Behind every belief, statement, and opinion about human anatomy, physiology, health, and disease there is a model. Whether it’s conscious or not, there is always some explanatory model underpinning that expression. Science is built on modelling that must pass the test of trial and error which is why for the most part medical practice is very unscientific. My intent here is not to attack modern medicine but rather to tease out the models that underlie its practice.

I’m going to select the cardio-vascular system because this was the subject of a talk I gave a few weeks ago and so it’s been in my mind. So let’s start modelling…

The Central Heating System Model

I believe that when most people think about the cardio-vascular system, they think about it in terms of this analogy where you have three components:

-          A pump (the heart) which pumps

-          fluid (the blood) through a return network of

-          closed channels or pipes (the blood vessels)

This isn’t such a bad model as a first order approximation. It explains the importance of blood pressure, and predicts the way that blood pressure is directly related to the diameter of the vessels and the total length of the vessels. It accounts for problems from blockages (embolisms and thrombosis) and leaks (aneurisms or haemorrhages). If you think of the skin, the limbs and the extremities as radiators you can see how the blood keeps us warm.

I’m convinced that this is where the lipid hypothesis gets its appeal. You can just imagine those “bad” fats clogging up the “pipes” like items of rubbish finding their way into our radiators.

However, upon closer examination certain cracks begin to appear:

-          the pipes aren’t fixed (they expand and contract with each pulse of blood)

-          the system is not closed – fluids are being filtered out and are leaking in at all times

-          the heart is not optimally placed to act as a filter (it’s centrally located, about two thirds of the way up the “pipes”)

The CHS with Flexible Hose Pipe Model

This might represent a second order model to account for the fact that the arteries are (or at least should be) flexible enough to “help” each pulse of blood. Now we see that the pumping action of the heart is actually distributed throughout the first half of the “pipes” so it does not have to do all the work on its own. In this way the smooth muscle in the arteries is like an “extension” of the myocardium. This model allows us to contemplate the possibility of external agents that might assist in this artery expansion (nitroglycerine, arginine, beetroot…)

This model is better than the first one but it’s still missing a few points…  Two examples:

-          how does the artery wall know when to expand and when to contract?

-          how does the system balance the amount of fluid in the “pipes”

As anyone who has studied control theory can testify we are missing a (or more correctly multiple) negative feedback loop (s).  So here’s the third model:

The CHS with FHP and Negative Feedback Loops Model

This allows for the various hormonal loops involved in blood volume and blood pressure control (aldosterone, renin, etc..), and the mechanism of thirst, and points to the importance of the endothelium in signaling arterial wall expansion and contraction.

At this stage we might be feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves because we’ve pretty much accounted for everything we can see – or have we…? Well, actually there are a couple of things still missing – for example, the influence of the CNS and the ANS (OK we can account for this with another set of feedback loops).

But perhaps the biggest factor still missing is the fact that the blood is not just a simple fluid but a non-Newtonian fluid – which is just a fancy way of saying that it’s made up of living cells and is capable of being unpredictable (a.k.a. “non-linear”). We also know that the endothelium is “speaking” to the blood and that the conversation is a two way process so we need also another feedback loop.

Now that we’ve reminded ourselves that blood is living tissue we can work backwards and forwards to ask the question: where do these cells originate and where do they end up? This brings us to the bone marrow and the spleen (not to mention all the inputs the lymph tissue and thymus have in the maturation of WBCs). Now let’s include the digestive tract and the input of nutrients via the liver and the lymph ; and add in the exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide in the lungs.

Returning to the subject of signaling let’s remember that the heart produces a (relatively) massive electro-magnetic pulse with every beat. I’m willing to bet that this is not just a simple coincidental outcome of its pumping action; that everything in the body has multiple functions; and that all of these functions cooperate dynamically and instantaneously.

So I’m going to take a leap of faith and state that the heart establishes a field of electromagnetic waves that communicate with every cell in the body. In other words the heart is actually a master communicator – listening to the needs of every cell in the same way that a mother knows when her babies need feeding. This allows us to incorporate the concept of heart rate variability where a (healthy) heart seems to (seamlessly and smoothly) adapt to the needs of the body by subtly varying the strength and frequency of every next beat.

So we could say that, while we still have the three primary anatomical components in our system (heart, blood and blood vessels), we’ve now added the kidneys, the liver, the lymph, the GIT, the ANS/CNS, the endocrine system, the bone marrow, the spleen, the lungs and if you include the recipients of blood-borne oxygen, every cell in the body.

What are we going to call this next model? The “CHS with FHP and a NFL and Live Blood and the Heart-As-Master-Communicator” Model? I give up. Why don’t we just call it a sub-system within a living system which is totally integrated with every other cell, tissue, and organ in the host?  By the way this is what homeostasis actually means although few actually admit to the totality of this definition.

Now I’m really feeling satisfied with myself but, before I get too carried away, I have a funny feeling that something is missing…

I am reminded of a study which observed a significant difference in heart disease between two towns in the USA (OK I know observational studies don’t demonstrate “proof” of causation but indulge me a little further…) Both towns had similarity in their diets, environmental conditions and profiles for all the known risk factors for CV disease.

One town, however, was a very tightly knit community with regular attendance at mass and frequent social interaction ; whereas the other was much more typical of the isolation of modern life – without much overt spiritual or community activity. The people living in the latter town experienced approximately 20% more cardio-vascular disease…

Yes, you’ve guessed it. I want to change my model again. Now it looks like the cardio-vascular system is a subsystem not only communicating with every other part of the body but also in some way connected with the community in which the person lives.

We also know that living in cities where air pollution is higher is another risk factor for CV disease. This brings me immediately to smoking (active or passive) which as we know has a hugely negative impact.

I’m intimidated by even the thought of coming up with a name to encompass this so I’ll stick to my living system sub-system concept but add in extra, environmental or hierarchical systems that also impose an influence – society and the environment.

Starting at the heart as a central organ we are going down to cellular levels, across to other organs, and upwards to the body as a whole, to the person inhabiting that body, and finally to the community and the environment which that person lives in.

If you are a little intimidated by the complexity of all of this, you are right to feel that way because in terms of our A -> B linear thinking it’s impossibly complex. That’s why our modern medicine takes short cuts – the complete picture is just too complicated. I don’t take issue with the need to simplify; if we didn’t, we’d be paralysed by the enormity of it all – if we tried to approach this traditionally.

That’s where systems theory comes in. We don’t need to understand the minutiae of everything because systems theory will give us guidelines about how and where to approach the system based on intelligent guesswork and trial and error (and hopefully much more trial than error).

I’m sure some of you can point to factors I have not mentioned and this makes my point even more forcefully because the system model is expandable without the need for overly complex analysis.  All I have to do is estimate what level of influence these new factors have on the system as a whole rather than trying to figure out exactly how they interact with everything in the model already.

