A woman we shall call Sarah first came to see me as a patient with something of an unusual complaint. Several years earlier she started developing an array of unusual symptoms: amongst other things, her heart rate had increased to around 120 beats per minute, her body temperature had increased, she began to lose weight and her hair started flattening out. What was curious was the fact that she could pinpoint the day when her symptoms began to appear and this led her to explore what could have changed around that time. It led her to discover that this was the day that the store underneath her apartment had installed a Wifi network. Her sensitivities to these manmade electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) although not ‘typical’, are certainly not unique either. In my own practice, I have come across a number of people with similar complaints and there are entire communities in remote parts of the country established as EMF free zones for just such people.
Inflammation
Homeopathy anti-inflammatory remedies provide perhaps the most sophisticated and specific form of inflammation treatment. Homeopathic anti inflammation medicine such as the nightshade Belladonna, Apis mellifica derived from the honeybee and Arnica Montana, a member of the sunflower family, are all widely used as homeopathic treatments for inflammation in the body.
The Dirt on Dirty Electricity
Up until recently, the term ‘Dirty Electricity” evoked in me images of the smoke stacks from coal fired power plants, open pit mines and mazes of huge erector-set like structures stringing power lines across the countryside. But the overt pollution of air, water and land resulting from the generation of electricity is only one meaning of the term. The other meaning of ‘Dirty Electricity’, though, specifically refers to one type of electromagnetic frequency called ‘high-frequency voltage transients’. A less visible is a form of pollution that does not appear on the agenda of the environmental movement hardly at all, it may turn out to be just as significant a form of pollution.
Thyroid Dysfunction
One of the most common clinical problems I seein my practice is thyroid dysfunction. Nearly twenty years ago, while working in Sri Lanka, it was common to see people, the great majority of them women, walking about with huge lumps - some the size of a tennis ball, some closer to a bowling ball - under their chins. These goitres, or enlarged thyroid glands, were for the most part a result of malnutrition, specifically a lack of iodine in the diet.
At the time I was working as an acupuncturist in a rural clinic, and it was possible to achieve considerable success in treating this condition through nutritional advice and acupuncture. The thyroid problems I see today in this country, though, are of a different sort. Rarely are they caused by a simple iodine deficiency.
What's Going Through Your Head?
It wasn’t that long ago that the idiom ‘wired society’ came into being. It referred to the fact that ongoing technological advances in the field of communications, from telephones to the internet to satellites, had joined us all together, allowing for instant access to people and information. Today, wired is quite passé¢, so 20th century, if you will. We have become a wireless society. Sometimes, in the hills of Vermont, amongst which I live, it is not so apparent how wireless the society has become. Cell phone reception is spotty in and around our house and we have not felt a need to use Bluetooth or have a wireless computer network. In fact, I’ve resisted it. So have any number of cantankerous Vermonters – private landowners, interested citizens and various municipal bodies – remained resistant to the lure of upgraded cellular connectivity and the lucre of the telecommunications industry in exchange for dotting the landscape with towers.