This podcast is an excerpt from the 1993 Emergencies and First Aid lecture from Dr. Robin Murphy's seminar series and Clinical Homeopathy Certificate Course.

Here Dr. Murphy talks about Homeopathy and the Paradigm of Health.

Emergencies and First Aid
This lecture gives an introduction to homeopathic emergency prescribing. Topics include the treatment of injuries, sprains, wounds, allergic reactions, food and chemical poisoning, and animal and insect bites. Dr. Murphy differentiates the use of remedies for burns, sunstroke, frostbite, dehydration, physical and emotional shock, and rape. Also, acute pain, broken bones, surgery, drug overdose, coma, and asphyxia are covered. He also reviews the Emergency chapter from the Homeopathic Medical Repertory by Robin Murphy.

The full Emergencies and First Aid lecture is available for streaming access.

Transcript

A paradigm is a model, a concept about what health is. We want to look at that first. So, homeopathy began in 1793. So, exactly 200 years ago by Samuel Christian Hahnemann. And he was fed up with medicine. And medical doctors at that time gave leeches and [would] bloodlet. They would bleed everybody until they got so weak that all your symptoms would go away and they would claim a cure. And that was standard medicine all the way up to the mid 1800s, even in the United States. So, Samuel Hahnemann had a theory from observation. And quickly the story goes that malaria was rampant and these doctors were using quinine bark, cinchona bark, and they had a theory that malaria was being cured by quinine because it affected the stomach a certain way. And Hahnemann said, well, where did he get that idea? So, he did a strange thing and he took quinine bark and he got all the symptoms of malaria. So, he came up with the basic premise of homeopathy is “like cures like”. And we have this in folklore a lot. We say what that man needs is a dose of his own medicine. Or people get hit on their head and they lose their memory and they get hit again and their memory comes back. Or fight fire with fire is another saying. And it's an actual practical thing when you set a fire to neutralize a fire. And in physics, the same principle is there that waves of equal and opposite – coming in equal opposite direction will cancel each other.

So, homeopathy is an energetic therapy based on neutralizing symptoms. And there's two ways you can approach an immune response. So, a person has an immune response, say this is their liver and they're having pain and inflammation in the liver. The homeopath will say that's the immune system attempting to heal itself. Now, the medical doctors will say the same thing in the classroom, but in the clinic, all they do is give drugs and stuff to stop the immune response. So, the homeopathic remedies mimic the immune response and enhance the immune response by giving a remedy that can cause similar symptoms in a healthy person. If you give it to someone that has these liver symptoms, it will enhance that response. So, homeopathy cooperates with the body, where instead of covering up the symptoms, it actually stimulates them and they go away quicker. You go through the process quicker. And he came up with a whole different view of medicine based on energy.

So, he used various terms. He said that human beings had a soul and their bodies, their temples, their bodies were animated with a vital force. And this vital force is what gets sick first. So, this is his basic paradigm. And you'll see, even in emergencies, it's our energy that gets disturbed and our body. So, we have to heal us on both levels. So, he basically had a theory that we have a spirit or soul and we have two things down here. One is vital energy and vitality. Chinese medicine has the same three things. They call it the spirit and chi, which is the breath and vitality. And these are the three things that are our inner being or who we are and our body is the outer coverings and the vitality is how much energy you have.

The vitality is inherited from your parents. This is what we say in normal terminology is the constitution of the patient. But we're really saying is how strong is their vitality? Some children are weak and sick and full of allergies. And other children are very vital and they never get sick and they fall and don't get hurt. This child has a stronger constitution, okay? You can look back in that child’s – at the time the child was conceived, the parents may have been sick. I know I have a friend in Santa Fe who had a cough and a bronchitis and the child was conceived. And this child, whose three or four now, we've been treating them, has had periodic coughs and upper respiratory problems. And they remember because I asked him, do you remember the time of conception? So, the health of the parents – so some parents might be out on vacation and drunk or something, sleep, jet lag, and they conceive a child and that child will be sicker than another one that was conceived at home and not under a lot of stress or travel. And we see this a lot. So, the vitality, your constitution is inherited from both your parents. So, if one parent's real sick and one's real healthy, the child's constitution will be somewhere in between, okay? And so, we gave the child with the cough, we gave the child, the boy, the remedy that the father needed at the time of conception of the child and that was passed on to him, that weakness in that area. It's not a genetic thing, it's a state of that parent’s vitality at the time of conception. That's why we always feel pregnancies and all that should be very planned and parents should get themselves healthy and stuff like that.

And then vital energy is the breath, the breath of life. And we get that from breathing and from water and from food. So, one is like a reserve storage battery and one's like your daily fuel. If either one of those get weak, we suffer. And we have like a barometer. If you're at 100% of your vitality and you're eating a very good diet, you will have optimum health. If you have a strong constitution and you eat a poor diet and have poor breathing and exercise habits, then your health will deteriorate slowly. And this is why scientists can't explain why someone like George Burns is 90 years old and smokes and drinks and he's still healthy. Well, we say he has a very strong constitution, but he would be even healthier if he didn't smoke and drink, okay? So, he can take it because his inherited energy was very strong. Chinese medicine, they call this prenatal qi before the birth. And then vital energy is called postnatal qi, which means what we get from our environment. And if the vital energy in the body is not sufficient to maintain life, then we have to go in and tap our reserves, and that's what wears down people's constitution. And this is called the aging process as we are taught to believe.

As we age, our vitality and our vital energy get depleted. And when that happens, there's less life in the body, and the body starts to deteriorate. And we're told that that's normal. The doctor will pat you on your head and say, of course you're losing your memory. You're 70 years old, okay? And he's 50, and he's losing his memory. And people believe that. So, the whole secret of health is maintaining your energy at a certain level and not going into this depletion state or cultivating energy as you grow older. And that's what tai chi and diet and homeopathy is all about. If we can increase our energy a little bit as we grow older, then we won't deteriorate as a human being, which we consider normal, but in reality, it's common. It's not normal, okay? We can get healthier and healthier as we age. And then from this model of Hahnemann, we can determine what takes away our energy and what depletes our energy. And that's our criteria of what is healthy and what is unhealthy for us. Natural law as opposed to theory.