Homeopathy, diseases and action inhibition

Homeopathy works far too much in a "closed circuit" way. This completely misses its potential to enrich medical, biological and scientific knowledge. It also prevents it from attracting the interest of the entire medical and scientific community and from addressing it with any chance of being heard and appreciated. In fact, the only "interest" of such a confinement is to dispense with the indispensable rigour and concern for intelligibility that the desire to exchange with others imposes. Everyone will have understood that my approach is the opposite of this "confinement"; that it aims, on the contrary, to open the necessary dialogue with the entire medical and scientific community.

It so happens that homeopathy could highlight an essential and major biological phenomenon in the onset of diseases and thus enrich, very profoundly, the current conception of the causes of diseases.

Everyone is, of course, familiar with the biomedical concept of diseases and their causes, a concept which has a strong mechanistic dimension with the emphasis on a particular causal agent (virus or bacteria as the cause of an infection, hypercholesterolemia as the cause of a myocardial infarction, local pollen factor elevated to the rank of allergen, etc.), a neurotransmitter (serotonin or dopamine), a physio-pathological phenomenon (autoimmune diseases), etc. Of course, the therapeutic response in such a context will be the administration of a molecule interfering or acting on the identified local causes, destroying it (antibiotic), inhibiting it (enzyme or chemical reaction) or blocking such a receptor (beta-blocker, anti-histamine), etc.

Homeopathy considers diseases in a much more global way and, in this context, rather than identifying different "local" and independent pathologies in a patient (asthma, hypertension and uterine fibroma for example); it assumes the existence of a single global pathology. The traditional but very vague notion of "terrain" has long served or been used as an "explanation" for such an imbalance.

However, such a notion is rather poor from a scientific point of view and explains nothing, or almost nothing, in reality. It is therefore seriously lacking in content, and we must therefore go well beyond this old notion of terrain and ask ourselves the following question.

As I have underlined in another text on this site, most pathologies are, to a large extent, due to chronic biological imbalances. But defining diseases is something that should not neglect the question of their origin, their cause. Indeed, why do these imbalances take hold? Are they innate? Acquired? Why do they occur? What are the main factors and drivers? In a word, what is their cause?

Indeed, one does not get sick without a reason. Not without a cause and without agents, of course, but not, either, without a vulnerability being in place. It is not enough to diagnose pneumopathy or asthma to dispense with such thinking. Of course, from a biomedical point of view, we can say that the first was caused by such and such a bacterium and that the second shows a bronchial hyper-reactivity more or less associated, for example, with an allergic note. All this is certainly true, or rather, is not false. But if the patient with pneumopathy had been soaked to the bones by a sudden rainstorm and had been very upset for several days, didn't that play a role? As for the asthma patient, he also has migraine, has a tendency to hypochondria, is afraid of running out of money and his asthma is accompanied by eczema.

All things that clearly indicate a global imbalance.

But why has this imbalance set in? What caused it? How can we account for all this, scientifically, biologically? By turning, once again, to homeopathic practice, that is to say, by placing the occurrence of disease in the field of life, in the vital plane. This will lead us to a fundamental vital and biological phenomenon.

What homeopathy shows, as evidenced by its meticulous and attentive observation of patients for more than two centuries, and particularly with the developments in contemporary homeopathy, is that what seems to destabilize organisms and cause disease is the fact that, for a given subject, to find oneself in such and such a difficult situation, to be confronted with such and such an obstacle.

Thus, homeopathic medicines are known to be useful when the onset of a pathology seems to have occurred in the "aftermath of..." fear, shock, grief, head trauma, exposure to humidity, abuse of coffee or tea, etc.

Contemporary homeopathy has emphasized other difficulties, other obstacles, more existential. The patient then "falls ill” when he or she encounters a situation commonly encountered by more or less all human beings in which he or she finds himself or herself, as it were, locked up and prevented from acting, whether for "internal" reasons (he or she is vulnerable to this situation, which makes it much more difficult to overcome) or for "external" reasons (the constraint, the obstacle is really more important than the average), or even a combination of both types of reasons.

To take just the example of the metals in the fourth line of Mendeleev's periodic table, it is now known, thanks to the work of Jan Scholten in particular, that patients needing these remedies will readily destabilise themselves when professional circumstances arise. For example, Ferrum metallicum will fall ill from not being able to cope with such a growing demand for work that he will burn out, Nicolum will be prevented from exercising his full, albeit well-acquired professional abilities, and Cuprum will be pushed further and higher when he is already struggling to maintain his status in a tense manner.

In such a concept, it is understood that healing, therefore, is no longer only marked by the disappearance of this or that lesion or dysfunction but, more fundamentally, by the resolution of the difficulty of life encountered, its "dissolution" one could almost say. The patient no longer wastes his energy and thoughts fighting and struggling against what was hindering and posing a problem that can now be lived without difficulty.

This has a consequence on what can be considered a true healing. It is no longer enough for the lesions to disappear, for even if this happens, if the obstacle or life situation remains difficult and "abnormally" problematic, this must prompt caution and mistrust. Indeed, given the difficulty to act, to "overcome" the persistent obstacle, it would hardly be surprising if either a recurrence or a "displacement" towards other harmful and pathogenic consequences occurred.