Nature does not waste precious resources and this is why signalling always precedes and predetermines action and reaction. This is nothing new to those who have studied naturopathy, where one of the most fundamental principles is supremacy of the terrain. However, until now it has been assumed at least in mainstream medicine that the terrain is exclusively biochemical but this paradigm now seems to be making way for a wider perspective.

The cracks have been appearing rapidly over the past decades – examples listed in no particular order and in no attempt  to be comprehensive:

-    the many weird and quirky phenomena thrown up by quantum physics
-    the rise in the study into and recognition of the importance of epigenetics
-    extensive research into the emotional and social influences on health
-    ground-breaking research into “para-normal” influences on reality

Words like “signalling” and “response to environmental influences” have become commonplace. My key message here is that this signalling and these stimuli and responses are not confined to the world of biochemistry but use other pathways as well.

These other pathways are most interesting to us as practitioners because they offer the possibility to influence affairs in quiet and apparently magical ways. The conversations we seek to participate in happen in ways which we cannot fully comprehend in comparison with the relatively safe world of chemistry. Clearly electro-magnetism plays a part but beyond this is a vista of quantum signalling and information flows for which there are no comprehensive models or terminology to describe.

Actually I’m not so sure how safe or concrete the world of chemical action and reaction is in any case. It’s been approximately a century since any physicist thought of electrons as little billiard balls spinning around a bigger, central ball. Their current status seems to more like waveform clouds of energy constantly looking for a home to call their own.

Coming back to the clinic and the patients who fall prey to acute, infectious diseases – what can this new arena of play offer them? Well, firstly it underlines once again the primacy of the terrain. It’s comforting to know that if our homes are securely defended not even the most virulent invaders will waste energy in an attack. The moment I wrote this last sentence I’m struck by how limiting it is in its vision.

Whether knowledge can translate in to constructive action is dependent on the patient’s emotional condition, social influences, lifestyle habits (ie: socially acceptable addictions), and miasmatic preponderance. More correctly, it depends how willing or able he or she is to make the changes.

Another term for the terrain is the field and this is my cue to reintroduce the concept of information fields. What I like about this concept is that it gives me a methodology for tracing and predicting likely action and reaction even though I don’t necessarily know how that action and reaction take place. The domain (or domains) where the signalling takes place seems to follow some simple rules:

-    Nature is dynamic:  a vacuum where nothing happens is not an option – there must always be an outcome but every outcome leads to another like an endless merry-go-round

-    Identity or order is built from the top down and the bottom up simultaneously and the clearer the identity the more it maintains health – but:

-    This identity or order is never completely exclusive, it fits above and below, inside and outside, in terms of its component parts and the greater systems to which it belongs

-    Every conversation takes place instantly and seems to involve the participation of all interested parties and at every moment it appears that every voice or vibration is integrated at once without delay

-    The conversation is both separate when viewed at any one moment and continuous in the sense that it’s impossible to separate those different moments when a system’s development is traced through different outcomes

-    Nature is both spatially separate and one at the same time – the conversations that seem to take place between separate entities can just as validly be considered as a higher order system (ie: nature) simply talking to itself

-    There is no linear causation path from one unit acting exclusively on another action that produces a reaction but rather a circular dance of simultaneous inputs each chattering with everyone else

-    No action is initiated and hence no outcome possible unless the system “accepts” that there is a reasonable chance of success – the field decides rather than any individual protagonist

-    Nature embraces both order and chaos as agents of change and seems to have no preference overall for one or the other – and in fact it seems that:

-    Time dictates that all order must (when viewed from its own perspective) dissolve into disorder at some stage to make way for change once again (all empires collapse)

-    Finally, intelligence appears to be embedded everywhere, and therefore self-learning, adaption and development of a “greater” identity is possible (at least temporarily)

What does this tell us about infections?

-    All infections are opportunistic

-    The host body somehow “agrees” to the battle (which will result in either a learning experience or dissolution)

-    The outcome is the cumulative result of all internal and external inputs (biochemical, electromagnetic, informational etc..)

Let’s go over some examples of opportunistic threats and the signalling factors that influence whether they arise or not:

-    The herpes simplex virus has to be one of the most common and “in-your-face” examples. Our viral friend plays possum until it detects a drop in immune capability or a concomitant, biochemical imbalance whence it springs back into life. The result can be awkward, even socially embarrassing cold sores if it happens in your lips but graver consequences should it find its way into a vital organ such as the brain.

-    Cholera is recognised as one of the most dangerous infectious diseases and yet  I remember reading in the Townsend Letter some years ago about a research experiment carried out prior to the Second World War where a number of marines were orally exposed to a bacterium that causes cholera. Setting aside for the moment the ethics of this experiment, it is interesting to note that none of them succumbed to the disease. Fortunately their terrain was sufficiently robust that none of them fell ill. The obvious conclusion drawn was that exposure does not equal infection.

-    It seems that all of us – based on the evidence of autopsies – develop pre-cancerous or benign lesions over the course of a lifetime.  We know that these lesions are only a couple of steps away from full-blown cancer. What determines whether these potential cancers became invasive to local tissue or not? In my opinion the answer is in signalling. If the immune system and all other supporting and inter-related systems in the body remain sufficiently robust, the pre-cancerous entities never receive the “go-ahead” to proceed.

However, as happens in many cases when a triggering factor (typically an emotional upset) causes the immune system and its allies to drop the collective guard, the cancer sees a window of opportunity to launch an attack and it does so moving onto the next stage.

We fool ourselves into thinking that we are each a single, unique individual defined by the separateness signalled by our five senses. Nature is far more promiscuous than that. We share the space our bodies inhabit with micro-organisms that outnumber us 10 to 1. Our single most powerful ally is the ability of this community to signal health and vigour to all its bedfellows (the welcome ones and the not-so welcome ones).

It is sobering to reflect that the friendly lactobacilli in our gut are more “us” than our own cells that turn precancerous. Nature abhors a vacuum. We either look after the physical terrain over which we have been granted guardianship or nature returns it to chaos. We are the result of the entirety of internal and external inputs we experience or engage.

To do nothing in life seems not to be an option:  we either remain part of the universal dance or we return to dust with untimely haste.  That participation is ultimately an informational exchange. Our role seems to be to add greater value to the whole. My only question is – what is the “whole”? I’m pretty sure it exists but I just can’t say where it ends….

Today is the world’s first ever EMR Action Day! Pass on the word.

Below is a copy of the mission statement, from www.EMRActionDay.org, which I recommend everyone to read (or listen to – via the audio which is only 5 minutes in length) immediately.

It has been put together through a close and extended process of collaboration. This is a statement of intent prepared by activists on at least four continents, i.e., Europe, North America, South America and Africa.

I was just one of the many people participating in the preparation of this statement, and the final decisions of what to include or exclude, and how to phrase it, were made by consensus within the group. (Our regular readers will probably notice a few identifiable parts that I had my hand in, such as the living systems theme – which others also wished to emphasize; a defense I made of keeping in a mention of the EMF-metal link; and the paragraph about nuclear radiation, which I introduced and defended, although I would have worded that part even more strongly than the consensus decided, in relation to nuclear power plants). The final statement became a wonderful encapsulation of the common ground between many talented and devoted activists.

