This is a great treatment for all sorts of infections and inflammations in the upper body. It is simple to do and you don't anything but some socks and some water... The wet sock treatment is best if repeated for three nights in a row, or as instructed.
Indications: Sore throat or any inflammation or infection of the throat, neck pain, ear infections, headaches, migraines, nasal congestion, upper respiratory infections, coughs, bronchitis, and sinus infections.
The news story that broke the other day about the sex and drug scandal involving a prominent Evangelical preacher in Colorado brought back memories of a late night television broadcast my wife and I watched some 20 years ago. We were fresh off the boat, so to speak, having just arrived in the US a week or two earlier. My wife had never set foot in America before and I hadn’t lived here for nearly a decade. So, as a way of (re-) acquainting ourselves with American culture, we were flipping through the channels one night, and came across a broadcast of a preacher histrionically sermonizing about faith, sin, redemption, and salvation. Part mesmerized, part repelled by his prancing and posturing, by the flow of tears and the howling, neither of us really knew what to make of it…
Not long after that, we recognized pictures of this same man, Jimmy Lee Swaggart, splashed across the front pages and nightly news broadcasts. Little did we know that he had been, up until that point, one of the most successful and powerful televangelists in the country. But, he had been caught repeatedly on film in the company of prostitutes. And although Swaggart weepingly confessed his sins and pledged to make things right with God, it was not enough to save his ministry.
The Swaggart episode was engineered by a former minister in his church who himself had been fired for an adulterous escapade and it had come on the heels of an even more lurid sex scandal in which fellow evangelist Jim Bakker was accused of paying hush money to quiet allegations of rape.
So, the news from Colorado got me thinking, “What is it with these guys?” What is it about people so sanctimonious in their pronouncements about the way people should and shouldn’t conduct themselves but who can’t keep to the straight and narrow in their own lives? How could it be that Ted Haggard, the disgraced Colorado preacher could publicly condemn homosexuality and be such an outspoken proponent of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, while hiring male prostitutes?
It is tempting to dismiss these wayward ministers as hypocrites, lumping them together with politicians, unscrupulous corporate executives and other favorite targets of popular contempt. But, there is more to this phenomenon than that.
Compensation is a concept that both homeopathy and psychology share. It is a mechanism by which a person conceals or counterbalances an internal state of being by developing a set of behaviors, attitudes and beliefs that apparently are very different. In fact, quite often these are the polar opposite.
It is easy to mistakenly assume that a highly compensated person truly embodies the overtly displayed behaviors or proclaimed beliefs without detecting the inner reality they are meant to conceal. He himself is often equally unaware. Compensation does not come about through conscious decision making, but is instead a subconscious strategy which all of us, to one extent of the other, employ to feel safer and function more smoothly in the world.
I recall a patient who was a strict vegan (a form of vegetarianism were no animal products, even milk or eggs, are eaten) and extremely devoted to animal rights causes. While her devotion to these beliefs was admirable, at the same time she expressed them with a discomforting strident adamancy. In the course of the consultation, the reason for that unyielding dedication was revealed when she described constantly recurring dreams of incredible violence where, for the most part, she was the perpetrator. Clearly, her lifestyle was a compensatory mechanism to keep in check her own brutality.
The study of homeopathic remedies often reveals various states of compensation. For instance, one of our very commonly used medicines is made from the coniferous tree Arbor Vitae, otherwise known as Thuja. The internal state of a person needing Thuja, like other members of the conifer family, is one of great weakness.
More specifically, it is experienced as a sense of hollowness and fragility, a brittleness that can easily fragment and shatter. On a psychological level, the fragmentation manifests as disconnectedness, leading to a feeling of isolation. In addition, one of the characteristics distinguishing Thuja from other conifers is a compulsion to hide their state. They experience their fragility, emptiness and disassociation as an innate, irreparable weakness and survival in the world demands it be covered up lest it be discovered.
A common compensatory strategy of a Thuja thus becomes to hide his fragility by being very rigid in the way he thinks while, a the same time, denying any urges or impulses that might reveal the true inner state. This can develop into a type of fanaticism or monomaniacal obsession. Regardless of the arena in which he is involved, be it religion, politics – or even homeopathy, a deep fear that the slightest deviancy from orthodoxy might fatally expose his own weakness, compels him to be unyieldingly dogmatic.
The Bakkers, Haggards and Swaggerts of the world are not truly hypocrites anymore than the rest of us. For whatever reason, their need for compensatory behavior is unusually strong, but it is doubtful that they made deliberate, conscious choices to hide their real selves through sermonizing and moralizing. The urge to preach, more than likely, was experienced as a compulsion, a ‘calling’ if you will. In their own language, one might say it was a calling from God to fight temptation and sin… And that is a very apt description.
