One of the most central principles to Heilkunst is that of resonance, which is what is behind the way medicines are applied, as well as lifestyle and diet suggestions. We resonate to certain things based on typological factors (eg. everyone who is a ‘thyroid body type’ will resonate with the same balancing diet), but the healthier we become, the more we resonate to things based on our unique individuality. Art and music are good vehicles for identifying where our resonance lights up the most, and are good points of exploration for therapeutic purposes.

My favourite personal discovery over the past few months is in the recently implemented business models of music subscription services, which work very differently from the long-standing music business model of purchasing songs or albums to own and keep indefinitely. Subscription models, on the other hand, work more like a ‘rental’ model, where a low monthly subscription fee gives the subscriber full access to enormous libraries of music to stream ‘on demand’, but which are not ‘owned’ in the traditional sense of a copy of the file remaining on one’s computer or music device.

Although I’m a long time fan of enjoying music which I have bought and collected in my own personal library of CDs, albums, and cassettes, my experience with this new subscription model has opened up my relationship to music in ways that have been completely surprising to me.

With increasingly popular services such as Spotify, or Rdio for Canadians, it’s not only the old business model of buying and selling music that has been reinvented, but the special relationship of the consumer to the music is completely turned on its head now — speaking from my own experience, the spirit of exploring music has been entirely re-kindled within myself, and the joy of discovery is now unhindered by any of the old barriers and limitations implicit in the model of ownership and permanence. I can choose to sample anything once, and quickly discard all that is not resonant to my current taste.

I go back now to listen to some of my old playlists from my permanent personal collection, and they feel so old and “museum-ified” in an eternally frozen state. Such old points of reference seem to serve to reinforce old habits of ego-identification with what has been, rather than what is becoming within me. With this new subscription model, I can let go of these old ego-identifications, and instead participate everything in the moment through resonance, and an open scientific attitude of making fresh observations about the music, and about my inner responses to it.

Also, there is a powerful therapeutic potential in terms of the time line work that we do with patients, in terms of re-creating the “soundtrack” of our lives with the music that we listened to in a certain era of our lives, in order to re-capture the feeling from that time to be processed and healed. Likewise, if a patient is talking about their favourite music (now, or in the past), I can instantly call it up to understand its feeling for myself, and to understand the patient better.

There are many powerful aspects to creating or consuming music, and now we are being given an opportunity to access as much of its potential as possible. Which playlist would you create first?

For those that do overcome these inner impediments, their health and treatment in general gets a major boost forward once they start to expand their breathing capacity through singing lessons, as well as start to activate their own range of emotional expression. These are very powerful ‘non-medical’ approaches to the de-armoring process, which gets to the heart of either preventing or reversing and uprooting chronic illness.

As Janet Kidd (who is a voice coach) recently wrote in her blog, the “stultification of energy is obvious in the bodies of most people in our culture”, and “I’ve often seen and heard wonderful singers who are very convincing, from the neck up” [emphasis added]. This is a clear image of the armoring process which most people are encased in to varying degrees. We are constantly dealing with patients who are “stuck in their heads”, and have little to no awareness of what sensations they have in their bodies or in their emotional minds. “How do you feel?” is a question that can often be answered only after a few moments of deliberation (and even more so in our male patients). It feels like some patients could use a sturdy shake to try to dislodge their awareness from inside their own head!

Janet Kidd in the blog post linked to above also says that singers need to “inhabit the lyrics and emotion of  a song…”, or we could say that the aim of Heilkunst treatment is to lead patients to the point of fully inhabiting the lyric and emotion of their whole life, fully embodied, and fully resonant. It’s no coincidence that both Heilkunst and music aim for a deep resonance in their respective activities.

There are many avenues to get at this fundamental disease of “stuck in the head”, and you can have a look at the interesting exercise which Janet suggested for re-connecting to your sensations of body awareness. Regular singing lessons are a great way to establish this at deeper and deeper levels, and assist in the great goal of retraining the dysfunctional breathing pattern that most adults take on. Shallow breathing functions to block off our own body awareness, and keep us stuck in our heads, and learning to sing forces us to break through this destructive habit, and progressively expand all of our life functions, as they are all dependent on proper expansion and oxygenation. I certainly notice the difference in myself between when I’ve been singing regularly and when I have not.

No more shallow breathing — I want to see you breathing all the way down to your toes!