Some had argued for a narrower vision (e.g. focusing on campaigning against ‘smart’ grids – one of the immediate serious concerns), but most, including me (in true systems theory fashion!), advocated a wider vision and encompassing perspective – one that could help unite the efforts of people on all the different continents and all of their many initiatives.

Here, too, you can alternatively simply listen to an audio version which I have prepared:

EMRActionDay-MissionStatement

_______________________

Worldwide EMR Action Day aligns with Earth Day 2012 to protect the biological integrity of the natural world and all its inhabitants against unnatural Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR).  With this endeavour, people from around the planet join together to reduce harm from EMR and create a healthier life for all.

Man-made EMR is the only hazard that reaches every square centimetre of Earth’s surface at every moment, harming people, animals, insects and plant life. Electromagnetic pollution has been imposed upon us by military and industrial interests, with devastating health, environmental and social consequences.  From microwave (MW) and radio-frequency (RF) radiation to extremely low frequency (ELF) fields, sources include:

• so-called ‘smart’ utility grids, meters and appliances
• wireless internet (wi-fi), wi-max and their infrastructures
• mobile phones and their antenna infrastructure on masts, rooftops and in disguised structures
• cordless phones and their bases
• microwave oven leakage
• baby monitors and children’s RF-related toys
• RF medical devices
• RFID-embedded chips in people, animals, consumer products, and identity and credit cards
• direct-energy and other EM weaponry
• TV, radio and satellite broadcasts
• radar and sonar
• the electrical power grid, appliances and broadband over power lines (BPL)
• fluorescent lights, including compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs)

While some man-made EMR sources are falsely marketed as ‘green’, they all independently produce adverse biological and health effects. The effects markedly worsen with prolonged exposure or when combined with additional EMR sources, chemical toxicants or metals. MW radiation intensities in urban areas can be over a trillion times higher than natural background levels.

All life is electromagnetic in function. From the symbiotic balance of wildlife ecosystems to the health of our internal cells and organs – especially the brain and heart – living systems depend on undisturbed electrical signaling processes. All creatures derive a sense of wellbeing from the Earth’s own Schumann Resonances and other natural fields, which have now been overwhelmed by man-made EMR.

Scientists and experts in policy and law, examining thousands of research studies, warn of immediate and long-term hazards and call for minimised exposures.  EMR Action Day provides support and information on sources, effects and solutions to communities and individuals in need.

Harmful EMR also includes ionising radiation from nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. We urge reduced exposures to all such sources including medical tests, treatments and wastes.

EMR Action Day proposes new choices for safer and lower energy consumption: hard-wiring and fibre-optics in homes, schools and workplaces; shielding materials; and safe White Zones and other EMR-free solutions. We engage people in minimising EMR exposures and reconnecting with their own natural biorhythms. By our judicial, legislative, media, artistic and other creative endeavours, we act to free humankind, defend public safety and restore electromagnetic harmony to the Earth.

Our focus is on solutions that benefit us all.

Let’s take a brief look at key toxins. What are they? How do we identify or measure them?

On request from some of our readers, I have created here an audio recording of this article, which – at only 12 minutes long – you can listen to while commuting, or play in the background like the radio while you are doing something else:

Blog20apr2012-KeyToxins

Oh, and please share comments below about whether you prefer having access to the written or the audio version, for the future, so that we can connect with you in the way that suits you best. . .

Tomorrow, 21^st April, deliberately timed to coincide with Earth Day, is the world’s first ever EMR Action Day!

Join us in switching off all wireless radiation for 24 hours, to allow us and the Earth a rest from the continuous presence of a blanket of microwave radiation.

And please do attend your nearest Earth Day gatherings and share information with them about EMR Action Day, as Earth Day has been sadly hijacked by the wireless telecommunications industry talking about a “mobilized earth”. Earth Day activists urgently need to be educated about the proliferation of electromagnetic fields / radiation (EMFs / EMR) and their health and environmental effects – and the existence of easy solutions in terms of alternatives – such as simple fibre-optics. It’s time to stop this soul-destroying (and “green-washing”) overpowering of genuine environmental and health concerns through allowing people to blur them with commercial interests of industry!

I apologise for our absence of blogs lately. Kevin and I have been devoting a lot of our energy and time to gearing up to teach our next FCT Graduate Programme, and we’re putting ourselves under a deadline to get it up and running with a range of dramatically new and exciting material and events.

Let’s dive into this subject of “key toxins”, starting with this example. What does Field Control Therapy (FCT) tell us about electromagnetic fields?

It tells us a lot. First of all, once you understand that the human body is primarily a quantum electrical system, then it makes complete sense that our electrical environment is able to impact our physiology as a key health variable.

Secondly, FCT offers a uniquely encompassing (via systems science) AND yet also focused (via decision science) perspective on a politically, socially and academically eyebrow-raising radical notion which I refer to as “Disease Causation”.

In short, we argue that if you just stubbed your toe against something, it is because there is something there for you to stub your toe against, such as a brick wall!

Simple as that logic is, this type of talk does appear to surprise many of the otherwise intelligent people who fill the conventional AND alternative medical journals with a constant chit-chat about disease mechanisms yet hardly a peep about Causes.

To quote Aristophanes (from another context), good medicine, whether conventional or alternative, does not consist of “learned prattle”. . . If you stubbed your toe against a wall, the single most important thing you need to do is to acknowledge the involvement of the wall!

You can study the mechanisms of cellular damage – and even repair – in your toe to your heart’s content, and till the cows come home – and describe it in the most technical terminology – yet fail to pay any attention to the wall. That’s what I’m referring to as learned prattle – such as pretending that you understand something by calling it “Multiple Sclerosis” or “Motor Neuron Disease”, or let’s say “Painful Toe Syndrome”, and publishing endless statistics and other data about it, wasting people’s taxes on research describing mechanisms of toe damage, when in reality you have no clue what its origin is and have no explanation for Disease Causation.

In the example of the stubbed toe, unless you recognize that you just walked into a brick wall:

1. How will you prevent walking into future brickwalls – either the same wall or others like it?
2. How will you understand what has caused your toe pain, to give the most appropriate response to that pain, and, just as importantly, avoid wasting money and time on medical treatments for your toe, often with side effects of their own, which are based on other theories that have nothing to do with brickwalls?

In short, in FCT we look at (and teach) the whole gamut of primary and secondary causes of disease, while at the same time concentrating our resources on what Savely Yurkovsky, MD, founder of FCT, calls the category of “key toxins” – and the scientific tools for how to identify which are the key toxins. These are the key “brickwall” factors which stand out.

