The Healing Crisis

Treatment with herbs or other natural medicines is sometimes accompanied by a deterioration in the condition before improvement takes place. Usually known as a healing crisis, this can happen also as a result of taking nutritional supplements or undergoing therapeutic programmes such as are involved in nature cure, massage and magnetic therapy.

Often these reactions represent a resurgence of old symptoms, anything form headache and nausea to skin eruptions, chest colds or unusual fatigue, which were experienced during the disease process. They recur as the body’s elimination of unwanted materials accelerates, making the system temporarily more toxic: no longer stuck in the tissues, these substances can circulate freely, e.g. in the blood and lymph, and become much more disruptive. Until they are fully excreted, physiological imbalances remain and the body cannot establish harmony.

It is important, therefore, to support this cleansing with healthy lifestyle – diet, rest and exercise and clean water to flush out completely.

Your practioner will offer therapeutic support if neccesary, when the effects of toxics are on their way out of the system until health and well being are restored.

Fats and Health

It is a myth that eating fats causes weight gain, unless we consume trans fats hydrogenated into unnatural fats solid at room temperature.

The processing of unsaturated vegetable seed oils into hydrogenated margarine etc. creates toxicity – they cannot be properly metabolised and lead to disease.  However, saturated fats, e.g.: from butter and other animal foods, lower Lp(a) associated with heart disease, enhance immune function and contain many essential nutrients to combat cancer and promote fertility. Some types boost metabolism and reduce weight, whereas trans fats raise it.

So let’s avoid processed vegetable oils and rely more on healthy fats from coconuts, olives, fish and land animals not tortured by industrial farming, e.g.: pastured, grass fed cattle. Good seed oils such as flax and hemp are best kept refrigerated (easily go rancid), available from Sunny Foods and the Eastbourne Clinic of Natural Medicine: raw milk and butter delivered by Hook & Son near Hailsham, also organic yoghurt from Court Lodge Farm in Wartling.

  

Hypnotherapy for Deep Relaxing and Centering

Hypnotherapy for Deep Relaxing and Centering with JOHN HIRST  MA CHP(NC) 

Special offer: 30 minute sessions for £20.00

At this time many people are facing difficulties in their day-to-day lives.  The pressure can seem inescapable. Hypnotherapy can help you to release the stress through deep relaxation and find resources and inspiration within yourself to move forward.

An individual session of deep relaxation and suggestions, or a series of sessions, can support you through disruptions and changes. Call the Clinic on 01323 734664  or email johnmartinhirst@google.com to book.

Gynaecology

Paul Chedgey has recently completed a post-graduate diploma course in gynaecology taught by Dr Trevor Wing, who studied in one of the main hospitals in China under one of that country’s leading specialists.  Herbal medicine and acupuncture are the first choice of treatment in China for conditions such as infertility, menstrual pain and irregularity and menopausal symptoms: these are regarded as the most effective therapies.

Having gained distinction in the final examination, Paul is able to incorporate new skills and information to help a range of gynaecological problems, with great success.  A member of the British Acupuncture Council, the National Institute of Medical Herbalists and the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, Paul is now a registered associate of Dr Wing, regularly attending seminars and conferences, and reading the latest research papers to keep up to date with the many wonderful developments in this field.

Cranio-sacral therapy too can help with gynaecological difficulties and as a member of the Register of Cranio-Sacral Therapists, Paul incorporates this also into a treatment programme for such problems, such that improvement can be very rapid.

Raw Milk and Pasteurisation

Most milk today derives from the modern, rather than the traditional Holstein cow, bred to produce huge quantities (three times a much as the old-fashioned cow) and to survive on cereals rather than grass. Average life span is 42 months compared to about 12 years for the grass-fed cow, she must be milked three times a day and is very susceptible to mastitis. Her milk contains high levels of growth hormone from the pituitary gland even when spared the indignity of genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone to push her to the limits. 

The proper feed for cows is green grass in spring, summer and autumn, with only small amounts of grain; then stored dry hay, silage and root vegetables in winter. It is not soy meal, cottonseed meal or other commercial feeds, nor is it bakery waste, chicken manure, swill from ethanol production or citrus peel cake laced with pesticides. Soy meal has the wrong protein profile for the dairy cow, resulting in a short burst of high milk production followed by premature death. Vital nutrients like vitamins A, D, E and K are greatest in milk from cows eating green grass, especially rapidly growing green grass in the spring and autumn. Vitamins A and D are greatly diminished and Vitamin K disappears when milk cows are fed commercial feeds. 

Pasteurisation destroys enzymes, denatures anti-microbial and immune-stimulating components, diminishes nutrient availability, denatures fragile milk proteins, destroys vitamins C, B6 and B12, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens and is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, infant colic, growth and behavioural problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis and heart disease. Calves fed pasteurised milk do poorly and often die before maturity. Raw milk sours naturally whereas pasteurised milk turns putrid. 

Pasteurisation was instituted in the 1920s to combat TB, infant diarrhoea, undulant fever and other diseases caused by poor animal nutrition, dirty production methods and infected water supplies. But times have changed and effective water treatment, stainless steel tanks, milking machines, refrigerated transport and improved testing methods make pasteurisation unnecessary for public protection. Pasteurisation does not always kill pathogens: the bacteria for Johne’s disease, which infects a large proportion of confined cattle, survive pasteurisation; Johne’s has been linked to Crohn’s disease in humans. 

