This is a great intro article to Homeopathy and how it saved the health and sanity of one smart and attentive fellow. Enjoy.
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A Painful Road to Homeopathic Cure
by K.J.
I HAD ALWAYS felt that I understood disease. If you came down with an illness, you called up your doctor who prescribed an antibiotic; within 48 hours, it cured you. Feel bad, take pill, feel better.
But by the time I had my first meeting with my homeopath, David Kramer, my belief in the infallibility of the medical system had crashed. I was in pain, I was angry and extremely depressed. Nine years of chronic joint pain, degenerative disc disease, torn cartilage, and a host of other physical problems were severely limiting how I used my body. I couldn't even throw a ball around with my son in our backyard, or make a simple repair around the house without suffering debilitating neck, back, and shoulder pain for days.
I felt as if I was going into a deep physical decline. I no longer worried whether I could take care of my family after the age of 60; I was worried about taking care of them after the age of 40. As I described to David, I felt as if something was "eating me from the inside out."
The Progression of Physical Woes
My physical symptoms could be traced back to 1985, when I first started feeling an odd tingling around the right side of my abdomen. My brother years ago had suffered a debilitating case of shingles, and I instinctively knew that this was one of the first symptoms. I called my doctor who had me in the next day, pronounced my diagnosis correct, and put me on massive doses of Zovirax. It never progressed beyond minor irritation.
About a year later, while in the gym bench-pressing on my lunch hour, I felt as if a fuse blew in my back. By the time I returned to my office, not only did I have a sore neck, but I was having trouble using my hands.
I went to an orthopedist who, after X-rays and CAT scans, told me I had herniated two disks in my cervical spine. He passed me on to a surgeon who thankfully declined to operate, told me my weight-lifting days were over, and sent me on to physical therapy. Unfortunately my neck pain became chronic, and I began having what would be many years of muscle spasm and pain along my upper back.
Then one morning in 1988, while taking a shower, I seemed to be getting soap in my right eye no matter how hard I squeezed it shut. Ignoring it, I got out of the shower, toweled off, and started to brush my teeth. But toothpaste and water just came bubbling out of the right side of my mouth. I looked in the mirror and saw a slight droop in my right eye and on the right side of my mouth. I had developed symptoms of Bell's Palsy.
Over the next few days, I was treated with decreasing doses of Prednisone and went back to the doctor for follow-up. I was passed along to a physical therapist, who prescribed a hand-held electrical stimulation gun that, like a cattle prod, I was to use to stimulate the affected side of my face with short, electrical shocks. But muscular function did not begin to return until about a month later and, up to now, only about 80 percent of the function has returned.
My bouts with neck pain continued and I tried returning to the gym. But using weights badly aggravated my back and neck. I was beginning to get frustrated, because my feeling of well-being was deeply tied into my sense of physical strength and appearance. Along with the disfigurement of the Bell's, I began to feel a little depressed.
Because I needed some kind of hard exercise (not only was I competitive, I loved to sweat!), I picked up the game of racquetball. But after only a few months, in April 1991, while reaching for a ball, I felt as if my whole right shoulder had popped in and out, complete with sound effects. I excused myself, changed, and headed home.
The next morning, I had trouble moving my right shoulder and arm, and I was in intense pain. I was recommended to a local orthopedic surgeon, who offered me either surgery, where they would scrape away part of my offending acromioclavicular joint, or physical therapy to strengthen the area. I opted for physical therapy.
Now along with chronic neck pain, I had a shoulder that felt weakened and prone to further injury. Where once physically I felt invulnerable, I suddenly started to feel as if I was beginning to break down.
If I had any doubts that there was something deeply wrong, the point was made again the following month, May 1991, when upon standing up from a kneeling position, I heard the rip of cartilage in my left knee. After X-rays and MRIs, the marvel of technology where you are slipped into a claustrophobia-inducing tube for up to 45 minutes while huge magnets give the atoms of your body their marching orders, the doctor again offered me either surgery or physical therapy. I had already done my homework, was convinced that torn cartilage left alone would lead to early arthritis, and opted for surgery. Following the surgery, I went into physical therapy. I got back the use of the knee, a little stiffer and a little older.