First dates can be full of so much anticipation, hope, and anxiety. It’s much the same the first time I work with a new patient. Most patients bring to me their sufferings, along with their hopes to find a cure for it. After the initial assessment, where I’ve learned as much about the patient’s health as possible and developed as clear a diagnostic and treatment map as I can, I send them off with my advice and remedies, with a full sense of anticipation for how they will be when they return 1 month later.

There’s a very subtle, but very crucial shift which I often discern when a patient returns for their first follow-up. As Dr. Hahnemann described it so beautifully in aphorism 253 of his Organon:

In the case of an ever-so-slight beginning of improvement a greater comfort, an increasing composure, freedom of spirit, increased courage, a kind of returning naturalness.

Often, it will be outside the patient’s awareness, and it takes some direction on my part to point out to them what I notice as having changed. Small differences such as the tone of their expression or body language, or even small shifts in some of the patterns of their symptoms they listed the previous month. Until these are pointed out, the patient often has not made contact with this within them self. This is very similar to the same thing I pointed out yesterday about not understanding the difference between a symptom of illness and a healing reaction. There are a certain number of patients who ARE in contact with themselves at this level, and return to the consult room bounding and full of excitement at what the remedy is starting to do for them, and they can’t wait to find out what we will be doing next.

These first remedies I give the patient behave very much as the military use of depth charges, which are used both to assess what’s below the surface, while also causing initial damage to the enemy. The subtle art of conversation on a first date often serves this role of planting certain “depth charges”, to test if certain undesirable elements are hidden below the surface, or if there is likely a safe passage forward.  The subtle and observable shifts and changes that the patient comes back with their second visit are very good qualitative indicators for where the disease has penetrated to different depths in the whole economy of the patient’s life energy. I always anticipate with excitement what kind of shift in their energetic picture the patient brings on their second date, and the much greater clarity I will now be able to bring to their treatment plan.

When patients return for their follow up visit every 28 days, especially in the earlier phases of their treatment while they are still getting used to the new way of thinking about health that they learn with Heilkunst, we evaluate how they have responded to their remedies during the previous four weeks, and in which direction they seem to be moving. The newer the patient is to the process, the less they tend to understand the concept of “healing reaction“, and the more likely they are to miss them when they happen.

A typical conversation at this stage will start with the patient reporting that “nothing happened” after they took their remedies. I review with them my notes from the previous session, and ask them how they are doing relative to each of the points I recorded the previous month. More often than not, they’ll slip into the conversation at one point

“…but I did catch this head cold that is going around the office, and was sneezing with a runny nose for 4 days”.

When I inquire further, this will most often turn out to be a healing reaction.

How can I tell? A healing reaction, although it includes any variety of discharge symptoms, whether physical or emotional, will have the peculiar characteristic of the patient feeling rather well at their core despite the apparant head cold they have. It’s kind of like the idea of “the eye of the storm”, where all kinds of content can be swirling around the patient, yet they feel surprisingly well despite all of that. Also, we come to understand what the typical rhythm that each patient has with the remedies, and the time frame that their healing reaction tends to occur within.  On average, most patient’s have their healing reactions within 5 – 12 days after taking their remedy, but there are occurrences at the near and far end of this bell curve.

It usually takes a few repetitions of this pattern with a new patient before they start to understand the difference between a healing reaction, and, say, a “head cold” which they assume is what they have at that time. I especially need to re-train the patients who tend to rush out every time to get a suppressive medication (and therefore necessitate the repetition of their remedy), instead of calling me for a remedy to support them through the healing reaction, instead of suppressing it. I keep my fingers and toes crossed until that moment arrives when the patient starts to get it, and allows themself to go through the process without interrupting every step forward of progress with an equal step back with anti-symptom prescription drugs.

The fiction author Steven Pressfield has written a couple of books about the creative process itself, and in his book The War of Art, he very specifically addresses the reality of resistance, and how it is a constant struggle within every creative process.

Its sequel, Do The Work, is also a short and valuable read to help illuminate the nature of this challenge to activating one’s creativity.

While these Steven Pressfield books are great for gaining a conceptual orientation for the problem of resistance, Julia Cameron’s classic book The Artist’s Way, gives many practical exercises to actually start to chip away at these resistances and blockages. Her “morning pages” exercise is often known by people who haven’t even read this book, and is one of several practical exercises offered by Cameron.

