Open Q&A: What is the difference between tonic and pathic disease?
Especially for patients who have transferred to Arcanum from a Classical Homeopath, there’s a learning curve to tackle about how we approach treatment – particularly on the difference between “tonic” and “pathic” disease.
The key idea is the difference between the root of a disease as opposed to its symptomatic expression – but we’ll explore this more fully in today’s session.
Differences in diagnosis, treatment, healing reactions, and outcome will be covered.
Once your questions on this have been covered, we’ll conclude with an open Q&A on any other Heilkunst topic you have on your mind today
Transcript generated automatically by a computer algorithm:
Hello, greetings to you. And thank you for joining me today, we will be continuing on our basic Heilkunst series. And you’re a mix of the frequently asked questions, the FAQs, as well, of course, any new questions you put forward. And as always, on that note, you can wherever you’re watching, you can just add your question or your comment right into the comment box. And if you’re here with me live, I will be able to answer you immediately or otherwise, I will get your comments after the fact. And then I will reply in a future video or I’ll reply in an appropriate format. But today’s question that we want to start off with, is the known sound like a bit of a technical question, but don’t worry, I’ll break it down the difference between what we call tonic disease and Pathic disease. Now, as I say, I will break that distinction down. But the simple definition, you know, the overview way of saying it, is we’re really looking at the difference between the root of the disease itself compared to the expression of the disease. Now, it may, it may sound like Well, that sounds like hair-splitting, or what’s the big deal anyways? Can you just get rid of the problem? Sure, of course, we want to get rid of the problem, we want to remove any blockage in someone’s health and get them back to their natural state of health. But this hair-splitting is actually quite significant. Because it makes a big difference in how effective our treatment will be. Right? If we if you don’t have a clear concept of what you’re dealing with, well, you can’t help but to, you know, either be incomplete or to make a mess at some level. And this is true of anything in life right to an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis gets to an incomplete solution or a wrong solution or even even worse, a harmful solution. So So back to our technical words tonic, and Pathik, you will probably immediately already recognize the word Pathic as being you know, one of the components of the word homeopathic. So there’s the Pathic part, the tonic is or so with that word homeopathic now within this hairsplitting, we can talk about a homeopathic remedy that of course, that term is very widely used, very widely known, you know, we go to the health food store, and there’s a shelf of homeopathic remedies. Okay, very lovely. But what’s this other side? So this, where the Pathic? Is this, you know, this, this kind of the expression of the disease, the symptom picture, you know, what, how does the patient experience their own suffering, you know, hey, the pain in my elbow, I have this symptom, I have that symptom. You know, that’s the whole Pathak side. And that’s where we look for the homeopathic remedy. But the other side, this other word I’m using called tonic, we could bring it to the other word, which is very little known, but I think it deserves to be a lot more known. And that’s the hormone tonic. So home atonic homeopathic, they’re related to under the same underlying principle of the of the law of similars. Or like yours, like, you know, we’re still dealing in that same principle. But we’re just dealing with two different sides of that Homo tonic, homeopathic. And let’s actually use something that where people have confusion on this. They think that this is something that you know, the whole Heilkunst movement just simply dreamed up. It’s like, oh, we want to make up our own thing or whatever. Well, no, you can go all the way back into Dr. Hahnemann original writings. And he was talking about the same concepts. He didn’t use those exact words. Well, he used the word homeopathic of course, but he very in very plain language, he differentiated between what he called diseases of constant nature, compared to diseases of variable nature, okay. And the diseases of constant nature, he said, and he observed there, there are very few it’s just there’s a small number of those compared to the diseases that variable nature, right? So if we didn’t know any better, we would just as you know, in the health field, we would just be inundated with diseases of variable nature all day long. You know, the Pathic diseases? You know, the what, what are the symptoms that the patient is suffering? What is their pathos, you know, that’s the root word behind Pathic. What is the suffering? And this, as I said, if we didn’t know any better, this would seem to be the big deal that we had to pay attention to in healthcare, you know, people have symptoms, they’re suffering, we have to find solutions, right? That’s the path of sight. But as I say, as Hahnemann said, the you know, he identified this very clear scientific distinction between diseases of constant nature and diseases of variable nature now, the diseases of quantum sin nature. I’ll just give you some of his examples. And there’s still examples today, you know, the basic childhood illnesses, you know, the, you know, the like things like chickenpox and measles, and, you know, these primary childhood infections. These are what he referred to some of examples anyways of the diseases of constant nature. Right. So, so what that means is like, if we’re coming to a definition of health and disease and medicine and what, how we’re how we’re relating all these things to each other, the disease of constant nature, always has the same essential characteristics, right? It’s, you know, what to say whether that’s chickenpox or measles or what have you. It is what it is like when you have a case of measles. You know, if you if you experienced, you know, enough, enough patients with that, you know, if you if you are just in life in general, if you’re not a physician, you’ve had you’ve seen that in enough you know, friends and