We are living in the age of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Sorcerer being nature and science being the Apprentice. We have succeeded in altering our natural environment to the point that our state of existence has been called into question. This has frightening implications for our health and for disease. We face an unrelenting increase in degenerative diseases due to our own toying with the power of nature. Hahnemann's insights into the origins of chronic disease makes one all the more pessimistic for the health and survival of future generations.

Homeopathy, if it is to have any chance of becoming the foundation for the bio-energy therapeutics of the next century, must come to grips with the consequences of the unprecedented chemical and electro-magnetic pollution and extensive medical interventions (represented by drugs and vaccinations) of the last fifty years. All of these have the potential to profoundly disturb the human life force and to generate chronic disease processes. Hahnemann's precepts were derived for a different world. They remain valid but must be adapted and advanced for our time.

Already in his time, when the interventions of man and science into nature were just beginning, Hahnemann identified various external factors that interfered with and made more difficult, if not impossible, a rapid, gentle and permanent cure for chronic conditions.

In his landmark study of chronic disease and in many of his lesser writings, Hahnemann favoured patients who had lived a simple, rural life and had not been brought up nor indulged in the excesses of the richer classes.

This strong link between civilisation and health was clearly noted: "In the rude state of nature but few remedial agents were required, and the simple mode of living admitted of but few diseases. With the civilisation of mankind, on the contrary, the occasion of disease and the necessity for medical aid increased in equal proportion."

Until about 50 years ago, the ability of man to alter nature was relatively limited. This changed with the massive changes following the Second World War, which introduced the products of laboratories on a dizzying scale in every facet of our lives.

Heat processing, chemical additives and more recently non-ionising radiation now manipulate our food. Our agriculture is dependent on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and our soil is being depleted of the trace elements and microbial life necessary to healthy plants. Our water is being treated with chemicals in an unprecedented human experiment and has become the reservoir of the noxious synthetic chemicals used by our modern society. Our environment has become polluted beyond our comprehension and seemingly beyond our ability to handle its effects on our health.

The prevailing medical model of our time has reflected all this in the unending creation of ever-more powerful "miracle drugs", vaccinations on a grand scale, and the use of intrusive technology such as X-rays, ultra-sound, blood transfusions, transplants, all with little study of or understanding of their long-term consequences. It cannot have escaped the notice of any objective homeopath that the ability of homeopathy as derived from the teachings of Hahnemann to truly cure chronic diseases has declined over this period I call the Bio-Chemical Age of Medicine.

Hahnemann set out very clearly the ultimate objective of every physician, one, which he believed that homeopathy, could and would obtain to cure - rapidly, gently and permanently. This was a concern that constantly drove Hahnemann to improve upon his methods in applying the Law of Similars even though he often left behind various of his homeopathic followers who resisted change of any sort, preferring the orthodoxy they knew to the promise of a different approach. This happened in the case of the use of potencies going beyond Avogadro's Hypothesis and the discovery of the chronic miasms.

We must marvel at the reported successes of Hahnemann and his early disciples who clearly wrought "miracles" and were closer to the ideal of the single dose. The more difficult cases are ever more immune to our remedies and require treatment over extended periods of time, sometimes seemingly forever. It is easy to ignore the problem, as its recognition is painful for a healing discipline just now coming into its own as the basis for the coming Age of Bio-Energy Medicine.

However, to triumph over the bio-chemical model, energy medicine and homeopathy in particular needs to be able to deal with the iatrogenic effects of that model.

Homeopathy has responded in several ways. Some practitioners, the least dedicated, have simply ignored the issue or have sought refuge in a narrow interpretation of Hahnemannian principles. Others have had the courage to recognise it and, in the spirit of Hahnemann, to search for solutions. For some of these it has meant the search for ever more additions to the Materia Medica, in the hopes of finding more effective curative agents. We now have a bewildering number of remedies in the Materia Medica, but our comprehension of the problem and our ability to cure have not increased accordingly.

For another group it has meant the increasing use of higher and higher potencies, but also the selective use of certain nosodes in an effort to stimulate the vital force to heal. From them we have been introduced to the notion of "blockages" and "barriers" wherein the simillimum is prevented from acting. A well-selected nosode has the effect of removing the blockage and allowing the energy of the simillimum to trigger a healing reaction.

Kent himself contains various references to the use of nosodes, particularly those corresponding to the miasms, where there is a miasmic history, in order to allow the simillimum to do its work. Later homeopathic writings refer to the use of certain nosodes to remove sequelae from childhood diseases and other acute miasms, for example the use of Morbillinum for red measles.

I have come to associate myself with the last group. As I studied and practised, I began to realise that the unprecedented interventions of technology into our lives and health were buffeting and destabilising the vital force to an equally unprecedented degree and that the classical remedies were often unable to overcome the effects.

I became convinced that the notion of barriers or blockages and the more systematic use of nosodes provided the key to dealing with these problems but could find little guidance in the literature. To date, the use of nosodes and the concept of "blockages" in the vital force are based on scattered and serendipitous clinical findings.

Before Hahnemann, the principle of similars was known and used, but it remained for Hahnemann to turn the idea into a system of therapeutics that could be used by anyone in a consistent and predictable fashion. But where was this new insight, this key to the future, to come from?

