Paul K. Branch, M.D. - Holistic Medicine and Classical Homeopathy


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The Alternative Healer

Posts Tagged ‘homeopathy’


A case of Chronic Leukemia

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

I have had a number of tragedies in last few years, I try not to dwell on it, she said.

This woman, in her 70s, had come to for help in treating her leukemia, a cancer of the blood.  Although deeply concerned about her health, she focused on  difficulties in her emotional life during our interview.  She told me,

Divorce is almost worse than death.  I have seen so many people hurt.  The whole family is devastated, and it never stops, we are still picking up pieces.

She paused.  I feel like I’m out there alone.

Although her leukemia was a slow-progressing kind, it was making her increasingly fatigued.  We can observe a certain emotional fatigue in her words as well, for example when she says, “and it never stops, we are still picking up the pieces.” Hers is not a vitality that immediately picks itself up and dusts itself off after one of life’s blows.  We get the sense that she is numb from repeated shocks.  On describing the effects of having a close friend die, she said,

You go numb.  You almost wilt; your strength leaves you.

In some way, this feeling “the strength leaves you,” ties in with her fatigue.  This relates to her leukemia, which was progressively sapping her of strength, as her blood became more and more diseased.  Which came first, the emotional fatigue, or the leukemia?  There is no way to know.

To find out what was happening, I needed to go deeper.  I had to further explore the feeling she had of being alone.  Reaching back to her childhood, she told me,

I never felt anyone would stick up for me.  My mother resents that I learned to stick up for myself.  I knew I had to do it myself,  I knew I couldn’t depend on her.  I was just independent.

There was a detachment to her state.  She used the words “aloof” and “cold.”  She also used the term “putting up a wall,” and it began early with her mother.   Drawing from her sensitivity and the specifics of her detachment and aloneness, I gave her a plant remedy from the Malvales family.  This is the family from which we get cocoa and chocolate.

This remedy has given her much strength over the past 7 years.  I have needed to repeat it often because she would periodically fall back into a state of feeling shock or fatigue or alone.  For her, all three of these are connected.  The energetic strength in the homeopathic remedy enabled her to hold the line.

In the first part of her treatment, her leukemia stalled out in progressing.  Originally she was told by her oncologist that her white blood cell count would keep rising as her cancer progressed.  To the contrary, her white blood cell count simply stopped increasing and held steady.  This is something that can happen in homeopathic treatment of slow-moving, debilitating diseases.  Many neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s, fall under this category.  As a homeopathic doctor, you can give a Parkinson’s patient an exact prescription and the disease stops progressing.  It is another reason why it is best to seek homeopathic treatment sooner rather than later.

The good news in this case is that, after stalling out for a few years, after continued homeopathic treatment her blood counts returned to normal.  In her latest appointment with the oncologist, he had nothing to do and told her to come back for a check-up in a year.   Is this a “cure”?  After five years of improvement culminating with normal blood tests, things are looking good.

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Cellular Memory–and its Relationship to Classical Homeopathy

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

I heard a true story recently that brings insight into life and healing.  It is about an eight year-old girl who had a heart transplant.  The story is related by members of her transplant team.  Malcolm Robinson has written about it, Case 6 in his studies of cellular memory. 

The donor heart for her transplant had become available with the sudden death of a woman.  The transplant went well.  The only hitch in her treatment came a few months later.  The girl began having vivid nightmares.  In these terrible dreams she was being attacked and stabbed to death by a man.  The dream would repeat, revealing a new detail.  The panic, and the being stabbed remained the same. 

This waking up at night in abject fear was traumatic for the girl.  Moreover, it was unusual–the girl had never had nightmares like this before.  They were entirely new and out of context.

Members of her team, which included psychiatric care, puzzled over this, and finally, as the girl continued to have these disturbing nightmares, one of them delved deeper into the matter.   What turned up is both astonishing and, in the end, the most “logical” explanation. 

The woman to whom the heart originally belonged was the victim of an attack and had died suddenly:  she was stabbed to death.  The dreams of the girl who had received the transplanted heart exactly reflected her violent demise.  Based on the details of these dreams, the attacker was caught and tried.  In some way, the cells of this woman’s heart carried the memory of her traumatic, violent end, and this cellular memory was transplanted with the heart.  

Cellular memory is some form of energy–an energy powerful enough to stir up intense fear and nightmares.  This energy is not yet measurable by any machine yet invented by biomedical technology–and without this “proof” many scientists would deny its existence.  Nevertheless, almost all of us have experiences that are difficult to explain in any other way.