siblings and family members and whatever. It’s like, you know what Measles is, once you’ve seen it enough, it’s like, it has this undeniable set of characteristics. Now, the way it expresses itself can vary, you know, that takes us into the Pathak side. But the the disease itself is is is is not changing. It’s it has this essential nature. But what I said what Hahnemann called the diseases of constant nature. And there you have them. So you have those those childhood infectious diseases, you have other infectious diseases such as, you know, influenza, and hepatitis, all these kinds of infectious diseases like that. The same thing. Those are diseases of constant nature. So in our tonic Pathic distinction, these are some of the examples between the, between the tonic and Pathic, I’ll come back around to the Pathic in a second and flesh that out a bit more. But this is I just want to go back to where Hahnemann started. He, as he clearly distinguished with these diseases of constant nature. And he made very clear in his practice and his writings in his whole concept of medicine, that when, when it is a disease of constant nature, it’s always a priority to treat that first. Right, that’s your first order of business when it comes to medicine, because the you have this relationship between the tonic and the Pathic. The Pathic, any Pathic disease emerges out of a tonic disease, you know it? It’s like you would never say that oh, look at that tree. You know, it doesn’t have any roots or trunk. It’s just all branches and leaves, there’d be no such thing. You can’t have the branches and leaves before you have the roots in the trunk. Right. So I’m just using that as an analogy. Think of it that way. The diseases of constant nature are the roots in the trunk, so to speak. And so any Pathic disease, you have, by definition has to have come out of some kind of chronic disease, some kind of disease of constant nature, as Hahnemann would call it. So that being said, this is why Hanuman said you the first order of business is to identify and treat the diseases of constant nature. And one of the reasons being like, you know, aside from it being the root disease, as I’m saying, it will very much of the time, it will at the same time it will eliminate any Pathic disease that’s grown up out of that tonic, right? It will so whatever the patient is suffering and the pain in their elbow, you know, that example I gave, rather than rushing into to give relief to the elbow, of course, we want to do that ultimately, but by treating that tonic disease, a large number of a larger number of cases, that’s going to take care of the Pathic at the same time. So hunted them and was quite wise and practical and doing this you know, he wasn’t just trying to make up a rule for no good reason. There was a very good reason. So yeah, so the the tonic diseases are the diseases of constant nature. They, you know, they take they’re the first order of business you know, like in mathematics, we talked about the order of operations, you know, you do the the addition and subtraction before the multiplication and I forget all the order but we all learned that in grade school. So it’s just like that it’s the order of operations. You start with a tonic disease and whatever Pathic expression remains after that. Yeah, then you go full force into that then you give the you know, the homeopathic remedy for the elbow pain or whatever it is, but you’ll it’ll be that at that stage that Pathic treatment will be a lot easier and a lot more effective than it is in the flipped model where, you know, the whole world of Classical Homeopathy.
They only treat the Pathic side, you know, they only look at that side. Well, other than by x then I can get into some other examples. But yeah, it’s kind of this grand blind spot in Classical Homeopathy, where they go full force into the Pathic. And they basically cause a lot of delays a lot of problems and treatment. They get some successes but but actually relatively few and if you ask any any full out practitioner of Classical Homeopathy at best, they’ll admit to a 10 to 15% success rate. And that’s not because the law of similars doesn’t work. That’s because this exclusive focus on the Pathic disease, you know, the symptom, the symptom picture is, is not the best route to go. Like as Hahnemann pointed out, you start with the tonic you start with the root cause that will take care of a lot of the pathways, whatever it Pathic is left over, you can come back around and treat that. So I just wanted to give this basic orientation. It’s very historically grounded all the way back to Dr. Hahnemann. We have just kind of enhanced our understanding of that new so we haven’t invented any new any new concepts here. We’ve just taken what Hahnemann gave, and flesh that out into a more specific protocol. Right. But to say it doesn’t contradict his principles. And yeah, this really is the kind of the long and the short of it. We’re dealing with the root cause of disease, versus the Pathic. And I’m saying this for every new patient. This is critical, you know, this plays into how the treatment goes, how we assess them, how we, you know, assess the remedies, and what happens from a remedy, you know, does somebody have a healing reaction and does this and that happened, like the whole business, the whole treatment protocol, is based on this distinction. So yeah, I’ve talked about Hahnemann, and his language started with concept versus variable disease, we’ve just kind of gotten a little more technical with that, as they say, we call that the tonic. And the Pathic or the remedies then become the homie or homo tonic versus homo homeopathic. And we another just general thing to say I’ve kind of hinted at this in one way. But any times a patient has a Pathic disease, you know, a symptom expression, by definition, there will be a root tonic disease underneath that. Now, we may not necessarily know what it is, or be able to identify it in the process of diagnosis, at least at a given moment in the treatment. So sometimes we all we have is the perfect picture. So we will start with that. But yeah, as soon as possible as soon as we can see and identify that tonic disease. Well, perfect. That’s what you know, that’s, that’s the most immediate thing we want to do. And, and also just to clarify, as well, when we know both, you know, we can clearly see the tonic disease and