Can homeopathy detect health problem at it's early stage? (when it's without symptoms)

[John Harvey]

Hi, Priscilla --

It's an easy trap to fall into, that trap of imagining that one has to treat high blood pressure in order to cure it.

Of course, the trick with homoeopathy is to keep the focus on the totality of symptoms: not with a view to addressing each individually but with a view to finding the substance that can most closely mimic the entire pattern as a totality. When you realise this, you realise that one or another incipient pathological symptom of a very general nature is of no particular value in arriving at the correct prescription.

But it's still easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the overlooked pathology will mean an untreated patient. Why? Because it's easy to fall into the trap of imagining that somebody with, say, incipient heart disease will have -- or might have -- no related symptoms.

An allopathic approach might find that justifiable. But homoeopathy treats all the symptoms arising from the one state as related together. And any state that is manifesting even subtle pathology manifests recognisable symptoms. In fact, even the so-called one-sided illnesses are extremely rare, an apparent paucity of symptoms almost always reflecting merely the practitioner's inability to learn them: the patient is extremely young or for other reasons inarticulate, or, very commonly, the practitioner simply has not invested sufficient time in which she might learn what there is in the patient's state to cure.

In a nutshell, the idea that a person walks around without symptoms while developing pathology is a purely speculative fiction; no practitioner of merit could entirely overlook the symptoms always present in an early pathological state; none has, to my knowledge, claimed their absence.

The symptoms are there; the practitioner merely needs to be ready and able to know them.

Cheers!

John

[John Harvey]

Thanks, Kerry, for thinking to add that!

Cheers --

John
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"Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it."

-- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major.

[Priscilla Tan]

Dr. Rozencwajg,

Most homeopathic practitioners I visited do not use a BP measurer, so they would not guess that one has a BP problem unless the patient is aware of that himself and related that to the practitioners.

For me, I had been a suffering of HBP since 18 of age...I had no symptoms (absolutely nothing) and was only discovered it when I went for an appendicectomy (which was a blessing in disguish or who knows what other health problems I may have later on if the BP continued to be uncontrolled).
Since then, I had been put on medication.

Because of my history, I cannot be certain what happened to me would not happen to my children. How am I going to ensure that they don't have this problem or being treated early since a homeopath does not routinely check one's BP?

Regards,
priscilla
Hypertension is a symptom, and nothing but a symptom, with the additional problem that it can be undetected for many years and cause all the problems you mention.
Once the BP has been measured and it is realised that there is a symptom (although without a complaint), then the full homeopathic work can start.
Do I make any sense here??
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

[John Harvey]

Priscilla, it seems to me that high blood pressure is, in homoeopathic terms, no more diagnostic than any other symptom -- that is to say, that it is of no great help in choosing the remedy most homoeopathic to the patient, if for no other reason than that the provings of many remedies have excluded all measure of blood pressure anyway.
You may be certain that even if one or two such symptoms, significant certainly to the patient's health but not highly significant to remedy selection, were missed in the patient consultation, it would not affect the practitioner's ability to use the remainder of the symptoms exhibited for correct remedy selection.
Again, the practitioner would in all likelihood receive no help at all from knowing the high blood pressure, precisely because the provings of so many important remedies disregard it, but also because the symptom is common rather than peculiar.
Despite your impression that you had absolutely no symptoms when you went in for an appendectomy, you undoubtedly did, even at that time, exhibit what homoeopaths would recognise as characteristic symptoms. Read again what Kerry wrote about this, and you'll recognise, I'm sure, that it applies. Dr J is not, by the way, suggesting that high blood pressure is not significant; and Kerry is not excluding it as a symptom; but Kerry is pointing out something important: that many symptoms useful to the homoeopath may be indistinguishable by the patient from normality, which is to say, a state of health. It's probably not possible for you to correctly ascertain that at the age of 18 you had exhibited no symptoms of use for homoeopathic prescribing; in all probability, you exhibited a great many. The "one-sided" illness is a great rarity in the practice of a practitioner who troubles herself to go into the case properly.
Cheers!
John
Hypertension is a symptom, and nothing but a symptom, with the additional problem that it can be undetected for many years and cause all the problems you mention.
Once the BP has been measured and it is realised that there is a symptom (although without a complaint), then the full homeopathic work can start.
Do I make any sense here??
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

[Priscilla Tan]

I think at 18, i had a BP of 180/100...surgery had to wait until the hospital brought my BP down.
I do take veggies but not so much fruits. Same for my kids.