While these books are specifically written with writers or artists in mind, the concepts and principles they illuminate apply to anyone who is wishing to access their own creativity and desire function, even if that is for something outside of the usual world of the arts. Our desire function and creativity can be directed into any activity — it is just a question of finding out what that is for you. What tools have you successfully used to help with your creativity?

“Serafina” Allyson McQuinn 2011The Russian scientist Leonid Ponomarev described rather eloquently our two ways of knowing:

“It has long been known that science is only one of the methods of studying the world around us.  Another – complementary – method is realized in art.  The joint existence of art and science is in itself a good illustration of the complementarity principle.  You can devote yourself completely to science or live exclusively in your art.  Both points of view are equally valid, but, taken separately, are incomplete.  The backbone of science is logic and experiment.  The basis of art is intuition and insight.  But the art of ballet requires mathematical accuracy and, as Pushkin wrote, ‘Inspiration in geometry is just as necessary as in poetry.’  They complement rather than contradict each other.  True science is akin to art, in the same way as real art always includes elements of science.  They reflect different, complementary aspects of human experience and give us a complete idea of the world only when taken together.  Unfortunately, we do not know the ‘uncertainty relation’ for the conjugate pair of concepts ‘science and art.’  Hence we cannot assess the degree of damage we undergo from a one-sided perception of life.”

~ Leonid Ponomarev

In Quest of the Quantum

“Eye of God” Allyson McQuinn 2011

“The Wave” Allyson McQuinn 2011

“Bridge At Sundown” Allyson McQuinn 2011

“Solitude by Moonlight” Allyson McQuinn 2011

“What, then, is this Imaginative cognition, which naturally functions entirely in the supersensible world? If I attempted to give you a symbolic representation of what Imaginative knowledge is, in the way that a mathematician uses figures to illustrate a mathematical problem, I would say the following: imagine that a person living in the world knows more than sense-cognition can tell him because he can rise to pictures that yield a reality, just as the human brain yields the reality of the human soul. In the brain, nature itself has given us as a real Imagination, an Imagination perceptible to the senses, something that is attained in Imaginative knowledge at a higher level.

This, you see, leads us more deeply into the constitution of the human being. As we shall see in the next few days, this marvelous structure of the human brain is not an isolated formation.

Through Imagination we behold a world, a supersensible world, and it is as though a part of this world had become real in a lower world; in the human brain we behold a world of Imagination in concrete fact. I do not believe that anyone can speak adequately about the human brain unless he sees in its structure an Imaginative replica of the life of soul. It is just this that leads us into a dilemma when we take our start from ordinary neurophysiology and try to pass to an understanding of the life of soul. If we confine ourselves to the brain itself, a life of soul over and above this does not seem necessary. The only individuals with a right to speak of a life of soul over and above the structure of the human brain are those who have knowledge of it other than what is acquired by customary methods in this world. For when we come to know this life of soul in the spiritual world, we realize that it has its complete reflection in the structure of the human brain, and that the brain, moreover, can do everything that the supersensible organ of soul can do by way of conceptual activity. Down to its very function the brain is a mirror-image. With neurophysiology, therefore, no one can prove or disprove materialism. It simply cannot be done. If the human being were merely a being of brain, he would never need to say to himself, “Over and above this brain of mine, I possess a soul.”

~ Rudolf Steiner

Lecture: Fundamentals of Anthroposophic Medicine

Lecture I Stuttgart, October 26, 1922

“Blushing Heart”  Allyson McQuinn 2011

Wilhelm Reich goes on to define exactly how he would render his diagnosis as “The Silent Observer” and I find it fascinating to watch how he thinks about a case and their intellectual posturing while processing the diagnosis,

“Character analysis had succeeded in unmasking and eliminating the patient’s politeness and apparent devotedness as deception and the warding off of strong aggressions. Now he began to develop the following defense. Exceptionally intelligent, he sought to divine everything he concealed in the way of unconscious mechanisms and, in fact, he succeeded in destroying most of the affect situations by divining them beforehand. It was as if from a secret hiding place, he continually illuminated and examined everything with his intellect in order to preclude any surprises. It became more and more clear that the intellect fulfilled a defensive function and was spurred by severe anxious anticipations. For example, he was always extremely skilled in finding out what I happened to be thinking about him at any one moment. He was able to infer this from various factors and from the course of the treatment. He was also able to divine and foresee what would happen at any one point. From the point of view of character analysis, this behavior was looked upon as anything but cooperation; rather, it was attacked as an extremely cunning way of avoiding deep insights. The first task was to render this weapon unusable to the patient, and this could be done only by the consistent analysis of its function, and by being very sparse with my communications. The patient continued for a while to use his intellect as a defense mechanism, but gradually became insecure and uneasy and finally began to protest violently that I did not want to understand him, that his intellectual help was a clear demonstration of his cooperation, etc. I became that much more consistent in my analysis of his intellectual activity as a defense against surprises. One day a term occurred to me for his behavior. I told him that it reminded me of a cunning fox or lynx. And then, following a short period of excitation, his defensive behavior fell to pieces. It happened this way: once again he began the session by despairing that I no longer understood him. Then, gradually, his attention was focused on a scene from his third year of life which he had recounted earlier in passing, without details and affect.”

