Differentiating Real Healing from Merely Suppressing Disease

Just because symptoms disappear shortly after any treatment does not necessarily mean that a “cure” has been effected. This experience can mean one of several things:
— The symptoms went away on their own, and the treatment had nothing to do with it.
— The treatment lessened the intensity of the symptoms, providing short-term

relief but resulting in the recurrence of symptoms in the near future.
— The treatment suppressed the symptoms, pushing them deeper into the body. Although suppression may cause the initial symptoms to disappear, they are replaced with more serious, deeper symptoms that are more discomforting and potentially dangerous.

The concept of suppressing symptoms is well accepted and understood in psychology. It is commonly observed that when a person suppresses his or her emotions, it pushes the emotional turmoil deeper, leading the person to explode at some future time, often at people who are not directly related to the origin of the person’s problem.
While people may be familiar with the problems associated with the suppression of emotions, people are generally not familiar with the possibility that many conventional medical treatments can suppress their physical symptoms, driving the disease deeper into the person.
Such is the problem when using pharmacological agents that are explicitly prescribed for their ability to control or inhibit symptoms that are the natural defensive functions of the body.
The father of American homeopathy was a German physician named Constantine Hering, M.D. He observed that people go through a specific healing process after being given the correct homeopathic medicine. He developed guidelines in which to determine when a real healing is taking place. These guidelines have been called “Hering’s laws of cure,” but some homeopaths prefer to call them Hering’s guidelines of cure.

To understand these guidelines, it is first useful to know that homeopaths carefully evaluate the evolution of a person’s physical, emotional, and mental/spiritual symptoms. Homeopaths consider mental/spiritual symptoms to be deepest to the core of a person’s being, for they represent the will, the ego, the sense of security that the person feels, and the person’s overall state of consciousness. The emotional symptoms are external to the mental/spiritual level of the person because imbalances in the deeper level will create various fears, angers, depressive states, and other emotions. The physical symptoms are the most outer manifestation of the person, though every level can and will influence the other.

Also, each level has certain symptoms that have more or less influence on a person’s overall health. For instance, a person’s asthma will be deeper than his or her skin rash, a person’s fear of death will be deeper than his or her irritability, and a person’s loss of self-esteem will be deeper than a subtle reduction in memory. Likewise, when comparing symptoms on different levels, a person’s heart disease will more profoundly affect his or her health than a difficulty in concentration experienced on the mental/spiritual level.
In light of these levels of the human being and the degrees of intensity to which a symptom impairs a person’s ability to live, Hering found that healing progresses:

— from within to without (from the deepest part of our being to the most external);
— from the most recent disease back in time to previous ones (a reversion of the disease process); and
— from the top of the body to the bottom of the body.

Homeopaths observe that a truly effective therapy sometimes elicits a temporary exacerbation of certain symptoms, usually in the superficial ones, or those that the person had many years previously. Homeopaths assert that a true healing is taking place when a person’s current symptoms are more superficial than previous ones.
On the other hand, if and when a person’s symptoms disappear and new ones that are more serious develop, this suggests that the treatment has suppressed the person’s condition and has made the symptoms worse. Unknown to most physicians and patients, people undergoing conventional medical treatment are commonly having their disease suppressed. Homeopaths assert that one of the reasons that there is increased mental disease and increased chronic disease at earlier and earlier ages is because of effective suppression of the disease process by conventional medical treatment.

Distinct from methods that suppress disease are those that help disease express and externalize itself. Homeopathy’s use of the principle of similars is one important safeguard against disease suppression because it mimics the wisdom of the body rather than suppresses its symptoms.