Cellular memory has a close relationship to classical homeopathy.  The preparation of a homeopathic remedy involves extensive dilution and shaking of each dilution, leaving no trace of the original substance.  There is only the “memory” left in the triple distilled alcohol of the original substance.  This leads me to believe that homeopathy works on a similar energetic plane as cellular memory.  In the same way as the cellular memory from a transplanted organ can disturb a woman’s dreams, a small, infinitesimal dose of substance in a homeopathic remedy can energetically match and shift an ill patient to health.  

Classical homeopathy likely affords the deepest  energetic therapy we have. It is able to reach places and heal problems where everything else has failed.

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An Aggressive Form of Rheumatoid Arthritis

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Recently a patient I had not seen in some time wrote with a question. When I wrote back, I asked how she would feel if I wrote about her case. She had been a joy to treat, and her case held much interest for me. She replied with this precise summary:

“Please note that I was told by two rheumatologists that I have a diagnosis of Psoriatic Arthritis, which is more aggressive and crippling than rheumatoid, and that I would be a cripple in a wheelchair if I didn’t take the Enbrel and Methotrexate. (both medications have side effects as bad as the disease even though they don’t admit it). I began my doses of remedy in August 2006, off Methotrexate in November in 2006, and off Enbrel February 2007. Currently, I have the normal and some abnormal aches and pains of a 62 y/o female in menopause, and actually painting all the rooms in my house. I am able to live with the pain and work through it since taking the remedy. Also, you are the best that has happened to me for a long time and I appreciate this “thing” that has brought me out of a very black period of life and maintained my sanity.“

This was a woman with a particularly aggressive form of arthritis indeed. Without the immune-system-suppressing regimen of Methotrexate and Enbrel she was practically frozen, her joints ”stiffening up in excruciating pain.“ How to explain how one good classical homeopathic prescription changed her life? As I briefly explain her case, remember the rule ”like cures like.“ The remedy must mirror the overall state of mind and body. Forget any ideas you have about what types of substances may or may not be able to heal disease. A substance that heals someone may be quite unexpected and outside the realm of what we consider “medicine.”

Note her use of the word ”aggressive“ in describing her arthritis. ”Aggressive and crippling,“ she says. This word came up repeatedly when I took her case. It is not stretching things too far to say that ”aggression“ is a certain energetic reality for her. When she described a co-worker she said this:

She was an extremely evil, aggressive person. She used any method to be underhanded and pretty much push me out so she could take control.

Here we get a sense of what she means by ”aggressive.” It is an ”evil, underhanded…take control“ aggression. Thus, we have ”aggression“ at the level of her joints and we have ”aggression“ at the level of her co-worker. Whenever we see a word like this repeating in entirely different circumstances, then the chances are good that it is coming not from an outer reality, but from a deep inner perception of reality, the energetic pattern of consciousness within the person (i.e. 4th level). You cannot truly cure the aggression of the arthritis without dealing with the inner perception of aggressiveness. They are one and the same.

Repeatedly she made note of people who were ”cruel“ and would ”cheat“ on her. There was a certain need in her to develop independence. When she had become dependent on people, they would ”betray“, ”cheat,“ or just plain turn ”cruel.“ As she put it,

They are so ruthless; they are so cruel. They are like lions in a den. If they could they would devour your flesh…They treat you like a piece of meat.

Faced with such an unpleasant reality, you would develop independence too. Note that the core issue is one of survival in a world of aggression and competition. Understand this in a deep way and you understandt the essence of an homeopathic animal remedy. This is what cured this woman’s aggressive arthritis.

What sort of animal reality did she need? The key word for me in her case was the word ”dependence,“ because once I knocked open this door, it took the case straight into the realm of parasites. If you think about it, there are different types of dependencies. There is the dependency, for example, of the baby on the mother. There is a dependency of one who needs knowledge on the guide or teacher. There is the dependency of the addict on the drug. The dependency of the parasite on the host is a different matter. It is an animal relationship characterized by a lack of mutuality. The parasite needs the host to survive, and thereby takes from the host, not caring whether the host suffers harm. The parasite treats the host literally like ”a piece of meat.“ In this case case, the peculiarities of her state and ideas of ”sucking of the blood“ led to the homeopathic prescription of the Hiruda medicinalis, the blood-sucking leech. I have had two cases of this in my practice. and they both have had arthritis. Hiruda is apparently an important remedy for arthritis.

Although this particular case was an exception, the cases in my practice that have cured with parasitic remedies have often presented with an all-consuming ”global“ anger. The feeling that people are betraying you, cheating you, violating you, or just plain ripping you off can feel out of control for these people. We need to always remember that what the homeopathic remedy treats is baggage. It’s a deep perception within us that leaves us unfree. This woman has gradually been discovering more peace inside, even as she continued to have difficulties with those in her environment.

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