Choosing which they are is not a matter of speculation or personal opinion. The point is not, “Which toxins would YOU or I or HE or SHE want to think are the key ones?” It’s a calling to put aside our preconceptions and go where the science leads us.

Key toxins exist at each of the various levels:

• our whole species
• a particular region
• a particular town
• a particular family
• an individual person
• an individual organ or tissue

The key toxins at each of these levels may often overlap, but may be different at each level. On our courses we teach or review the tools to investigate and analyze which are the key toxins at each of these levels.

In the current age, when looking at chronic diseases of any type, the following two factors can be considered the two greatest “key toxins” of all, speaking generally at the level of our species at this juncture in our evolution:

1. Heavy metals, especially mercury
2. EMFs from modern manmade technologies

These two would be followed by other key toxins of note to keep an eye on, too, such as radioactive toxins, lead and herbicides.

The scientific tools of measure are complex and so I won’t cover them in depth here – we are planning to run the world’s first ever (that we know) entire medical training programme explicitly on this subject (Disease Causation). In short, variables which influence that equation include not only the degree of cellular toxicity of a particular toxin (which involves a close review of toxicology research), but also its prevalence in terms of exposures (i.e., how saturated has an environment become with a given toxin?), and then on the level of individual people or individual organs there are also, of course, variations. Yes, certain fairly sweeping generalizations can be made at the level of our whole species, and mercury and EMFs – as shown above – currently top that list for all of us internationally, even though some individual regions, people or organs may be succumbing to other key toxins more than these.

Consequently, earlier this year I had an idea: I wonder if anyone has created an international awareness day for mercury or EMFs? I felt that each of these two factors deserves one. Not only are they key lynchpins of Disease Causation in modern populations, but they are also hugely neglected ones in mainstream consciousness – and I am certain this will change in time – but I would like to help accelerate, if I can, that process of raising awareness of these two factors.

I discovered that nobody, to my knowledge, had created a global awareness day for either of these two factors before. So I decided to team up with colleagues and make them happen.

I phoned a colleague in the IAOMT and started by making plans for a Mercury Amalgam Awareness Day (or, perhaps, Week). I will share more details about this in time, when we get it organised. The wheels are already in motion for that!

Some time later, I then wrote to a colleague to find out if anyone had done a day like this for EMFs as well. I discovered that, on exactly the same week I had written to him, an EMF activist in California had just suggested an EMR Action Day and had already written a draft proposal and sent it out to colleagues. Talk about synchronicity of thinking! Or, rather, an idea whose time has come! So I offered my help, and others quickly offered theirs too, and within a few days, we had a thriving community of EMF activists all round the world all chipping in to prepare for this. I have been thrilled and humbled to discover that the international network of EMF activists is larger than I had thought.

It is early days still, and there is lots more to organise, but EMR Action Day has become a reality, and we are launching it this week. I will send more details in a separate blog. This will be the first of many activities planned, and not only once a year but also in between. They (i.e., the network of activists, many of whom have been contributing as a collective of concerned volunteers) have set up a website already, although it’s still in its early days: www.EMRActionDay.org

The way I look at it, this is an easy opportunity for us to make a difference to the people we love and the world we live in. It is possible that supporting EMR Action Day, and later Mercury Amalgam Awareness Day too, may be one of the most important things each of us can do all year.

There is one thing that can change the world, and enable us to put a stop to the degradation of our health and environment through toxicity and EMF pollution, and that is the grass-roots spread of awareness from individual to individual, all round the planet, so that, motivated out of love or friendship or even just goodwill, we feel the imperative – and perhaps one of the most important ones of our generation – to pass the word on about action days such as these, and all the important information and initiatives that are being bundled into them. Ideas and suggestions are also very welcome!

(By the way, I also wanted to mention that my toe is, in fact, fine, and was not really stubbed – in case you were wondering!)

Few would argue that medicine is an exact science. The complexity inherent in nature mitigates against simple, predictable cause and effect and the trouble with a term like “the cure” is how simple and absolute it is.

There are some valid uses of the term “the cure” in medicine. For instance, if one accepts that coeliac disease is an auto-immune condition caused by gluten, then avoidance of gluten can be considered the cure to coeliac disease. But this example of pure logic is rare in our profession. Anyway, how often would you see a patient who had only coeliac disease without other health complications?

Implied in the term “the cure” is that whatever we profess to do which creates the “cure” is going to be infinitely repeatable regardless of all other factors. For this reason alone, use of the term is flawed.

The error is compounded when we speak of chronic disease. Chronic disease is a not primarily a disease of the individual – it’s a disease of society. Society expects you to live according to certain norms and when those norms militate against your health, the result is chronic disease. Those norms include standard of care medical practice, standard diets, standard recreational drugs and standard lifestyle practice.

So the individual with the disease must decide to change his or her behaviour in such a way that it will no longer fit into the normality they have spent a lifetime fitting into. This move has nothing to do with any medical therapy as such. It is simply a life-saving action on the part of the patient and a very brave one at that.

Maybe if we were to change all those aspects of society which contribute to our chronic diseases: ruinous diets, recreational drugs, exposure to excess EMFs, pathological stress, iatrogenic interventions, etc… etc… Maybe then we could talk about “the cure”…

Another problem with using the term “the cure” in medicine is the subjectivity inherent in all forms of medical practice – conventional or alternative. Much as many would like to isolate and remove the terms placebo or nocebo from the clinic, they always reappear the moment a practitioner and a patient get together.

So for any given medical therapy or even paradigm no two clinicians will ever act or react in exactly the same way ; and equally so, no two patients will ever act and react in the same way.

But the expression “the cure” does not tolerate this level of diversity. It expects the same output from the same input no matter what; no matter who is delivering the input to no matter whom.

Obviously we could talk of a case that is cured. We could even talk of the curability of a disease, at least in relative terms. But the moment we move into the world of the absolute we are doomed. We can never hope to live up to the expectation.

I’m not sure whether that is a good or bad thing. Part of me loves to have a world where mystery and art are as important as science and logic.

“If you love somebody, set them free” (Sting)

“Life has its own ways. The moment you start managing everything, you spoil. Allow life its freedom …Don’t take the criterion from others about what is true and what is not true; these are the teachers that have been spoiling all of humanity. They tell you how to walk – which leg first and which leg second, and if you put them in some other order you are a sinner.” (Osho, “The Philosophical Frog and the Centipede”)

I have heard it said that freedom, as a value, is more important than any other, and more important even than love, because when freedom is lost, so is everything else.

Today I’ll explore this notion from a few angles. Is freedom really the highest value that there is? I wonder what you, our readers, think about this?

I’ll look at a range of topics including: an 8th tenet of medicine we are adding to the previous list of 7; Dr Yurkovsky’s emphasis on evolutionary principles; how medicine needs to approach human physiology; the future of feminism; an anecdote about a “free” school; the trouble with Plato’s “Utopia”; and a look at some of the highly unusual ways Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi sought to stand up for freedom as a core value – unlike most of the bland leaders in the world today.