Part of my all too little leisure time is spent in studying and contemplating the insights of modern physics for an energy-based medicine of the future. Quantum physics suggests to us how the power of a homeopathic potency can work. Einstein's space-time continuum provides a basis for understanding the healing process triggered by the remedy. But out of all the information and contemplation, I remained as unenlightened as ever. Until the day I picked up a remarkable book.

The universal consciousness seems to respond to our silent distress signals and to lead us gently to the clearing in the forest where we can regain our bearings. My moment of discovery came in the form of a book picked up by chance in a bookstore in Geneva, Switzerland.

I read the book from cover to cover on the flight home and got off the plane, my head reeling from excitement and exhilaration. I felt certain that I had found the key that I was looking for.

The book is entitled La Médicine Retrouvée (Medicine Rediscovered), by Dr. Jean Elmiger, of Lausanne. As the book explained, Dr. Elmiger comes from a long line (7th generation) of doctors. He was an allopath until some 15 years ago, when he had a crisis of faith in modern medicine and almost gave up his vocation in despair at not being able to cure, indeed at actually further harming, his patients.

Through luck and his remarkably open and inquiring mind, Dr. Elmiger discovered the world of energy medicine and natural healing, starting with the insights of Chinese traditional medicine and acupuncture. However, he found in homeopathy, the answer he had been searching for. This "royal road" , as he describes homeopathy, is alone capable of reaching into the depths of space and time to truly cure, to remove blockages and to correct inherited predispositions to disease at the genetic level (chronic miasm). But, in his apprenticeship in the world of energy medicine, Dr. Elmiger discovered that a basic element was missing from contemporary homeopathy that was vital to its success in the face of the shocks to the vital force produced by modern science.

Dr. Elmiger studied for a time with an adherent of Dr. Voll, the German doctor who had developed a means for measuring the energy flow through the Chinese acupuncture meridians. Dr. Voll and his followers also discovered that when a homeopathic potency of a suspected substance was placed in the patients hand in the circuit, the blocked energy would flow, showing up as a lack of resistance on the Voll-meter. The suspected substance was usually a vaccination or a chemical to which one had become allergic. This seemed to promise a simple means to restoring health on the basis of homeopathic potencies without having to go through the complications of a repertory and the Materia Medica.

However, Dr. Elmiger's alert and inquiring mind led him to realise that in some cases, once the suspected remedy "opened" the circuit by removing the blockage, any other substance could be paraded before the machine and would also register positive. The initial positive reading somehow falsified subsequent readings.

To explain this phenomenon, Dr. Elmiger reached back to the insights of Hahnemann and Hering and drew from his knowledge of Einstein's space-time continuum. He realised that we exist in at least four dimensions, three of space and one of time. Our lives are a continuum in time and space and we are affected by what has happened to us prior to now. Indeed, Einstein and quantum mechanics teaches that there is no past and future, just the now which encompasses all time.

Dr. Elmiger's genius has been to realise that when an event shocks the vital force and is not cured, then it can leave a trace or mark on the even and harmonious flow of that energy. This disturbance then leads to disease that is signalled to us in the form of morbid symptoms - mental, emotional and physical. Dr. Elmiger realised that, consistent with Hering's Law, the homeopath must treat each of these events in the exact reverse order of their occurrence.

It is hard to fully appreciate the simplicity, but profound importance, of this realisation. Homeopathic remedies, in Dr. Elmiger's conception are minute "time machines" which can travel back along the space-time continuum and correct various shocks. But to be done correctly and to have the desired result, this must be done in the exact reverse order of their happening. To do otherwise risks upsetting a cure and complicating the case.

In addition, Dr. Elmiger realised from his experience that the nosodes for the miasms were also capable, at sufficiently high potency, of correcting the genetic code of the patient and restoring true health. His experience led him to formulate a precise order for treatment of the miasms.

The simplicity and genius of Dr. Elmiger's work is based on a decade and a half of successful cases (often patients from some of the most renowned European homeopaths who had been treated continually for up to 20 years on the basis of the classical remedies and approach). This genius is evident to anyone who takes the time to read his book.

Dr. Elmiger's book speaks with passion and conviction and is well documented from his case files. Dr. Elmiger's work represents a renewal of homeopathy, in a manner that offers a clear and unencumbered yet profound means of cure. Just as Hahnemann pulled aside the curtains that obscured much of what we now know about the Law of Similars in his time, I am convinced that Dr. Elmiger's insights will manage to remove much confusion about the use of nosodes and the uncertainty about their proper use and effectiveness.

I am equally convinced that Dr. Elmiger's insights will make homeopathy more effective and enable it to form the basis of the energy medicine of the next century and beyond. While grounded firmly in the Law of Similars and the dynamics of potency, Dr. Elmiger's approach can truthfully be said to represent a new bio-energetic therapy in its own right. He refers to it as "sequential therapy". Were Hahnemann alive today, he would be the first to embrace this new advance and to use it enthusiastically.

Dr. Elmiger hopes to have an English translation of his discovery available soon. I know from my own brief experience with "sequential therapy" that it is a powerful healing approach, particularly in difficult, chronic cases where the vital force has been subjected to multiple shocks.

What has surprised me, in reading Dr. Elmiger's book and speaking to him, is the resistance that he has encountered from the homeopathic establishment in Europe. Given the resistance to Hahnemann's advances in homeopathy, which are widely accepted within homeopathy today, I would hope that there will be enough open minds in North America, during this period of renaissance of homeopathy, to give "sequential therapy" an objective review and trial when it is presented more fully.

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