Minutus

Just put this up as a query on the Homeopathy World Community - but I'd be interested in opinions here! In the footnote to Aphorism 260, amongst many other items including celery and asparagus, Hahnemann states that reading in bed is bad for you. Any ideas why this should be? Or whether true homeopaths should avoid celery and onion soup?

Vera
------------------------------------
Vera Resnick
Classical Homeopath
054-4640736
e-mail: vera.homeopath@gmail.com
www.jerusalemhomeopath.com
www.materiamedicastudymethods.wordpress.com

Overactivates the mind and prevents decent sleep - likewise celery and sparrow grass, overactivates the digestive system

He also includes highly spiced foods, now I really draw the line at giving up a good curry!
Joy

http://www.joylucashomeopathy.com
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/homeopathystudy/

Vera Resnick wrote:
Vera, what translation are you using?

It doesn't actually say "reading in bed". The German is "Lesen in
wagerechte Lage" = "Reading in horizontal Position". The phrase BEFORE
that is "langer Mittagsschlaf im Liegen (in Betten)," = "longer
Midday-sleep while Lying (in Bed),". Perhaps some translations run these
together?
"why is reading HORIZONTALLY, i.e. while lying down, bad for you"! One
reason I know of from personal experience is that if you often read
lying down, you will teach your body to stay awake while lying, and then
have trouble falling asleep. I think perhaps it's also not good for your
eyes, but I have only a vague memory of hearing this. Certainly if you
wear progressives, it'll give you a crick in the neck !

Aphorism from the German as yet, but after a quick look, it seems to me that
a) he's worried that since the doses used are SO small and fine, that
ingesting/smelling/drinking/etc anything ELSE that is medicinal (and
thus ALSO stimulates the VF in some way) and is at the same time
"foreign" to the case, will, as he says in 259: "overtune and
extinguish" the remedy.
b) in Aph 260, he's referring specifically to CHRONIC cases, where
perhaps there are few symptoms to go on (the one-sided cases are mostly
the chronic ones) so you need to be able to SEE reactions and changes of
state, and if there are lots of changes/Sx due to extraneous medicinal
things...well. Certainly Allium Cepa (onion) IS a remedy, as are many of
the herbs, and vegetables he mentions there.
Hope that helps...

Lois

I'm curious whether anyone here ever asks patients to avoid any of these things?
Shannon

Hi Lois,

Thanks for the input, and the specifics on german translation. I'm working from Boericke, and the exact words he uses are as you say - reading while lying down. However, I think that usually means reading in bed - as that's where many people lie down, although a park is also an option. Also makes me wonder whether there is any difference between reading while lying on the back, or reading while lying on the stomach. He also refers to sitting up long at night - another personal addiction.

My problem is with the concept that in chronic cases the VF can be easily thrown off by other substances. Where a remedy is a strong fit to the VF, where it is truly homeopathic to the case, can it be thrown off course so easily? Are the remedies themselves so fragile? I've seen remedies work under unusual circumstances, where you wouldn't expect them to hold. It seems to me that when a remedy is a good fit it's like hearing someone speak your mother tongue amid a cacophony of noise. Even though the speaker may be quiet, you will usually hear him better than the other sounds.

I also echo Shannon's query here - does anyone out there actually read their patients the whole 260's footnote's riot act?

Vera
------------------------------------
Vera Resnick
Classical Homeopath
054-4640736
e-mail: vera.homeopath@gmail.com
www.jerusalemhomeopath.com
www.materiamedicastudymethods.wordpress.com

I'm inclined to agree that a remedy that's sufficiently homoeopathic to the patient usually withstands a bit of roughhousing of the patient's health, especially when the potency is being changed frequently anyway, enabling safe frequent restarting of its primary effects. But that's usually.

There are certainly many patients whose lack of exercise or, most commonly, poor diet, lack of sleep, and social disconnectedness combine to undermine the robusticity of their health. They need not be markedly unwell; but they tend to be unaware of their symptoms -- and in particular of their peculiarities -- and they tend to be susceptible to what Hahnemann refers to as noxious influences: they readily catch colds, or acquire vague nervous symptoms or emotional disturbance, as a result of influences that in this day and age in a western society have no effect on others.

Similar fragility can come about due to overexposure and exposure at too young an age to mild influences (e.g. wheat; bovine milk) and is easy to induce through toxic exposure to modern chemicals (e.g. a single large exposure to glyphosate, a.k.a. the herbicide brands Roundup and Zero; or exposure to a cocktail of 4000 chemicals wrapped in a piece of paper, burnt, and inhaled, daily, for years on end). Some fragility also arises commonly through the steady deterioration of immune function accompanying typical ageing.

In people whose health is not robust, something as innocuous as an onion, which in those of robust health acts merely as food, has the power of acting medicinally. Hahnemann's observations as expressed in footnote 140 to § 260 show a great range of traditionally ubiquitous influences that too have that power in those whose health is not robust.

The list today would be far longer, as it would necessarily include a range of industrial chemicals and pseudo-foods that either did not exist or were not in use two centuries ago.

On the other hand, many of today's patients are eating a more nutritionally supportive diet than many of Hahneman's even had access to, and some may even be taking a degree of exercise equivalent to, or approaching, the work typically necessary at that time.

The allopathic medicines of Hahnemann's day are now readily acknowledged by the allopathic community as having been not merely useless but also toxic, frequently deadly, and even environmentally unsound (e.g. compounds of mercury and of lead, the metallic ions of which persist in the ecosphere to poison every organism with which they come into contact). Certainly these played a large part in debilitating patients to the point at which even flower odours might readily induce symptoms in the hapless patient, and usually we don't see patients today in a state quite so desperate outside a hospital.

