Vital Energy

The purpose of this article is to provide a definition of the disease according to the homeopathic point of view that is both consistent with its tradition and understandable and acceptable by biomedicine and the biological sciences in general. To do this, we need to differentiate ourselves from the Hahnemann definition. Indeed, it is no longer possible to use Hahnemann's definition for which the disease is due to a disturbance of the "life force" or vital energy. Such a definition is obsolete and must be replaced by the definition of disease as a disturbance and loss of vital balance.

It is not, of course, a question of throwing the stone at Hahnemann who, to formulate his discovery, was obliged to refer to the concepts of his time and the constraints of his language. In the nineteenth century, the reference to the notion of force or vital energy was common in medicine, and even in chemistry. Laennec and Bichat, the father of physiology, were both vitalists. That Hahnemann refers to it testifies therefore above all of its inscription in its time.

In addition, Western and Indo-European languages, push to make processes (unlike Chinese for example) more substantial and, as a result, transform them into "things", into entities, not real. For Chinese, we can talk about "living" with all its modalities without going through the term "life". In the West, life is said to be transformed into a process, a phenomenon, a dynamic, an experience lived into an entity, a "thing", "life" which, in reality, does not exist.

What Hahnemann has really thought about and discovered is that illness is a disruption of the patient's "living", "feeling and acting" to use his terms, that is, a vital disruption. . The problem is that instead of sticking to this formulation, unusual in Western languages, it has followed the penchant of these and refer this imbalance of "living" to a "thing", an entity, the energy or vital force.

The vital force does not exist as an autonomous entity. A force is "an action exerted by one object on another". It's the ability of an object to do something. Muscular strength does not exist "in itself" but is the expression of a capacity of the muscles. In the same way, the gravitational force is a force exerted, one on the other, by the masses of two bodies located at a certain distance from one another. This force explains, thus, the positioning, the final equilibrium situation obtained. But this force does not have an autonomous existence either. That there are forces acting in the living is obvious, but here too, they can not have the least autonomous existence. And one can conceive of a "vital force" only as "resultant", a global sum of all the vital phenomena at work in the living and not as a cause of these vital phenomena. Suffice to say that this "vital force" can not ensure, contrary to what Hahnemann said, the cohesion of the body, that it can not in any way direct and ensure its proper functioning. It is quite the opposite that it is. Namely that the "vital force" of the subject will be diminished, weakened, disturbed, if and only if the overall balance of the body is, itself, diminished and disturbed. It is therefore possible to say that ...

The disease is therefore not due to the disturbance of a particular energy or force, called "vital" that would control the body as a coachman directs a team of horses or a captain his ship.

The disease is, on the contrary, and it is the great advance brought by Hahnemann with homeopathy, a vital imbalance, an imbalance in the subject's capacity to live, a disruption of its vital dynamic (vast movement of global functioning of the whole organism, including psyche), ie, again, a global biological imbalance.

` Such a change in definition and thought is essential and rich in consequences. It makes, finally, possible the exchange and the dialogue with the medical, biological and scientific community since everyone knows, of course, that health and disease have a homeostatic dimension. Everyone knows, too, what an imbalance is. Everyone understands what global means. As for the vital adjective, it does not refer to any particular force or energy, but recalls that, from the homeopathic point of view, the disease is taken into account in its dimension of alteration of "feeling and acting". that is to say, as a lived experience, in a phenomenological dimension.

Disease, from this point of view, is, too, note, the transition to a new vital equilibrium, a new global operation, viable but less optimal, less "comfortable", which causes and is accompanied by more or less many, and more or less serious, inconvenience.

Biomedicine is part of the field of objectification. It therefore seeks, quite logically, as a cause for diseases, objects (infectious agents, biological parameters (cholesterol, triglycerides, glycemia, etc.), lesions, radiological images, etc.) and targets them as a target for action.

Homeopathy is part of the phenomenological field or vital field, that is to say of life as it is, concretely, lived. It takes into account how the patient lives his illness, how he feels it and aims to rebalance the patient's overall organism or, more precisely, to give the patient the impetus and / or the information necessary for he rebalances himself. Articulation and complementarity of the two approaches become, thus, obvious. There are, on the biomedical side, the diseases of biological mechanisms, local causes, in a word, of the machinery of life. And there is, on the homeopathic side, diseases by vital or biological imbalance. The two registers are intruding, moreover, more often than we think. Above all, the two registers complement each other harmoniously, since we see things clearly.