Do our world leaders – and our doctors – truly understand what the concept of freedom means and how it relates to their politics and their medicine? Many of them may give lip service to words like freedom, but that does not mean they are acting accordingly. In medicine, this goes far, far deeper than just the freedom to practise a therapy; it has huge implications also for how to practise medicine – and politics – in such a way that the autonomy of each patient and each citizen – and human physiology itself – is profoundly respected. If this were acted upon, the entire face of politics and medicine in the world today would have to be utterly and comprehensively transformed.

I suspect that freedom is closely interrelated with integrity, too, at source, because allowing the untrammelled freedom of others, and of life, is often a part of what it means to be or act in integrity. Perhaps freedom is a central concept, and integrity part of the mode of being and action which respects it? Frequently we lose our integrity when impeding freedom in some way.

Health and Life

Our main focus in this blog is health. Looking a bit deeper, let’s consider why. Is health an end in itself? I don’t believe so. I think of health as one of the most important foundations of life. So our aim is to protect health in order to sustain life. Thus, we focus on health because of life. Here is a way I found recently to try and express this:

A) HEALTH

“Protect health”
Health is required to sustain life.

Our related focus is on understanding and applying the following to problems where urgent development is needed:

1. Field Control Therapy
2. The Science of Disease Causation

B) LIFE

“Allow life”
Life, like a garden, has its own ways and goals;
all we can do is remove obstacles and cultivate the conditions which allow it to flourish.

Our related focus is on understanding and applying the following to problems where urgent development is needed:

3. Living Together
4. Living Consciously

Evolutionary principles, FCT and what freedom means to medicine

Savely Yurkovsky, M.D., introduced yet another important fresh facet of Field Control Therapy (FCT), his medical system, at his seminar last year: evolutionary principles.

He observed that every system, living and non-living, has certain requirements for not only its survival but also for its optimal function. It is thus our job, as healthcare professionals, to understand and respect these core parameters. It is not our purpose to imagine that the human body is limitless and that our patients can achieve anything they desire provided they follow the book, “The Secret” (insofar as it may contain claims that you are limitless, can have whatever you want if you manifest it in the right way, etc. . . ); however useful that book might or might not be in other applications, when it comes to medicine, this is not a sensible strategy, because it does not take account of evolutionary principles!

This relates to system properties – that key area of systems science which we regularly refer to as a basis for sound medicine.

For example, a tiger cannot thrive if it tries to live in an ocean – speaking in systems terms, this would be trying to sustain a life beyond its design parameters. This is, of course, a humbling notion, and so the human ego, which strives to be as powerful as possible, may not like to admit this!

Likewise, a motorcycle is not designed to fly long distances, and a human being is not designed to cope well with, for example, mercury toxicity. Maybe humans will adapt to develop more efficient mercury detoxification mechanisms in another few tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but at this point in our evolution, living with unnaturally raised levels of daily mercury exposure is to us not too far off from trying to get a tiger to adapt to living in the ocean.

So, when I say “designed”, I mean it in a generic systems meaning of the word, i.e., in the case of living systems I’m referring to the process of evolution, which I think of as a process of spontaneous design, or, as author Steven Strogatz has called it in the title of his book: “Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order”. This book is a fascinating read and it transcends the traditional debates concerning science vs. religion, and evolution vs. creation, perhaps making those debates irrelevant by reconciling the differences and finding some common ground.

Life emerges. Life appears. Life is created. Life produces. Life co-ordinates. Life “syncs”. Life evolves. Life goes through natural cycles.

Similarly, stars emerge out of the apparent blackness or void. And eventually go super-nova, while young stars take their places.

This is evidently the nature of existence. The universe is not “dumb matter” which therefore needs to be created by someone intelligent only once, at the start, like a potter who creates a jug and then leaves it sitting on the shelf; rather, it behaves with subtle intelligence of its own which is a “creation” (if you wish to put it this way – or else you could say “spontaneous order”) that is ongoing every instant, in the never-ending creativity of its cycles and spirals. To my mind this vision embraces and unites science and spirituality. Life all around us moves in cycles, and we do not cause this, but we can impede the healthy fruition of these cycles sometimes.

Thinking of it like a garden, we don’t give plants the ability to grow or flower – but we have the power (and choice) either to poison their soil and blight their existence, or to nurture the conditions most conducive to allowing.

“Allow” may be the key enabling word

So much of our time, as human beings, is spent preventing and hindering and obstructing, when we could be allowing. . . Thus, we have got the emphasis the wrong way round. (As sung famously in 1963, “Oh, senators, congressmen, please heed the call – don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall!”)

All through history, people – either individually or in groups – have attempted to impose order, in various ways, rather than finding ways to allow order to emerge organically given the right conditions. Governments, armies, medical institutes, schools, universities, churches, societies, families, corporations. . . are in at least many cases aimed primarily at imposing order, rather than allowing life.

I suggest we shift our emphasis away from imposing or regulating or controlling things, to allowing.

This enables us to narrow our focus on what really matters in life. And to me, that is the essence of “freedom” in a human sphere, and why it is so important for all of us: perhaps the single most important human social value, to ensure that as many of us as possible are able to live our lives unimpeded, is the freedom which exists through every single one of us allowing other people, and life itself, to go on their merry way unimpeded.

Thus, metaphorically speaking, instead of a neatly manicured but incredibly dull and artificial-looking lawn, sprayed with herbicides in case any demonic moss or daisies threaten to make it pretty, our garden will be allowed to spring up with a greater diversity of wild flowers. Yes, we may do a little weeding and trimming along the way, but this will be a refinement, rather than the raison d’être of the garden. Then we will be looking at a primary manifestation of nature and life, rather than a patch of grass which shows only the overbearing control we have exercised over it.

This is also a great relief, because it means that none of us needs to solve the world’s problems. The world will solve its own problems, if only we would allow it to! We are continually impeding life and health with obstacles, or we stand by while others do so.

It is time for each of us to do all we can to help remove life’s obstacles, and intervene to stop others impeding that flow.

Never before in human history, possibly, has this calling been more urgently stated than it needs to be now.

Judging from most people’s (herbicide-riddled) gardens – and lives and actions – potentially toxic forms of imposing power are still popular, and imposing control is the “catchphrase” in most cases, rather than allowing life. So I am aware that what I am writing here is not the “norm” of contemporary society. . . although I see us moving in this direction collectively, with each generation (“the times they are a-changin’ ”?) It is therefore also not surprising that our current medical system is still based primarily on invasive and materialist approaches, as I view this as symptomatic of the adolescence of our culture when it comes to freedom as a value.

