We live in very interesting times. Indeed, this timeless passage from A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, has never felt more true! “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Unless you are living under a rock or in a cave (which is usually where you will find me… but, my clients bring me news as well as diseases that are in vogue), you are probably aware of the measles headlines that has taken the media and the legislative sessions in some states by storm. Bills are being introduced to tighten vaccine mandates, remove exemptions, and increase vaccination rates amidst strong opposition from parents who are showing up in throngs to protest and fight for their right to medical freedom, right to informed consent, and right to medical choice of what they want to put into their own and their children’s bodies. I am not interested in the shaming that goes on in the name of science, or religion. (Seriously, we have to get out of this shame based culture!) But, I am very very interested in all of the symptoms and experiences of illness and health that clients bring to me as they relate their life stories to me, including what they have INHERITED and what they have ACQUIRED over their life time. I believe in EVOLUTION… in nature, in community, in diversity, in the whole. Evolution ensures life, and it means that the preset constructs and paradigms need to be always changing… nothing is set in stone except nature’s laws. To tackle a challenging problem, we often realize that we have to unlearn and scratch everything, and restart and relearn in a different way (sometimes over and over again) until we find the proper solution.
For the past several weeks, I have been getting emails and calls for dealing with measles. Some clients want to know if there is anything homeopathic to prevent, some people want a protocol to minimize side-effects from the vaccine they are about to go get, some people simply want to be prepared if they do contract the mild (yet dreaded) disease. This week, I also got two calls from clients with a body rash that followed approx. a week after the children received a booster shot of the MMR vaccine. Doctors called it “viral syndrome”. The families were positive that their children weren’t exposed to anyone they knew with any such viral syndrome… in fact the whole family got some funky skin eruptions, except in one case where the mom who had already gotten the measles in her childhood was spared. I assured them that that was probably one of the best scenarios of the measles vaccine outcome… that means the vaccine actually did its job.. and the rash is the immune system in action mobilizing to resolve the virus properly, and it is very likely that their immunity will hold longer, than if they had shown no reaction to the vaccine at all. Yes, we now know that vaccines don’t impart lifetime immunity as previously thought, and that in fact studies have shown that vaccine failure due to waning immunity can occur. You see, that previous belief has already undergone a rehash (or two), and the CDC then put into place a second and a third booster for the MMR vaccine as new information came to light. As our understanding of disease and the immune system evolves over time, it would bode us well to pause from time to time, regroup, and start considering different options and apply different thinking to the outbreaks that seem to be cropping up in pockets and cycles more and more. Blaming and shaming the un-vaccinated can only take us so far at the end of the day. There has got to be a better solution than having to depend on other people to get their act together or forcing them to do something they don’t want to do. I can not imagine a worse scenario of dependency and coercion. I’d rather have a reasonably effective plan that I can put into place for myself of my own free will without forcing nor expecting other people to do the same. Besides, a recent study in China established that measles is still happening in their population of 99% vaccination rate. The most recent case of a mumps outbreak amongst fully vaccinated sailors in a navy ship that had to be quarantined (and couldn’t dock) for 5 months is also another example that many outbreaks are happening despite vaccination. Here is an open letter to the legislators by an immunologist also explaining the same. So, all that divisive commentary and the taking away of freedom of choice is really not where my common sense and my love of my fellow human beings take me.
Instead, what if we stop trying to PREVENT after a certain point in the game, but instead try to TRAIN the immune system to help naturally deal with infectious diseases. I believe that vaccines did a stellar job in keeping the acute infectious disease incidence rate (I repeat, incidence rate) low over the last several years, but, there was a price to pay. And, we are seeing the grassroots uprising from people who have paid the price more than others so far, and it is just a matter of time before it catches up with the rest of us. Just like antibiotics, and opioids… I believe we are also in a vaccine-induced crisis. They all did do what they were originally meant to do very effectively, no doubt… but, we are now realizing the holes that we have dug ourselves into by widespread, repeated, and put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket usage of all these drugs. Vaccines are no different… they were absolutely brilliant until they weren’t any more. And, the masses with adverse effects are growing and speaking out, as they witness their children change right before their eyes after a round of routine vaccinations. And, I am not just referring to autism (in which the MMR vaccine is often incriminated, but debunked by CDC). Let’s put aside autism. Children are dealing with chronic health conditions like never before, with auto-immune diseases reigning supreme. In fact, anything “auto-immune” calls for detailed scrutiny of anything and everything that is injected into and ingested by the body that impacts the immune system, and can you deny that vaccines impact the immune system? In fact, vaccines do an underhand deal with only part of the immune system, without involving the whole system, just invoking the anti-body generating arm… while the other half (arm) stays asleep. Does anyone else think that it might potentially be troublesome to not let the right arm know what the left arm is up to? Actually, for people who are awakening and questioning, there is quite bit of research going on in understanding this risk when it comes to the “AUTO-IMMUNE” state.
