(First Post)
Sickness and Medicine : From First principles

The purpose of all medical systems is to restore sick persons to health, i.e., to cure them.

The meaning of "to restore" or "to cure" can be misleading, because it implies a significant task performed by the medicine. This is NEVER the case.

In restoring health, the body does the work - the medicine just assists in some very specific way.

In this discussion let's set aside "emergencies and surgical cases" (accidents, serious mechanical problems) as exceptions.

Sickness is a state in which the patient IS or FEELS ill. The process of identifying the kind of illness the patient is suffering from is called diagnosis. Successful diagnosis will help to decide the most appropriate treatment.

Is diagnosis of the particular disease essential? The primary objective is the restoration of health. Must all medical systems use disease diagnosis even if they can accomplish the primary objective without it?

No.

When a person feels ill, they may wait for improvement, but if it doesn't come, or it worsen so that they are in significant discomfort, they may visit a doctor.

The doctor will attempt to diagnose and treat the disease - and failing this, refer them to someone who can.

Generally speaking, what could be wrong with the patient? In Britain today, in hygienic conditions, with safe food, water, and a generally healthy life-style available to all, the problem is unlikely to be plague or a fatal infection.

The cause of the problem is likely to be either connected to an unhealthy lifestyle or a chronic condition. An unhealthy lifestyle would include smoking, excessive drinking, unhealthy diet, being overweight, lack of exercise, drug abuse, unsafe sex, etc.

Chronic conditions, incurable in conventional medicine, normally have a genetic connection, and are more common in middle and old age, e.g., fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, spinal deformity, IBS, arthritis, ME, and many more.

It goes without saying that the lifestyle issues need to be addressed first, to remove all exciting factors.

But, supposing you could deal with all the persistent chronic conditions without ever having to diagnose the individual disease(s) at all. By approaching the problem from a completely different direction.
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(Cont 1)
Discussions on sickness and disease which involve Homeopathy frequently use words like immune system and body defences, but these are just simplifications. Consider the term HOMEOSTATIS : "stability of all body functions at normal levels".
Homeostatic control involves every cell in the body, with systems able to quickly recognize any deviation from the normal state, and then able to correct this deviation. The billions of cells involved make this a very significant task. Millions of cells die each day and are replaced. The dead tissues have to be detected, gathered up, and removed from the body, a full-time task for the lymphatic system, which is also a key component of the immune system, attacking and removing both disease agents and foreign matter.

The immune system is just one part of the Homeostatic control system, ultimately under the control of a centre in the brain called the Hypothalamus. The Hypothalamus has many receptors which receive neural signals and monitor blood chemistry. The blood contains many messengers which indicate the status of the various systems involved in Homeostasis around the body. The Hypothalamus then takes action based on these inputs. There are four major inputs to this control system, which are:

1)PSYCHE : Higher Centres of Brain.

2)NEURAL : Nerve input from around the body.

3)IMMUNE SYSTEM : Signals of Immune system's status.

4)ENDOCRINE SYSTEM : Signals of status.

Because the Hypothalamic centre for Homeostasis is so central to total homeostatic control, it is called an "axis" ("something around which everything else revolves"). In this case the: PSYCHO-NEURO-IMMUNO-ENDOCRINE Axis ("PNIE" axis), the body's highest-level control system. PNIE is sometimes shortened to PNI, as you'll see in Searches. The study of this field is not new, but the 'logical' approach to the problem taken by this discussion, as you will see, IS new. The four major inputs to the PNIE centre have to be evaluated, resulting in the end in instructions back to them. A book on immunology will not say much about PNIE or PNI because so little is actually known about the relationship between the immune system and PNIE.