I’m aware that when I write about “allowing life”, some readers in the United States might at first think I’m alluding in some way to the ongoing debate for and against various forms of abortion. Actually, this article is not about abortion, of course, but instead I’m attempting a look at the word “life” in a far broader sense. Whatever one’s views about abortion (and as for me, I don’t think my views on abortion, one way or another, are relevant here), I reserve my right to use the word “life”, and the concept of being “pro” the allowing of life, not in the sense of referring specificaly to an anti-abortion political platform (which would be a different intended meaning to what I am intending to refer to), but in its true, wide sense in reference to life and nature in general and all of life’s manifestations! I have heard philosophers say that the question, “What is life?” is the deepest and most unanswerable one of all. I would rather that fundamental discussion and its terminology not be exclusive to the topic of abortion, important as that also is as a different topic of debate.

Personal example. . . of a “free school” in England

I’ll give a simple and rather intriguing example from a non-medical arena – of a “free” school.

Is there such a thing as too much freedom? I imagine so, if the freedom is afforded in a way which is lacking other necessary dimensions of life alongside it. A classic example might be the spoiled brat from Hergé’s Tintin stories, Abdullah, who is constantly making mischief while his father dotes on him. . . But is the problem that a child is given too much freedom (and thus “spoiled”), or simply that other necessary inputs are instead lacking, such as clear boundaries which help teach children how to cope in life and relate to others? I am no expert on parenting, or in the subject of psychology, but I suspect that clear boundaries can be supplied by teachers or parents in a loving way, without needing to be disciplinarian or in any way diminishing the atmosphere of freedom for a child, at least most of the time. Children may also “act out” due to missing other necessary emotional inputs, rather than “too much freedom” being the reason.

I guess I am expunging the old Victorian ghost, here, which has misled millions of people, at various times, with notions such as, “Children should be seen and not heard“! The truth of that sentiment is, in reality, an impoverishment of parenting and teaching skills, which is then compensated for by neglect and/or aggression. Disciplining children in “good old-fashioned” ways, as Charles Dickens showed in stories such as David Copperfield, seems to be more often a power play (or a way of expressing personal frustrations) on the part of the abuser, rather than an input which is necessary for a child to be healthy!

Indeed, in the following rather unconventional example, it turned out that an apparent excess of freedom given to children was not, actually, a problem, provided that other values such as respect and love were being provided at the same time.  . .  and I think even the setting of boundaries can and should be a form of respect and love, and thus not needing to be imposed or presented with aggression. . . For example, if I lock my front door at night, it sets boundaries in the neighbourhood, but is in no way aggressive or imposing on my neighbours. Boundaries, if seen as helpful communications, may in some cases also be considered a form of respect through firmness where firmness is needed, amd still this does not need to be restrictive or impose on anyone’s freedom in the way it is communicated. Part of the principle of freedom, too, is not only granting it to others, but ensuring they respect yours as well.

I wonder, also, if this pairing of (1) the granting of freedom but with firmness where needed; alongside (2) respect and love, against the backdrop of mutual freedom; could be a parallel of the medical balance my colleague Kevin Eakins has referred to and advocated in past blogs, in relation to the need to balance the “yang” input of “isodes”, in limited amounts, within the context of a far greater preponderance of suitably nurturing “yin” via “sarcodes” given sequentially?

Likewise, understanding this balance may partly explain why William Golding’s famous classic novel, ”Lord of the Flies“, cannot be taken as a representation of what happens when kids are given too much freedom, because while it depicts a group of children who behave horrendously when left completely alone on a desert island after a crash (i.e., in freedom from the restrictions of adults), it all takes place under highly unusual circumstances, where the children are from a schooling system and culture which Golding wants the reader to see were repressive, and, further, are then abandoned in an extreme situation of fear where they lack the safety of respect, nurturing and love I’m describing here as a requirement alongside freedom, to balance out the yin and the yang of our complex universal human needs. . .

Naturally, I imagined at the time that truancy must be rife at this free school, and one might have been forgiven for suspecting that kids would make trouble due to being undisciplined. This was the common assumption of people who had not been there and not seen it in action. Yet the reverse is true. Almost all new students there play truant for a while upon arrival, but quickly grow bored and realize that classes are worth attending! Truancy is not a problem at the school. And, as I’m sure you can imagine, since the kids have been allowed the freedom to choose to attend the classes, when they do attend they are then much more motivated and focused on them.

Similarly, I gather that discipline is not a problem at the school, either, because first of all the children don’t “play up” as much due to feeling respected and being allowed a voice in school decision-making processes; and secondly, when trouble arises, as it inevitably does, there is a stronger sense of community and communication between teachers and pupils, which leads to a faster and truer resolution of difficulties than a more austere or disciplinarian environment could achieve.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, the kids grow up not into merely obedient, conformist adults, but, more likely, into thinking individuals – which in my view is exactly what our world needs more of.

My proposition here is not a political one – and nor am I an expert on schooling systems; this is simply a personal anecdote to illustrate the principle of freedom in action – really in action. I am not advocating for any political position. Rather, freedom as a value transcends politics. Politics itself is in many cases one of the obstacles to this freedom, and particularly when any society moves towards repressive measures, such as imposing on people’s health freedoms, or such as police states with mass superveillance technologies, overbearing police forces, etc.; or, in positive cases, healthy politics can serve to help protect people’s freedom via minimalist necessary measures.

Feminism and the rebalancing of gender roles: What is our next step collectively?

The shift I am talking about has been widely discussed already, because naturally this pertains also to a contemporary shift of great historic import away from the governance of society by masculine-dominated social hierarchies, back to an approach which is more in balance with feminine energy too (and thus, by my reckoning, with our “Mother” Earth too), due to “allowing” (a feminine value in the sense that it is a receptive function) becoming our main emphasis, and then the masculine energy or active drive in this equation is withdrawn from all types of imposing – and redirected instead towards protecting, via the effort to remove obstacles to life’s own creativity.

Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady”, was supposedly portrayed in a recent film as some sort of feminist hero (I didn’t attend the film). Naturally, my idea of the goal and direction of feminism, and what lies beyond feminism in terms of the next logical step which we are undergoing at present, is not for women merely to adopt the “Iron”-like aggressive approaches of traditionally male-driven institutions and hierarchies (although they should certainly have the same right to do so as the men, of course), but instead for both women and men to soften these through cultivation of a more receptive, allowing, enabling quality.

As Carl Jung put it, all men and women have both a masculine side (the “animus”) and feminine side (the “anima”) and therefore both genders can contribute to this shift in focus. . . I believe that the true “gender struggle” is not between men and women, but is within the breast of every human being and represents the struggle to rebalance the animus and anima – and especially to resurrect a historically suppressed anima in individuals and the social structures they populate.

So even this feminine or receptive energy of allowing does not need to be conjured up from anywhere – it has been with us all along, only our male-driven society of at least several thousand years has been hell-bent on suppressing it and restricting its role in society (e.g. we all know about past atrocities, such as witch-hunting, in which women and feminine power were heinously assaulted on an ongoing basis). And so I am talking here about far more than feminism, which as a social phenomenon was necessary but has only been the beginning. I’m talking about men and women both restoring, in their own nature, behaviour and relations, the receptive principle of “allowing”, and holding back from imposing.