But it's a vexed question whether the debilitating influence of a lifetime of ingesting allopathic chemicals and of having injections of other substances and organisms bypass our natural defences is fundamentally any less profound. Modern patients' common belief that they are incapable of surviving without being in a state of continual medication is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy deriving from compromise of immune function by antibiotics and vaccine ingredients, an iceberg whose merest tip is the peanut allergies that result from the inclusion of peanut oil in vaccines.*

From that point of view, the care that Hahnemann was, in footnote 140, asking the practitioner to exercise in preventing the overwhelming of the homoeopathic substance by other medicinal influences necessitates today a far broader awareness of the patient's milieu. Most likely the patient will not be susceptible to celery; what, though, of his or her susceptibility to house-dust-mite faeces, or strong electric fields, or perceived moral insults?

Cheers --

John

* If we add to this the patient's exposure to 50,000 new chemicals annually, growing electromagnetic pollution, and the pathological fears that consume lifelong patients, we can readily understand something of the susceptibilities that result. Compound these by "protecting" our children from diphtheria and in the process removing our populations' naturally arising immunity to it (which in normal circumstances is acquired through mild exposure in good health); transforming measles in just the same way from a harmless childhood illness into a threat of a kind it has not been in the West for perhaps a century; and similarly depriving us of opportunities for permanent protection against other infective agents, and we find that the consensus of modern medical opinion has become that the modern lifelong patient is susceptible to everything. This, of course, is merely the price of progress!

Vera Resnick wrote:
Actually, many avid readers stretch out on the sofa to do it... Given
the context, I think reading while lying, staying in bed too long for a
midday nap and sitting up too long at night, are all habits which can
cause a sleep disturbance.

My experience is also that it can't...I've drunk coffee and had mint in
the hours and days after a high potency, or even a low, and saw no
stoppage in the on-going action.
which is actually due to poor habits, that would only confuse the
disease picture. If you take away EVERYTHING that COULD be causing
symptoms, for whatever reason, then correspondingly, your symptom
picture should be that much clearer, no? If you could get the patient to
DO it, it would certainly make YOUR task easier!!
the remedy, as you say...

I rather doubt it! I would assume that the patients that came to H. were
alot more desperate to be made well than they are today, if they were
willing to do all that!!
Lois

having eyes that are very sensitive to strain, i can attest to the level of
strain
while reading on one's back. i would not encourage people to do this.

tanya
you
and educational benefit of its members. It makes no representations
regarding the individual suitability of the information contained in any
document read or advice or recommendation offered which appears on this
website and/or email postings for any purpose. The entire risk arising out
of their use remains with the recipient. In no event shall the minutus site
or its individual members be liable for any direct, consequential,
incidental, special, punitive or other damages whatsoever and howsoever
caused.
your setting at http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/minutus to receive a
single daily digest.Yahoo! Groups Links

That's interesting, Tanya. Is this explicable on the basis of lesser reading distance than otherwise?

John
--
------------------------------------------------------------------

"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.

I just put this up on my blog - bit of a spoof on the footnote but can help fix it in memory.
I was trying to find a way to make this footnote significant for me – some will be aware that I have great difficulties with some of Hahnemann’s objections – reading lying down, staying up late, and eating celery, asparagus and onions to name a few.
So when this idea came knocking at my door, late at night after parsley and oregano soup followed by spiced chocolate and punch, I couldn’t resist the over-exertion of mind, although some would call it unnatural debauchery to spend so much time with the Organon in the wee hours of the morning. So if you’re tempted to excessive passive exercise (yes, slumping in front of a computer screen counts), have a tendency to read x-rated literature, and tend to be inappropriately drawn to play (pac-man, video games or chess, it’s all the same to me), put your grief aside, allow your anger and vexation to emerge as you pick your way through the marshlands of this Hahnemannian (i.e. long) paragraph and identify all the errors of diet and regimen that I’ve included here. I have excluded several for the sake of brevity and because thinking something up for all of this was too much of a strain on my usually over-active imagination.
As you get up in the morning and reach for the coffee from your coffee machine (tea? everyone knows that’s unhealthy!), you start feeling the after-effects of the previous night’s long swim after dinner – or was it that steak tartare that seemed to be, how to put it gently, long, long, long, past its prime – you wonder if you really should have eaten that meal yesterday. Was it the meat? Was it that herbed vegetable beer that no-one dares admit tastes of… well…herbed vegetables? Was it the chocolate mousse and wine for desert? Or just that you went to bed sucking on a bottle of whiskey?
Probably the whiskey, you muse, as you pull on the woolen underwear your mother insists that you wear in winter. She tried to put water in your wine last night at dinner – but you weren’t having any of it, no watered down wine for you. Even if your mother was paying for the meal. Even if you are forty-five and living at home because you can’t afford to rent your own place. Well, no time for a shower – the after-shave will just have to do. Again.
Someone at work mentioned recently that you have some strange habits. “How odd,” you think, “I wonder why they should think that,” as you stick a jaunty asparagus stalk into the brim of your hat, and set off for your first major exercise of the day – driving to the office. Well, you have a stick shift – that means you get to use both feet! A real workout.
OK – time to check the footnote – how many did you find? I’m not sure wearing asparagus counts, by the way…
------------------------------------
Vera Resnick
Classical Homeopath
054-4640736
e-mail: vera.homeopath@gmail.com
www.jerusalemhomeopath.com
www.materiamedicastudymethods.wordpress.com