Then, two months later, July 1991, I had my first major lower back episode. Walking back home one Sunday morning with the newspapers under my arm, I felt a dull pain beginning in my lower back. By the time I reached home, I felt as if someone was digging a fist into my back and I was sent sprawling onto the floor. Diagnosis: lumbar disc herniation; recommendation: two days of bed rest, anti-inflammatory medications, and physical therapy. Although the pain would eventually subside, it always reminded me it was there.
Then, in December 1991, I had a major flare-up of neck pain along with tingling in my hands. Back into physical therapy.
One month later, January 1992, the cartilage in my right knee tore. Again, first X-rays, then MRI, then surgery. But this time the knee didn't heal. So, exactly one year later, in December 1992, after telling my tale of woe to another surgeon, the right knee was operated on again, fresh tears were found, and more cartilage was removed.
About seven months later, in August 1993, I herniated a thoracic disc. Pain around my right side sent me back to my doctor, who sent me back to the neurologist for tests then back into physical therapy. "There must be something really wrong here," I remember telling him. "Are all of these injuries just coincidental?"
Then in November 1993, I had a major flare-up of neck pain with hand numbness and tingling. Again more tests, more MRIs. Again more physical therapy. My depression was growing and I was becoming obsessed not only with the pain, but in doing everything I could to avoid it.
By June of 1994, since I could no longer work out in a gym, I took up cycling. I could at least work up a sweat and burn off some of the weight I had gained from lengthening periods of inactivity because of injury. But chronic pain had turned me into an Advil junkie. I began taking them habitually in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Then, when the Advil didn't seem to work anymore, I started taking huge doses of aspirin, which seemed to help.
Then one Saturday evening, my right toe started to hurt as if I had stubbed it on a wall. I thought maybe I had tightened my cycling shoes too much, shrugged it off, and went to dinner with my wife and friends. The next morning, the toe started to swell and pain began in the joint. I called the doctor's office and my call was returned the next morning. By then the swelling started to involve the entire right foot and the joint in my big toe began to feel as if it was filled with sand.
The doctor told me I had gout, prescribed an anti-inflammatory and told me to stay off the foot. By that evening I couldn't take the pain anymore. The whole foot was now involved and I felt I was going to lose my mind over the pain. I called a doctor friend of ours, who after hearing the symptoms immediately put me on Colchicine. The next morning, he confirmed the diagnosis, put me on a vegetarian diet, and told me I had to wait it out.
The next day the pain started to subside. But that evening, I awoke in the middle of the night with a slicing pain back to front, around my right side along my rib cage. I got out of bed, now drenched in sweat and in enough pain that I was debating whether I should go to the emergency room. I instead opted for an ice pack, which seemed to help, and called the orthopedic surgeon the next morning. He told me it sounded like I had herniated another thoracic disk. Injury after injury had become more frightening to me. "Why is this happening to me?" I asked him. He looked at me and said, "I guess it's just bad luck."
Prior to going back into physical therapy for my back, I returned to my neurologist for further testing, including a second EMG and blood tests. I had given him my history and told him there must be something deeply wrong. To me, this growing string of injuries and chronic pain was a warning. But after additional blood testing for diabetes, there were no systemic causes to be found. There was something wrong that nobody was seeing. I felt as if I was dying, part by part, at an ever-accelerating rate.
And I also felt as if nobody was really listening to me.
Finding Homeopathy
About a month later, at a birthday party, I met a woman who seemed acutely aware of the pain I was in. I walked in a contorted position, could not sit still for any length of time, felt completely isolated and depressed, and was barely joining in any conversations. She was studying homeopathy and asked me if I knew anything about it. I said no, but basically gave her a rundown of everything modern medicine had done to me.
She told me to go down to my local health food store and search out three remedies, Arnica montana, Ruta graveolens, and Rhus toxicodenron. She also gave me the name of a homeopath she respected, David Kramer.
Before I went to see him, he had let me know that we would spend at least two hours together. We actually spent close to three. After listening to my physical complaints, he started asking me more penetrating questions, about my likes and dislikes, and "where" was I and "who" was I when I first started having these medical problems. Who was surrounding me, friends, family, job situation? He asked me about pressures in my life and specifically about my feelings about things. He asked me about losses and their significance to me (I had recently lost a close childhood friend to kidney cancer).