Say “no” to any proposed Utopia!

Given a chance, life itself flourishes. I’m not saying life is perfect and I’m not talking about a Utopia.

Life is simply what it is, but it is also capable of degenerating into unnatural processes that can cause much misery and destruction when we impede its flow. So when we leave life alone, it is not perfect but it is free and flowing and creative; but when we impede its flow, this is when it turns ugly and the miseries of the ages are compounded. The difference here is between bolstering up a river’s banks, in all its natural but beautiful curves and bountiful ecosystems, versus creating an entirely artificial canal in a straight line.

We don’t need to strive towards a Utopian ideal. For example, Plato’s ideal of a Utopia was dangerously close to being a dictatorship in his description – because he felt that perfect order and harmony need to be imposed – and so it comes as no surprise that he suggested the prohibition of poets (!) in his “Utopia” – certainly I would have no place in such a society, and nor would this blog!

Ask yourself: would you like to be in a society that considers poetry dangerous? I can hardly bear to imagine how twisted such a society must have become, to make poetry illegal! Imagine William Shakespeare being imprisoned for a breach of the peace

Then ask yourself: how come most people in contemporary society have no time for poetry, and, come to think of it, in some cases probably limited time for blogs like this, too? I also wonder what that tells us about the society we have – and our quality of life – where poetry is not illegal, but is instead simply sidelined along with any writing, such as this article, which is not designed explicitly in a promotional fashion to further anyone’s careers or unleash secrets to financial success, etc…!

I will come right out and declare it: this blog is not designed to further careers, promote anything or bring you financial rewards – that is not its purpose! And yet I feel proud to say so. It does contain many insights and tips that can revolutionize healthcare careers, and help refine the mental software behind them; and which can certainly save our readers thousands of euros and untold years of suffering.

Yet the underlying purpose, or at least our aspirations behind what we are writing, run deeper than this, and so I am grateful that Plato’s ambition was never realized: as grand as it sounds, the truth is that we aspire in this blog to do our best to understand, to explore and to help make manifest the ins and outs of a whole new philosophy of medicine and of life, based on and inspired by Savely Yurkovsky, M.D.’s system of Field Control Therapy. We are seeking to pull many threads together in order to shift perspectives and attempt to formulate clarity concerning the fundamental new worldview that is emerging, transforming medicine, science and society, and to lay out for the free consumption of the public the philosophical foundations concerning a wide range of topics many of which, I believe, have literally never been explored or sublimated in these terms before.

One thing you can also be sure of, rare as it is in either websites or books, is that all, or at least a majority, of what you may read at this website is strictly original both in content and its wording: we are not here to parrot or re-hash stuff that we’ve heard and not thought about much, nor to copy or repeat stuff unthinkingly that has already been presented elsewhere, nor to write about bland topics for the sake of it – we aim to share only what we feel compelled to write about, and to apply the principles of this article, by engaging our free minds to think things through and seek fresh perspectives to share.

Getting back to Plato: even if I were an aspiring dictator, I would not need to urge that the works of Dickens or Shakespeare be burned, as people are mostly too busy to be bothered with them, anyway… What Plato did not foresee is that poetry can be made irrelevant, as can philosophy, which is effectively nearly as good as banning it, and probably more effective. It has been claimed (although dubiously, I suspect) that there are now more people writing poetry than reading it, which from a mathematical point of view sounds concerning!

Aldous Huxley and others have, likewise, warned us against Utopias. . . Or, as Leonard Cohen beautifully sang, “Forget your perfect offering – there is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in!”

All we need to strive towards is to allow life to manifest – whatever life itself wants to manifest – with our participation and overseeing, yes, but not our overbearing control. And as we see all around us in natural ecosystems, life is creative, cyclical and astounding, but not necessarily Utopian – some animals eat other animals, for example, but in nature we see this occur out of necessity, not out of malevolence.

As human beings, we have the gift and burden of conscious awareness, and with it we have the choice in each moment either to be malevolent, self-serving and power-seeking, or to use this awareness to rise above the potential excesses of our egoistic impulses and instead direct as much of our energy as possible into removing the obstacles that impede life, and doing what we can to allow life (and, dare I say it, even to allow poetry and philosophy to exist, too!)

Medical and social implications of freedom and “allowing life”

This philosophy of “allowing” life appears to me to be essentially a systems one – because it is founded in the idea that living systems are intelligent, self-governing and dynamic.

Therefore, as a principle, this influences our medical practice and also our social relations.

True medicine focuses on allowing life, rather than imposing medical interventions designed to hijack or correct life’s processes. In other words, it is founded on a recognition that the human body is already striving, in every moment it is alive, to sustain its own health and equilibrium as best it can through its multiple immunological, excretory, neuro-endocrine and other metabolic sub-systems – and thus the best medical strategy is the one designed to assist by recognizing and allowing this process to continue whilst doing what we can to remove obstacles.

Blundering in to “correct” and “adjust” things is not where it’s at. . . and often leads to harmful “collateral damage” and/or physiological “blowback” (come to think of it, applying the geopolitical concept of blowback to human physiology may be a useful way to understand why the FCT approach is needed!)

As Dr Yurkovsky once put it, in medicine we need to “take out, take out, take out. . . rather than give, give, give. . .” to the body. He was referring to the need to take out obstacles that act as spanners in the works (such as immuno-toxins like heavy metals), rather than focusing on giving lots of things to the body (such as supplements or pharmaceuticals).

This is the approach which respects the body’s freedom, rather than imposing on it.

As a potentially interesting aside for past graduates of our FCT training programme: you may be interested in knowing that the above description relates also to an 8th “key tenet” of medicine which we have added into our teaching syllabus. . . During the last programme, we defined and taught 7 key tenets, or guiding principles, of FCT and of medicine generally. I have since realized that it is necessary to add an 8th which we did not explicitly spell out alongside the other 7: co-operation, based on the property of living systems which makes them dynamic, intelligent and self-governing, and hence requiring us to co-operate with human physiology rather than primarily imposing on it. This key distinction also resolves a two-century old question over the true nature and definition of “allopathy” and its attendant problems when applied as a primary modality. It also explains the reason why both the main diagnostic process (bio-resonance testing) and main therapeutic strategy (FCT remedies) used in FCT are based on the principle of collaborating with human physiology in the way they work and as the reason they have been adopted in FCT.

Socially, I see this also mirrored and exemplified by many of the people I have most respected in my life. Dr Yurkovsky is a fine example, because as a human being, in the decade I have known him, I have always found him enabling to others. He doesn’t devote his energy to trying to impose on others by seeking to manage, regulate, control, censor or dominate for its own sake, or as a modus operandi: he goes about his life in an attitude which is empowering to those around him simply because he likes to respect their space and being, and, unless there are obstacles to be addressed or removed, he likes to let them be, without trying to impose on them. It is a simple yet powerful principle in action, in a world filled with more imposing mentalities. And I see this quietly noble attitude also reflected in the way he has designed and shared FCT openly, as a uniquely self-sufficient medical system, and one which is vastly easier and cheaper to set up and maintain, equipment-wise, compared to most existing medical systems, and how the FCT system has so far always been shared in an enabling way which gives the practitioner complete freedom and self-sufficiency.