Thus, by taking into account life situations that destabilize and unbalance biological organisms, homeopathy relies, without having clearly understood it until now, on a phenomenon that is particularly important in the triggering of diseases. On the one hand, this has the merit of making homeopathy more understandable. On the other hand, it has the merit of showing that homeopathic observation and practice can contribute to medical, biological and scientific knowledge.

The triggering of a number of illnesses seems, in fact, to be the biological consequences of the phenomenon of inhibition of action described by the neurobiologist Henri Laborit in the extension and refinement of Selye's work on stress.

The concept of stress and general coping syndrome was described by Hans Selye in 1925. He defined it as the set of physiological and psychological means used to adapt to a more or less brutal change occurring in the usual course of a subject's previously well-balanced life, changes that are likely to trigger an upheaval in his psychic and somatic structure.

It is known that the organism has specific responses to certain situations, for example, it reacts to cold by producing heat, to physical effort by secreting a hormone that stimulates the organism, etc.

Stress, on the other hand, is defined as a non-specific response of the body to the adaptive demands made on it. This adaptive response involves biochemical changes aimed at maintaining what biologists call a state of equilibrium or homeostasis, i.e., the constancy or stability of the body's parameters such as body temperature, glucose levels, etc. This response is called "homeostasis". It therefore represents "all the modifications that allow an organism to bear the consequences of a natural or surgical trauma".

As long as the magnitude of the stressful event does not exceed the normal response capacity of the organism, it will not suffer the consequences. Conversely, if the resources of the body are insufficient, if it cannot cope with the amount of stress it has to manage, problems of all kinds are likely to arise. The organism then enters a vicious circle, the body's adaptation system becomes exhausted and the consequences of stress become more and more harmful.

Selye described it this way:

The mechanism of the adaptation syndrome has three consecutive phases:

- the "alarm phase",

- the "reaction phase",

- the "exhaustion phase".

Hans Selye finally shows that the stress phenomenon is a life-saving vigilance mechanism and that over-vigilance is harmful when the quantity of demands exceeds the subject's response capacity.

It is known in the homeopathic world that, in recent years, Rajan Sankaran has, on several occasions, referred to the role of stress in the triggering of illnesses, in line with Selye.

However, referring to the idea of stress alone does not allow us to understand the subtleties and the very concrete and identifiable nature of the unbalancing situations that contemporary homeopathy has increasingly highlighted over the last twenty years, for Selye does not mention anything that will, in concrete terms, make the body's capacity to adapt outdated.

This notion allows us to take a step forward and to describe much better what is at stake, and which homeopathy observes, with great subtlety, in many situations leading to the outbreak of diseases.

What makes patients ill is not just suffering from stress, which is too vague a term, but finding themselves in a situation of inhibition of action. In a situation where the action necessary to deal with the obstacle that arises, the unexpected that arises, is impossible and/or inaccessible to the subject. This, whether this impossibility comes from the extraordinary character of the obstacle, from the vulnerability of the subject precisely in front of it (while another obstacle would not necessarily pose a problem to him or the same obstacle would not pose any problem to another subject) or because the action is impossible because it is forbidden or unthinkable for psychic, social, cultural, religious, etc. reasons.

However, Henri Laborit's work has clearly shown that, faced with a stressful situation, there are only three biological responses available:

→ Flee (flight) to escape the stressful situation.

→ Fight and "escape" from stress by unloading your aggressiveness and taking action, whether the fight is victorious or not. Failure to fight the "real" problem may result in the individual shifting the fight to other areas. He is not fighting against what he has a problem with, but fighting about something else, which still allows him to fight, thus taking action and preventing him from getting sick.

It should be noted that these two options are the healthiest, the ones that keep the body from getting sick.

→ Fear, fright. If the subject is unable to flee or fight, he or she is condemned to remain in a situation of "action inhibition". He is seized by fear, fright and, above all, by the powerlessness to defend himself, to flee or to fight, that is to say, still powerless to act. This is the most harmful situation for the organism and leads to the installation of pathological states.

However, homeopathy, from time immemorial, and contemporary homeopathy even more so, has brought to light the harmful nature of certain situations which, when we think about it more closely, are situations of inhibition of action. The subject, being able neither to flee from the difficulty nor to fight and overcome it, finds himself forced to remain, without the possibility of action, in the stressful and problematic situation, which, little by little, or more rapidly depending on the case, leads to the appearance of an imbalance in his vital dynamics, that is to say, a global biological imbalance within him.

We can therefore see the great heuristic value, the formidable theoretical and practical fertility of a homeopathy that is well conceptualized and anchored in modern biological and scientific data. We can also see that it could greatly broaden our knowledge of the causes of diseases, in particular, by linking its clinical observations to the biological theory of action inhibition. This would make it possible to associate with the local factor involved (bacteria, neuromediator, etc.) or the psychic trauma incriminated in a pathology the causal role of an impeded, prevented and inhibited vital dynamic.