Someone was asking me how I felt and was actually listening!
As I talked to David, I felt that I was finally giving someone the entire picture of a deep sadness that I had been carrying around for many years. There were times when just the passing thought of my friend and the years that we shared would cause me to cry, something that I was not accustomed to doing. He was a touchstone for me, and even though as time went on we went down our separate paths, we had talked every day on the phone. This was something I missed terribly.
This also brought up other losses for me, particularly the loss of my father whom I understood only as I approached the age at which he died. The loss had even greater meaning when I would sit with my children and show them pictures of their grandfather. I would point to him and say, "This is my father like I am your father." To them it was only a picture. To me, it was someone's hand that I would never hold again.
I went further and deeper with David. The session seemed to pick up speed as we talked about friends and family. I felt I had no choice. David was a stranger, but I also considered him a last hope.
After close to three hours, I was pretty much spent. There was nothing left to say. I had given him everything that I could see at that time. David put his pen down and considered me for a few moments, asking a few questions about some of the things I said. Then he began to explain a bit about how homeopathy affects the patient. Not about the laws of similars, but because he saw how deeply I was hurting, he began to explain about the cure taking place on all levels, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
My Introduction to the Remedy
David used the analogy of a train moving down a track. At some point, the train became sidetracked onto a diseased pathway. The job that we faced was to stop the train. Then, as he explained, we have to get the train to reverse itself to the spot where it became mis-routed and then get it back on the right track.
David explained that throughout the cure, since we were backtracking over old ground, I might begin to experience old injuries and emotional upsets as I moved back through them again. I might have recurrences and shouldn't be upset by them. He explained how the disease moves through the body, from the inside out, and said I might experience this as skin problems. Rather than try to treat them topically, I was to call him with any changes that I noticed.
He did another curious thing. He chose a bottle out of a case, held it in his hand and looked at me. He then stopped, considered for a moment, and said, "No, let's try something that's a little more aggressive." I asked him what he meant and he explained that ordinarily he might give just a single dose of the remedy in the office. But he was going to approach this differently.
He took out another vial and had me stand up in front of him. "Hold the vial in your fist," he said, "and then raise your arm stiffly to your side."
I took the vial in my hand, closed my hand, made a fist and then raised my arm up. David came up to me and then, as if playing an old schoolyard trick, he tried to push my arm down as though it were a pump handle. But my arm stayed where it was.
"Oh, come on," I thought. "I've just spilled my heart out to someone who's behaving like a storefront tarot-card reader."
"David," I said, "how do I know that this wouldn't happen with any remedy in that box?" David grinned and brought his case over to me. "Pick any vial," he said. I chose one and he again told me to make a fist and hold my arm out. He easily pushed my arm down to my side. "Do it again," I said and deliberately tried to hold my arm up. But once again, my arm gave way and he easily pushed it down to my side. "Let me hold the first vial again" I said. He gave me the vial, I made a fist and raised my arm. David couldn't push my arm down. "OK," I said, "what's in this stuff?"
He explained that it was a remedy called Carcinosin and that it would help to cure me. He gave me explicit, written instructions on how to handle it and on what to avoid, for example, caffeine, mint, and so forth.
The Journey to Cure
That afternoon, I prepared my first bottle of Carcinosin, in an LM/1 potency. Since I was already feeling better, having tried some Rhus tox, I looked forward to even more improvement.
But the next morning, I woke up, got out of bed, and suddenly felt like the Tin Man. My whole body momentarily stiffened. For some reason, I wasn't frightened and gradually, within a half hour, I began to loosen up.
Over the next few weeks, I gradually began to feel better. The pain in my neck and back continued to subside, and my energy level actually started to increase. More interesting were the emotional changes that began taking place. My depression began to lift and I didn't feel burdened anymore. Where I once had an explosive temper at work, I became much more reasonable and focused. My sense of humor began to return and I was no longer snapping at everyone around me.