And Scientific experimentation on the PNIE is virtually impossible. The uncertainty principle of physics, proposed by Heisenberg, states that both the momentum and position of a quantum-mechanical particle cannot simultaneously be determined sharply. The very act of attempting to tie-down and measure the momentum or position of a particle, alters these parameters. An "uncertainty principle" also applies to the study of Homeostasis in the area of the PNIE axis. It is simply impossible to separate or fragment it's components for study without alteration. Unlike Science which insists that everything is identified and nailed down, Homeopathy accepts this limitation. (Continued later.)
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cont 3)
From the way people react to excessive doses of Homeopathic medicines, i.e., with symptom aggravations or violent swings between symptoms from one extreme to another, e.g., from feeling very cold to feeling very hot and back again, Hahnemann likened the process to a pendulum swinging. In these situations he used the term "Vital Principle becoming untuned". He reported that in disease, the Vital Principle could absorb a lot of stress before "becoming untuned".

When the immune response is triggered, there is indeed a lag of 7-14 days for the production of antibodies to build up. In practice, the infection is usually destroyed before that 7-14 days, and antibody production then cancelled - all this happening before any symptoms appear in the patient.

Otherwise, if the infection takes root, with constant monitoring by Homeostatic Control (HC), HC may decide to intervene by raising body temperature to help destroy the infection, for instance.

Hahnemann's concept of a "Vital Principle" is equivalent to HC, the body's Homeostatic control system. He provides so much detail about its behaviour, that it is not difficult to put forward a theory of what it is.

Hahnemann's medicines did not contain any disease agent at all, yet they produced symptoms closely matching a particular patient's disease.
Therefore, how could the disease agent be responsible for symptoms? It cannot - the body always produces the symptoms.

An anatomical map of the brain shows areas reserved for each part of the body. Though a feeling in our feet may seem to be coming from that location, it is actually constructed in the brain area responsible for sensations/activities involving the feet. HC, too, because its activities affect the whole body, e.g. symptom generation, must have a location or centre in the brain.

Hahnemann discovered these bizarre medicines that do absolutely nothing except produce specific symptoms in people. Indeed, their ONLY medicinal value is to produce symptom patterns, and even then, they are useless unless they closely match a patient's symptoms - only then do they have the capacity to act 'homeopathically'.

What we have called the PNIE axis is a significant part of HC, handling all the inputs to HC, and involved in relaying back outputs from HC.

If the HC centre in the brain controls Homeostasis throughout the body, what controls Homeostasis of HC itself? The HC is itself brain tissue, providing its own Homeostasis input (Psyche or Neural) like all other systems through the PNIE axis. HC does not exist in one specific location, but has several locations in the brain.

Homeopathic medicines are always administered by mouth or inhalation, and never to organs or tissues. Homeopathic medicines themselves cannot result in symptoms such as elevation of body temperature. But, natural diseases, acting through the HC, can result in temperature elevation.
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Cont 4)
Scientific studies have shown that Homeostatic Control (HC) can have profound effects on the activities of the immune system, e.g., greatly reduced T-cell activity in some people in depression. HC can simply override the immune system if it considers its activities to be a waste of resources, or not essential for survival.

After reading Hahnemann's books and his detailed description of the behaviour of HC, I am convinced that the main reason millions of people suffer incurable chronic diseases (of genetic origin) is due to HC being incapable of adequately performing it's regulatory tasks around the body.

Returning to the chronic diseases mentioned previously, these are not the result of an infective agent but are of genetic origin. In a healthy person, HC has no problems in maintaining homeostasis, promptly extinguishing any disease - a system which evolved into its almost perfect state over millions of years.

However, being perfect is not the rule of genetics - the variation of individuals is essential for the species to survive, and many individuals must be sacrificed for that overall goal. In all our cells are 40,000 genes, each having between 2 and 200 operational versions. The combinations we are dealt make us unique. The DNA of these genes is translated into proteins which make our bodies and define who we are. The variation of genes at each generation makes us all different in our constitution; we are all genetic experiments to test our suitability to the world as it is today. This is measured by whether or not we pass our genes onto the next generation.

People have chronic diseases of genetic origin because the "total genetic variations" have proceeded to a level at which some metabolic or physical process of the body is not fully functional, AND which cannot be fully compensated for by the person's HC system.

This "stress" situation can persist for very many generations, thus selecting the genes responsible for successful strategies used by the Homeostatic control system.

[ 14. June 2003, 11:25: Message edited by: Timokay ]