~ Wilhelm Reich

Sex-Economic Orgasmotherapy

pg. 16 4. THE INTELLECT AS DEFENSE FUNCTION

“Wild Columbine”  Allyson McQuinn 2011

Another physician who has silently mentored me with regards to state of mind based prescribing is the Bombay physician, Dr. Rajan Sankaran. He, too, regarded the mind state as more than just a random collection of discrete and unconnected symptoms. But his concept was that the whole of this state arose from an altered perception of reality, which is called Delusion. For example if a person views his situation as being very dangerous and threatening, and himself as a helpless child, he will react with panic and clinging. His apparent mental state (panic and clinging) comes from the delusion that he is like a child in dangerous surroundings. This false feeling will also be seen in his dreams. Another example: a patient who views himself as handicapped will feel incapable of handling his everyday responsibilities and react by shunning his duties and depending entirely on others. His apparent mental state (lack of responsibility, lack of confidence and dependence on others) comes from his inner, false perception that he is handicapped. In this way Dr. Rajan Sankaran brought out the importance of dreams and delusions as the basis of disease. The dream is closest to the delusion, the false perception which is at the bottom of the mind state of the patient.” These and other ideas were contained in his first book The Spirit of Homoeopathy. Apart from dreams there are other ways to perceive the patients delusion, and among these, the patients interests and hobbies, including what books, movies, activities etc. fascinate him, or hurt his sensitivity, were useful pointers to his inner state. Often unable to recall dreams the patient can vividly describe a scene from a movie or a newspaper story, with such powerful emotions that it could have been his own story. Such a thing is like a dream and can be used to perceive the delusion of the patient. Dr. Sankaran later systematized this method in his book The System of Homoeopathy.

For example the patient may say that with his ulcer, apart from the symptom of burning pain which is commonly experienced with the condition, there is a feeling that the stomach is very weak and is fragile and can break from any slight indiscretion. When this person’s mind state is examined it will be that his emotional stress is based upon a feeling of others finding out that he is not what he portrays to be, and this will be expressed as a feeling of fragility with regard to the image he projects.  What the Heilkunst Physician will observe is that the sensation expressed in the ulcer, will be no different than the sensation at the bottom of what the patient calls as stress.  The art of Heilkunst Medicine is in interpreting the fragile sensation, seen both locally and mentally is actually an expression of the deepest level of the disturbance, deeper than mind and body , and the underlying basis of both. A remedy with such a sensation (in this case, Thuja) will bring a healing action at the deepest level, thus helping his ulcer and his stress at the same time.

The founder of the American New Thought Movement, Phineus Quimby, also sourced much of this relating to the world in polarity of the right and left side of the brain, or seeing art or consciousness and a rendering of science, raising dogmatic religion up into an artful rendering, “Jesus saw all this, and as the people were groaning under the yokes (or beliefs) that bound them down, he said, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest to your soul, by explaining to you the cause of your trouble.” When he commenced explaining to the people, the explanation was to save them from the misery of this world of belief and to introduce a science (or kingdom), where there would be no offering up of prayer or forgiving of sins, but a consciousness (or science) that would put them in possession of a knowledge of themselves, which the natural man knew nothing of.
~ Phineus Quimby
The Quimby Manuscripts

I’ve also included some visual Illustrations of The Art of Seeing through Bruce Lipton’s evolution from empirical, mechanical thinking to his quantum knowledge of The Field:

This treatment involved addressing the recent birth of her daughter. It was a relatively straightforward birth, and the remedies I gave her for this time line event were the typical birth remedies (that is, birth from the mom’s perspective — birth from the baby’s perspective takes a different set of remedies).