the Pathic disease, we can give a remedy for each at the same time, you know, they can work together, they’re kind of work very synergistically, in fact, it kind of enhances the the effects of either side of that treatment. But, but if you only have one side, and it’s the tonic, that’s great. If you only have one side, and it’s the Pathic, that’s also good, you would go with that. But again, always keeping our keeping on the lookout for when we can more clearly find what that tonic disease is, you know, the root cause and treat that as well. So that’s, that’s kind of a big overview here. And something I just mentioned as well, a moment ago, you know, the idea of a healing reaction, I’ve done many videos on the topic of the healing reaction, you know, you can look those up on our website, that’s, that’s a perennial topic, you know, people are always taking the remedies and dealing with their healing reactions, and their detox process and all of that, I don’t want to go into all of that here. But just to, in our, in our context here, on the difference between the tonic and the Pathic. There is a difference between the nature between both of them in the nature of what kind of healing reaction you’ll have. So in the Pathic, when you give the remedy for that, for that there isn’t much of a healing reaction, typically speaking, versus on the tonic side, you know, especially when we’re getting, you know, in tonic, we’re usually getting into more deeply rooted diseases, you know, in terms of somebody’s timeline of shocks and traumas, you know, that those may have happened years or decades ago. In the case of the chronic miasms, you know, those genetic inherited diseases, we’re talking about some very, very deeply rooted diseases. So yes, we want to identify those and treat them as early as possible in the treatment process. Get out those root diseases, those tonic diseases, but because of how deep they are, and how much you know how much time typically they’ve had to kind of embed themselves into the whole physiology of the person. Those healing reactions can tend to be bigger, more dramatic, more dis detoxed more discharges. So you so we have a lot more case management to deal with there to make sure the patient has all the proper stuff. or for that discharge to happen in as smooth and as easy away as possible. So I just want to point this out. I’ve mentioned the healing reaction. And in our context here of tonic versus Pathic, this is the reason why we can have more significant healing reactions on this side. Now, I know a lot of myself included, you know, people don’t really appreciate the healing reaction at the at the subjective human level right there. It’s, you know, we’re uncomfortable, where you may be in bed for a day, or whatever the case is, you know, we’re not, we’re not functioning at 100% During that healing reaction, but, but that’s fine. I just say I don’t like it, as far as my experience of it. But we all like it in the sense of what it means like we all like this deeper idea of clearing this, this, this deeper tonic disease, and, you know, permanently getting that out of our system, where it’s no longer plaguing our lifeforce, no longer plaguing our life functions, right. So once you understand the idea of it, then it’s like, okay, you, you practically deal with the healing reaction and make sure you’re you’re properly supported and all your drainage channels and all the rest of it. But but as I say, for all the reasons I’m saying, it’s actually it’s experienced that we want to have like it, we don’t want the experience, we want the result of it, meaning we want to get rid of those chronic diseases, because they are enemy number one, when it comes to, you know, our full state of health. So that’s I just wanted to tie your tie little points around that of the difference in the types of healing reactions, why it’s different between the tonic and the Pathic. And why, you know, in the long run, that’s actually a good thing. We want those tonic disease healing reactions, because that means we’ve now gotten rid of one of these, these fundamental diseases to our whole structure. So that’s, you know, that’s about all I would say, you know, as I said at the beginning, if you’re watching live, certainly put in your questions. And we can, we can expand on any of these points, but I just wanted to lay out that basic framework. And likewise, as well, as I said, if you’re watching this as a video replay, same thing for your comment or question there, and I will take that up in our ongoing series and our ongoing discussion here. So I’ll just leave the channel open for the moment. And likewise, you know, as I say, we’re talking about tonic and Pathic. But if you have any other questions, you other parts of treatment, other concepts and the philosophy of Heilkunst, I know a lot of people really start to get really excited and interested in all the philosophical concepts because it’s not just about health. But it really speaks to a lot of the broader meaning of life and how we relate to ourselves in the world, and how we make our way through the bigger questions of life. You know, we can certainly get into any of those kinds of questions. But yeah, Heilkunst in the medicine is always a good starting point. But, but as I say, I’ll leave the channel open here for a moment if someone is in the middle of typing their question, and we’ll kind of come back around to that. But yeah, otherwise, that’s kind of the core topic I wanted to start with today. And yes, I can think of any final point I have about that. I think that’s a pretty good overview. But as I say any of the details, and I don’t I don’t believe there are any questions coming through at the moment. So I will bring this to a close. And again, I will see you again the next broadcast in Happy New Year. By the way, I’m actually starting a new rhythm I’m planning to, to keep this time of the week humid day on Thursday. Every week, you have to go through whatever the current questions or whatever the latest questions that have come my way and we can also turn it into a conversation if anyone wants to come on camera with me we can have a back and forth conversation on the more detailed or complex topic that’s available as well but for now, I will wish you all a good rest of your day. And I will see you at the next broadcast.
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