The Significance of Susceptibility

Words: Dr Deborah OLENEV

The question of susceptibility is central to homeopathy. In Western medicine susceptibility is not a concept that is discussed much. Experts may attribute the various types of responses people have to viruses as dependent on viral load, genetics, pre-existing conditions, age or some other cause, but the word susceptibility does not seem to come up.

In homeopathy susceptibility is the first word that arises. It is that susceptibility to a particular pathogen, pharmaceutical drug, vaccination, or remedy, that is the hallmark of our uniqueness.

If we have no susceptibility to a substance then it will generally not harm us, whether administered in a crude form, in  vaccination, or drug, or encountered in nature as in the form of a virus, or bacteria, or in the form of a homeopathic remedy that has been potentised. Potentisation is the process by which homeopathic remedies are diluted and succussed repeatedly to reduce the harmful side-effects and augment the healing power of the substance.

Those who have low or no susceptibility to a certain substance, like the COVID-19 virus, can go through the epidemic or pandemic without getting sick.

On the other hand, people who are highly susceptible to a substance can get very sick, or even die from exposure to it, whether this exposure comes in the form of a vaccine, which is geared towards conferring immunity to the disease that the person is being vaccinated against, or from exposure to the naturally occurring virus.

The Long & Short Of It

For a highly susceptible person even a small amount of pathogen in the vaccine, whether in the ‘Iive’ or dead form, or sensitivity to the preservative used in the vaccine, can cause catastrophic outcomes.

The same person who is so susceptible to a virus that they would die from it if exposed naturally would have a high likelihood of also being harmed by the vaccine.

This, on the flipside, is why the hunt for, or the use of, a vaccine against the COVID-9 pandemic may not be the panacea that the media and medical experts are encouraging people to believe that it will be.

The question of susceptibility is not being entertained. In the same way that many children have disastrous responses to the vaccines they receive in the first years of life due to the fact that susceptibility is not taken into account; so the same catastrophic responses can be anticipated from a COVID-19 vaccine.

The safer course of action is to invite homeopathy back to the larger healthcare table in the US and around the world. Just the fact that homeopathy puts susceptibility squarely in the centre of the target; that the concept is a mystery to Western medicine makes homeopathy a guest at the table with an enormous potential to offer.

Western medicine appears to have a desire to keep on reinventing the wheel — always seeking the new, but has blinders on when it comes to learning from homeopathy. Homeopathy is just dismissed out of hand, or even worse, its existence is not even known by trained medical doctors.

An analogy would be sending a child to school to get educated in reading and spelling, but leaving the vowels out of the alphabet. Not teaching homeopathy to doctors as a prerequisite for graduation is an enormous tragedy — a failure that has had consequences that reverberate throughout society.

Teach Susceptibility In Medical Schools

Medical schools send doctors into the world to practice medicine, but they don’t teach them the basic concept of susceptibility. That’s like the letter ‘A’ of the alphabet being left out.

The vowel ‘E’ would be the ‘Law of Similars,’ This is the homeopathic law that states that you have to match the symptoms of the patient to a remedy that has produced similar symptoms in healthy people who have taken the remedy as part of a proving. The purpose of a proving is to determine what the substance’s therapeutic range is. By having this information we can match the symptoms of this remedy to a patient who has similar symptoms and have the confidence that it will initiate a healing response.

The vowel ‘I’ stands for the magic of the minimum dose. This is the least amount of a therapeutic substance that you can give to a patient to stimulate healing.

When administering a homeopathic remedy, the homeopath is just giving a drop of intelligence, a message in the form of a remedy that resonates with the ‘vital force,’ neutralising the disease and bringing the patient a step closer to health.

I have mentioned the term vital force several times in my writings. In Traditional Chinese Medicine [TCM] this could be considered chi or qi, or prana, in Sanskrit. It can also be viewed as the principle that animates the body and gives it life. Death would be the departure of that principle from the body. Sickness would be the derangement of that vital force.

We can go into deep spiritual conversations here and there could be many differences of opinion as to what this term really means and ‘how much’ it encompasses. Is the vital force analogous to the Atman, or in-dwelling God, the consciousness principal? Can it also possibly be called the Deathless part of ourselves that migrates from incarnation to incarnation? Here I diverge from the subject at hand.