On salt intake, I have the impression that sea salt is a healthier salt and won't pose any health problem, correct?
Hypertension is a symptom, and nothing but a symptom, with the additional problem that it can be undetected for many years and cause all the problems you mention.
Once the BP has been measured and it is realised that there is a symptom (although without a complaint), then the full homeopathic work can start.
Do I make any sense here??
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

[John Harvey]

Hi, Priscilla --

No, not quite: sea salt and rock salt are both essentially sodium chloride, NaCl, with a few bits of impurities. Rock salt in fact comes from dried-up seas. It's the sodium in it that raises blood pressure and dehydrates you. (And there's an easy way to tell, if you're dehydrated: your urine is no longer clear, as the kidneys switch from their usual filtering system to one that concentrates the urine in order to conserve water.)

It's almost impossible to have a sodium deficiency in your diet; adding table salt is certainly no necessity for health. On the other hand, most westerners consume an excess of sodium over the minerals that tend to balance its ionic effects: calcium, magnesium, and, particularly, potassium.

Some people add potassium salts (potassium chloride, potassium bicarbonate) to sodium salt in order to attain that balance. An easier, safer, and certainly healthier alternative is to consume enough potassium-rich foods to balance the sodium intake -- and to reduce sodium intake anyway.

Cheers --

John
Hypertension is a symptom, and nothing but a symptom, with the additional problem that it can be undetected for many years and cause all the problems you mention.
Once the BP has been measured and it is realised that there is a symptom (although without a complaint), then the full homeopathic work can start.
Do I make any sense here??
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

[John Harvey]

Paul, good points, and interesting. Perhaps this indicates that sodium's effect on blood pressure is not via cell walls' sodium channels; or that chloride somehow potentiates that mechanism. I'd be very interested to know more about this. Thanks --

John
Hypertension is a symptom, and nothing but a symptom, with the additional problem that it can be undetected for many years and cause all the problems you mention.
Once the BP has been measured and it is realised that there is a symptom (although without a complaint), then the full homeopathic work can start.
Do I make any sense here??
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com

[John Harvey]

I just knew that the exceptions would arise here. Thanks, Shannon, for filling in the gaps I left wide open. Yes, the salty taste is one we come equipped to recognise and to crave; and I'm aware of its use by athletes -- and desert travellers too -- to replace salt lost in heavy sweating. I didn't know about this adrenal state; that's an interesting one.

Incidentally, I don't think there's evidence that all the impurities in, say, rock salt are nutritional requirements. I was speaking very generally to include all impurities, but even some of those in reasonable quantities (i.e. ignoring incidental trace lead, mercury, cadmium, etc.), such as polyhalite, don't seem to be known as cell nutrients.

It's easy to imagine the world was somehow arranged as a playpen for human beings, rather than to see the emergence as the finest sliver of fingernail at the end of the armlength that represents the age of the planet. The relationship between human health and the world begins to make sense when you understand that the design of the human body is the result of selective pressures on differential reproductive success arising from protohuman-environment interactions, and that the protohuman design in turn resulted from earlier selective pressures.

Cheers!

John
Hypertension is a symptom, and nothing but a symptom, with the additional problem that it can be undetected for many years and cause all the problems you mention.
Once the BP has been measured and it is realised that there is a symptom (although without a complaint), then the full homeopathic work can start.
Do I make any sense here??
 
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, NMD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"
Visit my new website www.naturamedica.webs.com