When she returned for her first follow-up one month later, she brought a very visible excitement about her treatment, which hadn’t been present at her first visit. The living experience she had with her remedies the first month helped her to “get it”, as far as how treatment works, and what she could expect going forward. This is true with almost every patient — they may understand the concepts regarding how treatment works, but it is very difficult for a concept on its own to generate any type of warmth or excitement in the absence of an experience.

So, what was the living experience that this patient had from her first time line remedies? She told me that after completing the remedies, she had a very unusual moment of re-experiencing the sensations very similar to (but not as intense) as when she had gone into labour. Her eyes widened slightly as she described to me the sequence of sensations she felt as she went through the healing reaction from those remedies.

As with all healing reactions, what the life force pushes up to the surface represents some form of completion of a natural process, which for some reason had not originally occurred in a natural setting where it could be completed. The healing reactions to time line events, in one way or another, will push out a physical or emotional memory which was suppressed when it original occurred.

As I have experienced with many patients, it is at moments like this where they display a true desire to learn more about the treatment, and where we’re going to be going for the remainder of their treatment plan. The moment when rigid skepticism dies, and the patient gives birth to truly engaging with the process of their treatment, and expanding the possibilities of health for themselves.

A broken arm is a certain kind of physical time line trauma and requires a particular combination of remedies to address it, which we gave her as part of her treatment that month. This was one of the more straightforward time line events we had treated in this patient (or so we thought!)

She came back the following month, however, with a completely unexpected reaction to the remedies — a strong headache had emerged for a few days after taking these remedies, which was not at all a typical symptom for her. This was a symptom which wasn’t related to the symptoms of a broken arm, nor to the following item on her timeline (which is often where the life force spontaneously goes when it is ready to move forward to the next necessary treatment.)

“Did anything else happen when you broke you arm? Maybe you struck your head at the same time?”

“No,” she said.

When we questioned her further about the broken arm, she revealed that there was another element to the story of her broken arm — it had occurred within another context, which was that she had just received news of the passing of her Uncle just before she slipped on the stairs outside the door of the house and broke her arm.

Ah ha! This headache is one of the typical physical symptoms we will see in a patient when they are going through a state of grief, whether related to a current event, or a past event on their time line. We immediately treated her with this grief remedy, to complete the whole event of the broken arm, before we knew we could logically move on to the next event to treat on her time line. Normally, we would have treated the broken arm with the grief remedies at the same time, in a compound event like this.

There were some very key lessons I learned from this :

• To be very thorough in case-taking, and not to make assumptions.
• The patient isn’t always sure about what to include on their time line, and needs to be guided and prompted to complete all the information.
• The patient’s life force will always tell you exactly what it needs, whether it is a conscious knowledge in the patient’s mind, or not. Without following it, the treatment will progress blindly, and often ineffectively.
• In other words, the time line is a great map of the territory, but the living, breathing movement of the life force is the necessary guide to navigate through it.

This is one of the core components of Heilkunst treatment is how we treat the patient’s “time line”. While we’re addressing everything that is going on for the patient in the present, we are also digging back into their history to release any major shock or trauma to their system. We start with the most recent, and work progressively all the way back towards the birth event, and then beyond into the genetic inheritance of chronic disease in the family tree. Without addressing this dimension, treatment would not be able to do much more than temporarily relieve symptoms as they present at the surface. The goal is to remove every root cause behind disease in order to cure it completely and permanently.

The exercise of creating the time line often poses one or more challenges for the patient. I have a few patients who strongly resist completing their time line in whole or part, and it takes them several sessions before they bring one in instead of more excuses about why they couldn’t get to it. Resistance is an interesting thing, and a good clue in itself as to potentially strong blockages around certain content in the patient’s history. Partial amnesia is one example of this, where a patient simply can’t remember back beyond a certain point in their life, or a particular phase.

Interestingly, as we work backwards through a patient’s time line, they will often spontaneously remember long-forgotten memories exactly at the point when we reach that point in their history. This has a lot to do with the fact that their treatment has increased their capacity for healing, and they are now both biologically and psychologically ready to fully process the content of the re-emerging time line event. It is a natural safety mechanism which protects us from undergoing a deeper healing process which we are not currently able to handle. This is one of the problems with certain approaches to depth psychology (including the use of hypnosis, for example), which can force open such areas of content before the patient is ready, and can cause more damage in the process than what is healed. Following the logic of the time line (cushioned by this safety valve of memory), will lead to deep healing results, but without having to provoke any risk. Similarly, some patients may very distinctly remember certain strong traumas, but choose not to include them on their time line until they are ready to share them. If this is a very strong issue for a patient, I will let them know that they don’t ever have to discuss the content of certain events, but if they can at least tell me the nature of the emotions involved, we can address those with the corresponding remedies. (Was their fear? Anger? Grief? Humiliation? Etc.). It can take a fair bit of time before a patient is even ready to discuss it at this level, and treatment helps them to be more ready for this when the time comes.