Hahnemann’s Vision

My understanding of what Dr Samuel Hahnemann, MD, the founder of homeopathy, meant by the vital force is that force within us that maintains us in a state of harmony and freedom from illness when we are in good health, but when disturbed by sickness, it expresses the disturbance in the form of signs and symptoms.

Dr Hahnemann taught us that the homeopathic remedy acts first and foremost on that disturbed Vital force and when the message from the remedy matches in potency and vibration with the disturbance in the vital force then the disturbance is reversed; the vital force regains its harmony and the patient is restored to health.

These are very subtle concepts and the homeopathic remedies are very subtle energies. One of the great points of scepticism hurled against homeopathy by Western medicine is that the remedies are too small to have any effect. Sceptics argue that there is just nothing there; the doses are too immaterial. I hope that in the face of the minuteness of the COVID-19 virus this argument can be laid to rest.

As everyone in the world can now see, the thing with the greatest power to wreak the greatest havoc is the thing that is the tiniest. That microscopic virus has killed thousands of people and disrupted the world economy. I hope that Western medicine will no longer dismiss the little as being weak and without power and see that it is the greatest of powers. This is what we have harnessed in homeopathy, the power of the little.

Now back to our vowels.

The vowel ‘O’ stands for the power to observe without interfering. Allow the remedy to work, the healing response to unfold, observe the changes and only give a new dose when there is evidence that the current dose is relapsing, because you are seeing a return of symptoms that had been better for a while.

The vowel ‘U’ stands for understanding the direction of cure. How do we interpret the patient’s response to the remedy?

Here we are guided by Dr Constantine Hering’s Law of Cure:

  • Symptoms should move from above down
  • Symptoms should move from the inside of the body to the outside
  • Symptoms should move from more vital body systems to the less vital.

Symptoms should leave in the reverse order of appearance. This means that the symptoms that appeared more recently should be the first ones the remedy works on and those that have become firmly rooted due to being around for a longer time will be the last to get better.

And, sometimes ‘Y.’ I would like to cross out the word sometimes and put in the word always. The ‘Y’ really ought to be the vowel A, as it should come first. The ‘Y’ is god, or love, or creation, or intuition, or Atman, or the ‘Inner Teacher.

Prejudiced Theories

Western medicine bows down to science as though it were a god, but science like beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. In the words of Anais Nin, “We see the world as we are, not as it is.” We design our science to confirm our prejudices and theories. We accumulate facts to support our idea of reality. Another person with a different view of reality can come up with an equal number of facts to support their viewpoint. The subject and their point of view, preconceived notions, and prejudices will always influence the outcome and the conclusion drawn.

But the ‘Y’ — the indwelling god, the force that permeates the world and every entity in it — this is the force on which I, as a homeopath, rely on to make sure that I am not using the ego and analytical thought to guide my decisions and actions.

The ‘Pure Mind’ submerged in the Heart and not acting from the Head is the best way a human being has to approach the Truth. And, what is it that we are seeking when we are trying to heal someone? We are seeking the truth.

What is needed now, beyond prejudice, beyond preconceived notions, beyond the mistakes made by analytical thinking is to listen from the heart to the way the Divine is pointing to.

The ‘Y’ is the guiding principal that lights the way for practitioners of all therapies:

  • The Great Doctors of Western Medicine
  • The Great Homeopaths
  • The Great Shamans.

We have attained wisdom when we understand that the source of healing is when we transcend ourselves and sublimate our egos to a higher power. Then we act as instruments of the Divine Will that points the way to proceed to his, or her, humble servant.

Finally, the unifying point between all therapies is god. This only means that it doesn’t matter what modality you practice, because you will be shown how to treat your patients in the best possible way for the highest good.

May the Divine bless everyone and heal this world, the people, the animals and all things that breathe and do not breathe in it.

Dr DEBORAH OLENEV, CCH, RSHom [NA], is a Classical Homeopath based in Mountain View, California, US. She treats people from all over the world via phone and video conferencing. Dr Olenev has had a passion for homeopathy for nearly forty years and has been in private practice since 1991. She has a vast knowledge of homeopathic Materia Medica, and integrates homeopathy with herbal medicine too. She is the owner of First Aid Cream, where she teaches about and sells homeopathic first-aid creams. She has several years of experience treating autistic children and people of all ages for all manner of health conditions.

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