified and experienced to justify your confidence. At your first meeting, ask about these matters. No suitable practitioner will be offended in the least and you will flush out one or two of the others by their response.
Quite a number of tissue salts and low potency homoeopathic remedies are available across the counter or by mail order, since it is acknowledged officially that even if they do no good they are incapable of causing any harm. You can therefore safely try treating yourself — but expect many disappointments or failures. Selecting the right remedy depends on an accurate and detailed assessment of your temperament as well as your symptoms, something most people find hard. But there is no harm in trying for a while, and approaching a practitioner only if you do not succeed.
Herbs
Most modern medicines are derived from herbs and chemists cannot see anything wrong with that. Many of them believe that by purifying substances chemically they are actually improving on nature. But by that test we should all be better off consuming pills or piles of pure crystalline chemicals, instead of eating food. That would be unpleasant and boring for everyone and would make many people sick. There must be something wrong with the chemists’ idea.
We can see what is wrong when we look closely at one chemical food — sugar. This occurs naturally as part of the tissues of various plants and, when consumed with those plants as food, never seems to do any harm. Apparently your body is well accustomed to it in this form, appreciates its quality as well as its quantity and handles it confidently. What is more, the other substances you need to make proper use of the sugar are also present in the same foods, so you are getting everything together in a sensible balance.
When sugar is refined into a pure chemical it loses all that — in particular its quality — and becomes hostile to your body. It is perfectly reasonable to argue against drug chemists on this basis. If in health we feed ourselves best from foods that still retain their natural balance and living quality, surely the same principle applies in disease. Sick animals can select the exact herb that will cure their ailments and show an unusual appetite for it, purely on the basis of taste. Should not humans attempt to do the same, adding unusual herbs to their diet to correct imbalances in their health?
A herbalist would say yes and put up with the objections of the chemists about purity, variable quality and the like. In general herbs are safer than chemicals, just as sugar cane is safer than lump sugar. What is more, you can learn the properties of a few common and inexpensive herbs and safely grow and use them yourself as teas or lotions, or in salads.
Healing
Every parent who has ever touched or caressed their child to soothe away a pain or upset has used healing, whether or not they know it. There is the world of difference between touching with intent and mere jostling or handling, as Jesus illustrated when the woman drew energy from him by touching his robe. There are many people alive today who have been healed more or less miraculously by access to pure qualitative energy, whether from a trained healer or not.
This is one alternative therapy which has made very impressive efforts to gets its act together, so that most of the organisations involved in spiritual healing are now members of the Confederation of Healing Organisations. They have embarked on a well-meaning attempt to prove the effectiveness of their treatments under scientific scrutiny. This is unlikely to succeed but their willingness to try is impressive. Failed science does not mean failed healing.
If you approach a spiritual healer, you should be careful not to have a particular expectation of what your healing will consist of; that is just where the scientists can be mistaken. What you want to happen may not be intended by the powers behind quality, which behave in a supremely wise and intelligent fashion. The help you receive may come in a totally unexpected form or from quite another direction. Unless you are prepared to seek healing unconditionally and with a completely open mind, perhaps it is not yet for you.
Osteopathy and Chiropractic
These are systems of medicine which take the physical structures and qualities of your body as their starting-point. They respect the extraordinary grace and beauty of the human body in action and seek to restore this when it becomes faulty. Chiropractic concentrates on the spine, whereas osteopathy is more general and less specialized.
It it surprising to discover that the massage or manipulation that will correct your posture or movement, will sometimes also correct the function of your soft organs — lungs, liver, heart, womb and so-forth. That is because vital energy, or quality, flows through your body from your head down your spine, and then forwards into every organ that needs it. Any structural disturbance or malfunction of your spine diverts and unbalances the flow of this energy, so that your organs get too much or too little.
The kind of headache that goes with cold hands and feet is a simple example: energy is locked in your head and cannot get to your limbs, where it belongs. But even if osteopaths confined their attention to backache and postural diseases, they would still have plenty of work to do.
This is the subject that medicine tackles least well and it is a relief that at last doctors are making intelligent referrals to osteopaths. Though you do not need your doctor’s permission to visit an osteopath, it is well worth the polite effort of approaching him first and keeping him informed.
Hypnotherapy
The therapeutic use of hypnosis has been long accepted as one of the principles that all medical students should learn but in practice few qualify with more than a passing reference to it as a tiny corner within psychiatry. Many doctors and dentists qualify later through weekend courses and there is no doubt that hypnotherapy has much to offer as an economical and cost-effective alternative to psychotherapy — a very time-consuming treatment that could never be available to more than a few.
There are, however, two snags. The first is that by no means everyone is susceptible to induction of the deep trance state in which the striking power of hypnotic suggestion can be explored. The vast majority of people can be induced to relax deeply but are always conscious of the therapist and do not surrender their will to him. For most people, therefore, hypnotherapy functions only like a relaxed and condensed form of psychotherapy.