Dr. Robert T. Cooper, an Irish physician born in 1844, was renowned both for his iconoclastic methods and his success in treating serious pathological conditions, especially cancer. A graduate of Trinity College in Dublin with a number of degrees that made him “one of the most qualified physicians of that period”1, Cooper established a practice in London, worked at the London Homeopathic Hospital and wrote a number of books and articles.
On March 22nd, Elizabeth Edwards announced that she was facing a recurrence of cancer. First diagnosed with breast cancer in the final weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign, she underwent several months of radiation and chemotherapy. This time it has spread to her bone and is termed ‘incurable’. Five days later, the White House announced that press secretary Tony Snow had a recurrence of cancer. Snow had his colon removed in 2005 and underwent six months of chemotherapy. Now the cancer has spread to his liver and he will begin chemotherapy again.
The other day, I had the opportunity to listen to an interview with Larry Dossey. I’m not sure how his work had escaped my notice all these years, but hearing him speak was certainly an enjoyable and reinforcing experience. Dossey has been an MD for 4 decades, was a battalion surgeon in Vietnam and chief of staff at a hospital in Dallas. He is also the author of a bunch of books and the chief proponent in the American conventional medical world of what he has termed the "nonlocal mind", that is, the concept that our awareness and our mind are not confined to our physical brain and body.
His story is similar to a number of others I have heard: he came across some data that seemed to contradict everything he knew about medicine and physical reality, and instead of dismissing it as flawed or bogus, he went about finding out whether it was valid or not.
The information he first came across was the result of a study conducted by South Korean researchers who created an experiment to determine the validity of the healing power of prayer. In it, a group of Korean women troubled by infertility were matched up with a person unknown to them in Canada. These pairs were divided into two groups, one where the Canadian was instructed to pray for their Korean partner to become pregnant, and the other where the Canadian was instructed to not pray for the partner.
What shocked Dossey, and paved the way for a dramatic shift in his view of medicine (and reality, in general) was the fact that there was a clear statistical difference in the pregnancy rate between the two groups.
Further studies showed that the religious affiliation of the participants – both the ‘prayers’ and the ‘prayees’ – happens to be. Whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, no matter what God or how they pray – all these factors make no difference. What is critical is the performance of some form of ritual that signifies one person’s intent that another be healed.
This often overlooked aspect of healing has been recognized for centuries in other traditions of medicine and is now, thanks to Dossey and other likeminded allopathic medical practitioners, only slowly gaining some recognition in the modern medical world.
This phenomenon brings to mind the science of Radionics, a form of distance healing created and popularized around the turn of the last century. It was the invention of a man named Albert Abrams, who made it into a very successful enterprise, and was further developed by a number of disciples some of whom were later persecuted and jailed because of their activities.
In Radionics, a “signature”, that is, a substance unique to a person, such as a drop of blood or a few strands of hair, is used as a focus to determine the health status of that individual and to heal them. This can be performed no matter where the person may actually physically be at the time.
Both the diagnosis and treatment are conducted by a device, a Radionics machine, onto which the signatures are placed. Curiously, this device is very simple electrical circuit – a circuit that may or not even be functional. It doesn’t use electricity or any other external form of energy (aside from, one might presume that of the practitioner and the subject).
Compared to a healthy person, a sick person will show disturbed or abnormal patterns of energy. These patterns or frequencies are picked up by the Radionics machine, and then categorized into various patterns that define what the problem or illness is.
Having made a diagnosis of sorts, the treatment is carried out by ‘broadcasting’ healing patterns of energy to the patient. This too, is carried out a Radionics device – either the same or a different machine from the one used to make the diagnosis.
One very interesting aspect is the fact that Radionics practitioners often used ‘rates’ to define and cure illness. Anticipating the modern computer age to a certain degree, rates are series of numbers that are used to categorize a disease and to perform the broadcast.
Although I am not involved with nor very studied in Radionics per se, over the years I have been exposed to and used various forms of treatment that rely on similar concepts. And it has become absolutely clear to me that the efficacy of these treatments - and make no mistake about it, sometimes miraculous cures have occurred with them – is dependent on the focus and intent of the practitioner.
These machines are merely conduits for that intent and focus, just as are acupuncture needles and the hands placed on a person during massage, chiropractic, Reiki or any form of bodywork. For that matter, it seems no different than the focus and intent that a physician, nurse or homeopath gives while interacting with a patient.
Sometimes it is useful to codify this into a ritual, a prayer or some other act, that brings us back from the mundane thoughts of daily life, brings our mind into a sharper focus, and distills or intensifies our true intent. For every person, this ritual may differ, but in the end, it boils down to the simple act of caring.