Another aspect of creating the time line which many patients need to sort out, is knowing the correct balance between too much and too little information. “It’s not a novel”, I caution some, who are prone to ramble on through many trivial details, diluting down the essential content. Yet others need to be encouraged to flesh it out quite a bit, where only a handful of dense, cryptic notes have been scribbled onto a small note pad. Each of these groups of patients need to learn to identify which events are likely to be considered traumas which they’ll need to have treated. Many patients will wrongly assume that events from the past are no longer in their system, whether as a natural process of healing and letting go, or of specific psychological or other healing work they have undergone. It is true that “time heals all wounds”, but the little understood distinction between ‘healing’ and ‘curing’ gets to the essence of time line treatment, which is a curative approach, in counterpart to the healing.

When a patient does bring in their time line, there are many things about its format which are sometimes as revealing about them as the actual content included. Is it typed, or hand-written? Neatly organized in a spreadsheet in chronological order, or haphazardly written in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, with many blocks of text “inserted” with squiggly arrows? The constitution of the patient (personality type) permeates everything they do and say (and how they do and say it), and the presentation of the time line is often one of my initial clues into which constitution the patient is.

If you overhear any conversation which includes the question “Where are you in your time line?”, you’ll know that you’re probably eavesdropping on one of our patients. Or, if you ever hear yourself stating that one or more of your health problems began with a certain event in your life (what we call “NBWS : Never Been Well Since”), then we know that your health will be improved when you work through your time line treatment. Time travel cruises are leaving from Port Arcanum on a daily basis….

“People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”

 ~James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

[Technical note on this article’s title : We treat the time line using homotonic, rather than homeopathic remedies, but that is a story for another day.]

While I am preparing the patient’s homeopathic take home remedies, I often invite them to read through the description of the key remedy I will be giving them, and all of its disease characteristics. The “Homeopathic Materia Medica” is a compendium of all the homeopathic remedies that have been studied, and integrated into regular practice by homeopaths of generations past.

I do this for a few reasons. One is to help the patient to see that the physical or mental or emotional symptoms which they have been suffering are actually an external entity or disease state, and is something separate from their essential healthy self. The tendency over time in chronic illness is to gradually forget one’s core natural state of health, and to identify more and more with the disease state and its symptoms, sensations, and altered feelings.

Another reason is that this sometimes proves to be a useful exercise in prompting the patient to tell me about other aspects of their illness which had slipped their mind during the consult. Patients will also leave out details which they assume are insignificant to treatment. “That reminds me,” they’ll say — “I used to have cold sores all the time before I had that bad flu last winter.” While the complete disease image is being filled out at this point, it is also a useful exercise for confirming that the image which I based the prescription on still holds up as accurate. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes at this point, the patient will point out so many contradictory symptoms to the image I assumed, that we have to go back and actually change the prescription. A kind of “quality control” is built in to the system here.

Similarly, at this point, the patient may often bring up connections to their family history of disease, and tell me things like “My mother had so many ear aches as a child, that she had to complete grade one at home with a tutor.” The nature of depth treatment includes not only addressing the current disease image, but also all of the latent inherited disease entities which came through the family tree. The more that we can know about the family history, the better. The clearer the image I can see of the patient’s health history, including their family health history, the clearer will be the map of treatment. Having the patient read about the disease images pertaining to them, the more I can help them to understand where they are on the map of health, and where we will be going in their treatment, and why.

One of the most powerful reasons for engaging in this exercise, is to progressively increase the patient’s knowledge of their self. A patient begins to recognize that what they had thought of as their self, is actually a harboured disease entity which is behind the symptoms they have brought in for treatment. By clarifying the distinction between their true self-image, from the image of the disease, it begins to prepare them for the “letting go” aspect of healing, which naturally unfolds after the remedy has completed its curative action. It’s as if I held up a mirror to the patient, and they saw two faces staring back at them.