Over the next few months, my dreams became more vivid. Old experiences, things I hadn't thought about in years began coming back to me. I let them reveal themselves to me, watched in wonder as they literally unfolded in front of me in movie fashion. Then, they evaporated, as dreams do, leaving me with a sense of calm and what I can only describe as revelation.
There seemed to be so many things that I had lost touch with, so many memories and people that I had buried down deep over the years. Now they were coming back to visit, old friends that I had missed, memories that I should never have tried to forget. I realized that any experience was important, any event, any person. To deny them was to deny what you are made of. To forget them was to diminish yourself.
As I began feeling better, I started to take more responsibility for my cure. I began to read what I could about homeopathy, but didn't limit myself to just one alternative path. Since I was still having muscular spasms across my neck and back, I began investigating massage and came across a book by Bonnie Prudden on trigger point therapy. It also gave me some background in muscular structure and mechanics.
As the homeopathy worked on me at deeper levels, I began working more at the surogram of stretching and strengthening to help with my back pain. I invested in something called a Thera-Cane, a self massage tool that helped me get to those trigger points in my back to release the muscle spasms.
The more control I took, the more self-success I encountered, and the more encouraged I was to continue on an alternate path. I began looking more deeply into homeopathy. What interested me most was not necessarily the physical cure, but the deeper emotional and spiritual relief it seemed to offer. I gained a greater understanding of "disease" and how the disease cannot be separated from the patient. It is this lack of individuality, this lack of looking at the whole person, that allopathic medicine is most guilty of. What my previous doctors seemed to miss, and what I now understand, is that my disease had affected me not only physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. I had been declining on all levels. But they insisted on treating only those things that they could X-ray or scan or grow in petri dishes. They were missing "me."
Although I didn't experience any typical aggravations on the remedy, I did go through a healing crisis in March of 1995. A sudden high temperature sent me home from work. I had left a message for David that I was heading home feeling really sick, although fever seemed to be the main problem.
I got back home and immediately went to bed and slept for the next few hours. During that period, David had called and told my wife that the best thing was to let me sleep. He also asked her to pick up a bottle of Echinacea and gave her directions on how I should take it.
I remember one other significant thing: Along with the fever, my lower back started to hurt and began "bunching up." It had been months since I had experienced lower back pain. But in the middle of one night, I woke up suddenly to feel my lower back "release," as if two hands that had been tightly intertwined were now loosening up and sliding past each other. Within 24 hours of coming down with the high fever (103 degrees), it was gone. To this day, my lower back no longer hurts the way it once did.
It's been about a year and a half now since I began my journey into alternative cure. Back in September, about a year after I had started it, I told David I wanted to try to go off of the remedy. He said I should go with my instincts, that although he felt it might be too early, I should at least try.
Unfortunately, I had a precipitous drop in energy almost immediately. All I wanted to do was sleep and I was catching naps wherever I could. I began to lose motivation. After about a month of this, I called David and told him what was happening. He told me not to restart the remedy but to come in to talk. He felt that we should reconsider the remedy and possibly add another or switch completely.
After some analysis, David felt I was still on the right path with Carcinosin, but he thought I should cut the dosage to once a day. The deciding factor was that although my energy level was down, he felt I was still clearly focused and stable and had come a long way. The drop in energy he felt was just my system beginning to devote all its resources towards cure.
I am back on Carcinosin, once a day, at an LM/15 potency right now. David feels that by this summer, I should be able to dispense with the remedy and I tend to believe him.
So many things have come back to me now. I'm writing again, involved with my family, and much more focused at work. Where I was once highly confrontational, physically and emotionally, I'm now a much better listener. I've begun to see how rich life is and how important people are to me.
Most important, I've begun to understand the meaning of taking responsibility for your cure and not leaving it up to modern technology to tell you whether you are healthy or sick. The one thing that the "modern" medical industry seems to have done is to have taken away "hope." The lack of hope has become, for so many people with chronic illness, a part of their disease. Once that has happened, there is nothing much left.
I hope to begin formal study of homeopathy this fall with David at his recently founded Hudson Valley School of Classical Homeopathy. I look forward to the time when I can begin bringing to other people what has been returned to me: hope.
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