This leads on to the second difficulty. Psychotherapy depends on the wisdom, integrity, balance and experience of the therapist to a very high degree. In hypnotherapy this maturity is not guaranteed. Indeed, it is easy to learn to hypnotize people in a weekend or so and very tempting to set up as a ’consultant’ purely on that basis. There are far too many people practising hypnotherapy without sufficient experience to cope responsibly with the unexpected — and there is no way of reliably spotting the difficult case in advance. On the one hand there are many people who have rid themselves of neurotic symptoms and compulsive habits and are completely satisfied. On the other are the one or two who have needed rescue from a suicidally unstable condition, in which they have been abandoned by an unsuitable hypnotherapist. What are you to do?
Your first protection is to approach someone with at least one other recognized professional qualification: clinical psychology or medicine are the most reliable. With these at least you can expect several years of training at university level and additional clinical experience.
To these, and certainly to any other hypnotherapists, you should also apply another test. In your initial contacts with them, make up your mind how mature you would rate them. If you find yourself feeling more experienced than they are, do not place yourself in their hands. Your therapist must be at least as mature a person as you are yourself.
Bach Flower Remedies
Edward Bach was one of the most attractive English physicians of this century and is still remembered with affection by residents of Cromer where he spent much of the latter part of his life. After establishing himself in a lucrative practice based on important vaccine research, in 1930 he gave it up to devote himself to a greater ambition. He wished to discover a simple system of healing that ordinary people could safely use for themselves. That task took him the remaining six years of his life, as well as stirring the medical profession to unworthy disciplinary anger.
His sympathy and attunement with nature enabled him to discern that the essential qualities of thirty eight flowers could profoundly influence the abnormal states of mind on which disease is founded and he devised means of dissolving their quality in spring water and preserving it with brandy. A few drops further diluted in spring water and savoured carefully several times daily proved capable of remarkable cures in a matter of weeks, not just in his own hands but in those of his assistants.
His legacy if faithfully maintained by the Centre founded in his name at Sotwell in Oxfordshire, from which you can obtain all the literature and supplies you need to choose and make up remedies. For all the practical details, click on the link above.
Naturopathy
This is an unsatisfactory term meaning cure by natural principles and has been left nearly to the last because strictly speaking it applies to all therapies which work with quality. All holistic therapists should incorporate its principles with their other skills. But as a technical term it also describes one academic approach to alternative therapy, several schools of which exist in Britain.
Its principle tools are the body’s own maintenance functions — breathing, food and fasting, water, bathing, correct elimination and massage. No cure is complete without some attention to all of these, which is why so many of our publications refer to them and why it is hard to distinguish them as a separate system of therapy.
There are however several situations — arthritis and cancer are good examples — in which prolonged fasting or rigorous dieting may be of great benefit. A naturopath is better placed to help you with these than most doctors are.
Dowsing and Radionics
Whatever you may think of old men with hazel twigs, it is easy to demonstrate that dowsing works. What is more, most people can do it if they try. More controversial is what it represents, but since it will give you straight answers to quite sophisticated questions it seems to tap in on the fields of intelligent influence that cause life in quality. It certainly does not relate to magnetism, electricity or gravity — the three quantity fields that most people know about.
Dowsing is used in diagnosis and healing in various guises. One is psionic medicine, in which doctors use dowsing to discover miasms causing disease, and formulate homoeopathic remedies to remove them. Another is radionics, which employs electronic equipment for both diagnosis and distant healing. Another is touch for health or kinesiology, which uses the strength of muscles to indicate responses to the examiner’s mental questions. But many healers use a simple pendulum or metal rods, which are more elegant versions of the diviner’s twig.
In expert and experienced hands these devices can yield remarkable information at great distance; its best known exponents are consulted regularly by telephone and frequently help doctors out. But the same responsibility exists here as in science: the dowser must ask sensible questions in the first place. If, for instance, he sets out to find allergies, then allergies are how your symptoms will be interpreted — whether that is sensible or not. The intelligence behind a pendulum cannot override a determined dowser just with yes or no answers. So choose your dowsing practitioner with care: look for general intelligence, experience and a good general grasp of medicine, naturopathic principles and your problem.
Relaxation and Meditation
For people who are not susceptible to deep hypnotic trance, hypnotherapy comes down to relaxation, visualizations and wize counselling. Many schools of therapy prefer to start from this point in the first place, and only employ hypnosis in selected situations. This is an approach that most people can relate to, whether or not they are sympathetic to holistic therapy in principle. It certainly provides a much more suitable approach to most human relationship problems, including those arising from a need to know yourself better.
The same general cautions apply here as in hypnotherapy: make sure to choose as your therapist a person you feel you can trust in any case. Qualifications are difficult to interpret in this field, as they are in many others: you may need to ask about these before committing yourself. As a general rule, be more wary of therapists who advertise, or make much of their qualifications; that often turns out to mask inexperience or insecurity on their part. Personal recommendation from people you already trust may be a more reliable guide.
Conclusion
Disease starts in quality, where scientific doctors cannot touch it. If they will not face this, you can and must. Tread warily, however, and be an active partner in your care. The quality of your life is up to you.