So – it is time to focus on building health from the roots. Nowadays, we have access to clean drinking water, sanitation, supplements and good food (if you choose correctly)… yet, we are getting sicker and sicker by the generation with all kinds of quirky, mysterious diseases. It is time to re-configure, re-do, re-think certain paradigms. No more quick fixes, easy bypass mechanisms, nor fooling the natural immune response to make it look the other way. I see this sort of fundamental change happening in the understanding of the immune system in a big way in recent years, and there is no stopping it. I can see a reclamation happening of the basics, this understanding and embracing of our biology, and the ecology. The impetus is on nurturing, INTEGRATING, and training the biome (mind, body, and spirit) and gathering the proper tools for caring for ourselves and for each other keeping in tune with the laws of nature.
One of those tools is Homeoprophylaxis, an immune system educator tool. But, before we get to that part of it in some more detail, it is important to understand that when the proper needs of a healthy biome have been met – good food, clean water, and sanitation – the immune system is able to navigate expertly and get adequately informed and trained of the various infectious agents in the surrounding environment. It’s not about, and never should be about, not FALLING sick… but, about the EMERGENCE from it. The discomforts and symptoms of an acute-level infectious sickness are a dialogue that happens between the environment and the each living organism in the environment… wherein the system/organism is primed and trained and strengthened and made more vital in the process to serve it’s life purpose in the environment. It’s infectious because everyone in the community needs to go through it, learn from it, integrate it and move on as a community. Once you have gone through it, you don’t fear it any more for life. You see, if you lose the fear, or rather come out of the spell that we absolutely have to STOP all infectious diseases from happening… then you might start seeing that there might be benefits from these diseases. Right now we’ve been conditioned to believe that all infectious diseases are bad, and we are under the spell that we have to somehow stop them… because infectious disease = death. We have to stop them with vaccines, even if we trade them in for a plethora of chronic diseases to be navigated for the rest of our lives. Never mind that there is death happening all the time, everywhere, in multiple other ways, in much greater numbers from the chronic diseases that we have traded them in for, but for some reason we have been taught to fear more the death from these infectious diseases. But, since we have figured out good nutrition, clean water and sanitation, measles deaths are not even happening like they used to… in addition, we now know that Vitamin A is an effective treatment for measles (CDC). So, with the risk of death greatly minimized, we can perhaps begin to consider enjoying the benefits of going through these infectious disease processes, and improve long term health outcomes. It’s time to roll with that notion that these infectious disease processes may just play a very important role in the development of the immune system of the individual and the community as a whole, preventing the onset of more serious chronic diseases in the future, like cancer. Let’s bring the community together over this, instead of dividing it with shame and coercion.
Homeoprophylaxis is a tool that one can optionally add to the basic needs of good food, clean water, and sanitation, to help the immune system train effectively and safely to endure the exposure to these infectious agents in nature. It’s not about stopping or preventing the disease, but about being prepared to properly integrate and master it. The operative word here is “integrate”, that speaks to the whole, that then informs and strengthens the immune system. Back in the 1800s when Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenner were working with and studying the rabies and smallpox diseases respectively, homeopaths were also working with these same diseases, and they had the brilliant idea to attenuate the pathogen through the homeopathic dilution method such that no virulence of the bacterial or viral strain remains. No added chemicals, no adjuvants, no heavy metals, no preservatives, no immuno-modulators, no exposure to another species’ host medium to risk DNA contamination, but just the pure energetic essence of the pathogen, the disease entity. When the biome gets a whiff or hit of this energy through the medicated pellets, it activates and preps the system to fight off the disease agent… the immune system mobilizes and loads its innate weaponry, but since there are no actual invaders there is no real bloodshed. However, the system just executes a proper drill as a whole unit, as close as it can ever come to without actually getting invaded. Homeoprophylaxis has been, and is, used all over the world successfully, especially for preventing cholera and dengue epidemics by the governments of India and Haiti. Perhaps the most well documented and large scale success story of the use of homeoprophylaxis was the leptospirosis epidemic in Cuba in 2007-2008 and subsequent years, involving millions of people. There are many other such studies and cases documented in pubmed that one can search through. Bottom line, I want to be clear that homeoprophylaxis is NOT the homeopathic alternative of vaccinations. The primary goal in homeoprophylaxis is not to prevent or stop diseases at all (although that naturally may happen as a secondary outcome), instead it is to train and use these agents to develop and mature the immune system for the long haul. No suppression, but an energetic stimulus that the body responds to as a whole. That’s all there is to it.
Finally, I leave you with this what-to-do for measles from Kate Birch, director of FHCi (Free and Healthy Children International), a great resource for knowledgeable, certified Homeoprophylaxis practitioners. Getting back to the Tale of Two Cities, it strikes me that duality is an essential theme of life in this planet, however the superlative degree of comparison fueled in equal parts by belief and incredulity only serves to divide instead of unite. Come out of the divisive spell. Get technical. Integrate. Nothing is good, nor bad, or everything is. One can not exist without the other. You can opt in or opt out… but what are you opting in for, and what are you opting out of? Happy Integration! Happy Health!