Much commercial milk is now ultra-pasteurised to eliminate heat-resistant pathogens and lengthen shelf life. Ultra-pasteurisation is a violent process that takes milk from a cool temperature to above boiling point in just a few seconds. Most milk is then also homogenised, which breaks down butterfat globules so they don’t rise to the top. Homogenised milk has been linked to heart disease. Average butterfat content used to be 4% but today it is more like 3%. 

Consumers have been duped into believing that low fat and skimmed milk products are good for them, and only by marketing low-fat and skimmed milk as healthy can the modern dairy industry get rid of its excess poor quality, reduced-fat milk from modern high-production herds. Butterfat contains vitamins A and D needed for assimilation of calcium and protein in the water fraction of milk; without them protein and calcium are more difficult to utilise and possibly toxic. Butterfat is rich in short and medium-chain fatty acids, which protect against disease and stimulate the immune system. It contains glycospingolipids, which prevent intestinal distress, and conjugated linoleic acid, which has strong anticancer properties. 

Powdered skimmed milk is a source of dangerous oxidised cholesterol and neurotoxic amino acids. Low-fat yogurts and sour creams contain mucopolysaccharide slime to give them body. Pale butter from hay-fed cows contains colourings to imitate vitamin-rich butter from grass-fed cows. In the 1920s people could procure fresh raw whole milk, curdled milk products and buttermilk as well as natural raw butter, cheese and cream. Today’s milk is accused of causing everything from allergies to cancer, but prior to pasteurisation and the industrialisation of dairy farming these diseases were rare. In fact fewer and fewer people can safely consume today’s pasteurised, ultra heat treated, homogenised, standardised, fat-reduced and manipulated dairy foods. 

Raw milk contains numerous ingredients that kill pathogenic bacteria in milk, strengthen the immune system, protect the intestinal tract, prevent the absorption of toxins and ensure full assimilation of all nutrients. These components are largely destroyed by pasteurisation.

Community Acupuncture Clinic

We are very pleased to announce the launch of the first Community Acupuncture Clinic in Eastbourne.

Kirsten Germann will be offering this service on Tuesday afternoons from 4th February 2014. This will enable patients to receive treatment for just £20 per session in a clinic room with two other patients.

A separate room is available for those who want to discuss medical issues privately before treatment. The first treatment will be £35 which includes a private consultation.

Kirsten will continue seeing patients on a one to one basis as before. Please note the fee increase for this clinic will be from £35 to £40 per treatment.

For further details please contact us. 

Herbs and Infections

In attempting to understand disease we naturally look for direct causation, which with infections usually means isolating and then targeting specific disease agents that can be held responsible. This is important so long as we don’t forget that germs do not cause disease by accident: their potency depends on the terrain in which they exist, ie. the health and vitality or otherwise of the host organism and its immediate environment.

The major infectious diseases were declining in the Western world, before the introduction of vaccines and antibiotics, thanks to improved public health, cleaner water and better nutrition. They pose no serious threat anywhere that society has organised adequate provision in these spheres. Similarly at the level of the individual, “germs” need reason•ably favourable conditions to survive and, whether bacteria, viruses or even fungi, they cannot thrive in the tissues of a healthy body.

We must still cope with a host of infections – almost as a condition of human existence – which it would be foolish to underestimate. Dangerous complications of meningitis, for example, are inevitably going to be treated with conventional antibiotics and these drugs will always have an important place in modern medicine. But they have long been over prescribed for less serious conditions, or where problems are more chronic in nature, and there is widespread abuse of antibiotics in modern agriculture. This has resulted in over exposure and consequent resistance to therapeutic action when that becomes necessary.

Herbal antimicrobials have enormous potential to fill some of the gaps in modern healthcare, including treatment of infections. Garlic has appreciable antiseptic properties, once being known as “Russian penicillin” and credited with preventing gangrene and sepsis for thousands of troops in the 1914-18 World War. Taken raw it has a cleansing action on the gut, effective in almost all enteric diseases, and disinfects the lungs. Applied locally it is useful too for ear infections, oral thrush and tonsillitis. Many other herbs have local antiseptic action, eg marigold petals and myrrh (gum resin from Commiphora molmol and related species), particularly when used in the form of an alcoholic tincture.

Myrrh is a good example of a herbal antimicrobial which, far from leaving us depleted as usually happens with conventional antibiotics, in fact augments and vitalises the body’s own defences. It combines direct toxic action on bacteria with the ability to stimulate white blood cell production. Thyme and sage are also known to increase white blood cell activity, certainly in the form of the essential oils. And echinacea, which has been well researched and is readily available, is a potent antibiotic herb that seems to work by enhancing our defence against invasive pathogens.

This enhancement of innate immunity is a crucial advantage with herbal antimicrobials. Herbs can be robustly effective against viral as well as bacterial infections, which may just mean the common cold or a mild flu, but also AIDS and hepatitis B. Somewhat exotic herbs such as astragalus and siberian ginseng probably work this way, strengthening the immune system, yand two others with broad spectrum antiviral and antibiotic properties which are perhaps more modest and closer to home: honeysuckle flowers and forsythia seeds.

Harry Boys MNIMH