This attitude is not unique, in these exciting times – plenty of other people I know are living examples of this principle, too. I believe that this type of person, and behaviour, is on the rise in society, and will increasingly mark the future of our society, and of human civilization. It is this attitude which we are evolving into as a species, and which will – if anything – save us from ourselves. It is the attitude in which we set out to respect each other’s space and freedom.

Does this mean being passive?

It does not imply passivity, either. I am not advocating that we all be apathetic – far from it.

Clearly there are powerful, destructive, hostile interests at large in the world today, at times threatening or potentially threatening freedom at a great many levels of society, such as:

• our seed stocks
• our medicine
• our food chain
• our ecological environment
• our rainforests
• imposed social structures
• imposed mass electromagnetic pollution
• our privacy
• our civil rights
• our fluoridated water supply
• enforced vaccination agendas
• and much else. . .

Sometimes it seems that freedom is under periodic or gradual attack everywhere we turn, although often subtly so – and sometimes, strangely, the attacks on freedom are promoted in the name of freedom, and the attacks on health promoted in the name of health (!)

I guess these types of struggles have, in essence, always been present throughout human history, except now they are being played out on a rapidly centralizing global stage.

It is therefore logical to me, and relevant to this article, that no discussion of freedom is complete without an ethical call to action, on behalf of ourselves, our fellow humanity, our planet, our fellow animals and the future generations of life who will inherit the problems we commit now – or allow to be committed around us, through not protecting our freedoms well enough. . .

The active component of this vision of freedom is the complementary process of protecting freedom by removing the obstacles impeding it, or sometimes acting to stop those who would impose on others. If it were not the case, we would not need medicine at all, for example; but we do need medicine – and it works best when it acts in a minimalist, non-invasive fashion yet while basing itself on intelligent, scientific strategies.

However, the emphasis here is very different to the norm. Instead of advocating something which is to be imposed on everyone, such as a rigid structure of some kind, I am advocating a minimalist approach – both to medicine and society – in which we focus mainly on allowing, and also, where needed, on removing key obstacles.

Of course, this is not cut and dry, but there is a subtle yet fundamental difference between removing obstacles versus controlling and restricting. For example, over 90% of history’s wars have been initiated as an offensive proposition – invading, conquering, exploiting, dominating, competing for resources, power and control. . . Likewise, most medical interventions are invasive and seek to actively suppress or replace biochemical pathways.

In contrast, the “freeing” type of action is the one that respects autonomy and liberates (and of course an exploitative war which is promoted as a “liberating” one wouldn’t count!) If your company is polluting my neighbourhood, by erecting a mobile phone mast near to our homes, I may take drastic action to try my best to shut you down, or the policy that leads you to act in this way, as you are seriously imposing on a community.

These are the times in life when freedom falls under threat, and, if it serves any purpose at all, then at least we may come out afterwards a little maturer; a little shocked; a little galvanized; a little reeling from an intensified recognition of the importance of freedom, which came into focus due to falling under attack. Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? They pave paradise and set up a parking lot!”

Mandela, Gandhi and the freedom principle

The greatest social leaders have always known what I am writing in this blog: the central indomitable value of freedom.

It kept Nelson Mandela going through his long years of imprisonment, with his favourite poem that goes, “I am the captain of my soul”.

It motivated Mahatma Gandhi, and was evident in his many actions – not only to guide India towards independence (and hence, freedom from the British occupiers), but also in his style. And I find it interesting that, for example, he was offered a position to lead the country as India’s first prime minister, yet declined the role. His basic philosophy and approach to life – which was so freeing to those around him and to his country – was, as I perceive it, so wrapped up in the principle of freedom, that even to take a position as a political leader was too structured a role, too much regulatory control, to interest him. Instead, he chose to remain out of political office, even though those in political office frequently looked to him for guidance. In this, as in so many other ways, Gandhi served – and still serves – to inspire us all towards more of a freedom-based enabling mode of living together.

Similarly, a cinematic moment I enjoyed is in Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus”, when Nelson Mandela, just recently made president of RSA, leaps to the defence of the favourite sport and rugby team of the Afrikaners, to allow it the freedom to continue even when everyone is clamouring to clamp down on it because of the history of Apartheid both in the sport and as perpetuated by the people wrapped up in the sport. Regardless of past wrongs, Mandela seeks to make the transformation in society, in this moment of the story, not by imposing further restrictions but by allowing freedom – even to the perceived enemy. This action arises from profound wisdom, and, according to the film’s version of history, represents the true transformation of the Apartheid system in that moment – not only as an establishment of democratic political power upon inviting the black majority to participate in a system previously dominated by the white minority, but also as a new emphasis on the principle of freedom as a value. As I understand it, it is the principle of freedom which has the transformative power in such situations, rather than the enacting of retaliations or further restrictions.

In response to this hypothetical telecommunications company, then, I will not take a passive stance – but will stand up to you and put a stop to it if I can.

However, the key difference is that actions are focused on removing a key obstacle to life’s freedom, and on doing so via the minimum possible violence, emphasizing instead the most intelligent and proactive strategies. Gandhi, for example, could in my view be described as a “systems philosopher” – since, like many of the truly great figures in history, he lived and breathed systems theory even long before science began to define it more formally from the 1950s on. I say this because his decisions were often based on analyzing the system (e.g. India) and adopting new strategies better suited to running that system as a free, self-governing, co-operative entity – rather than imposing on it.

Taking up the principle of “living together”, in my table above, as well as “living consciously”, I would in this example seek to link up with other individuals in my community and make a common stand to protect our brains, hearts and other organs from your corporation’s electromagnetic pollution.

On a broader scale, with an issue so important and global as this one which is assaulting basic freedoms everywhere, I will also join up with people internationally to put a stop to the microwave pollution currently blanketing our globe, since all it takes is a little willingness from industry to switch over to non-polluting technologies, and the problem goes away.

Indeed, as of last week I have participated in the founding of a global group of exactly this type – EMR Action Day – which I aim to introduce in a forthcoming blog!

These have been just a few examples of why I don’t imply passivity when I say “freedom” or “allowing”.

People as “free spirits” – the only viable future for our race?

Regarding freedom-respecting people, my mother, in her wisdom and integrity, has a word she has often used for the type of person I am talking about who aims to think and live freely and allow others to do the same – she likes to refer to this type of person as a “free spirit”.

By this, I think she means a person who first of all, rather than being an unthinking conformist, thinks for him- or herself (and yes, she and my father both encouraged me in this as I grew up, for which I am very grateful!), and secondly also she means a person who respects the freedom of others rather than imposing on it.

In her philosophy of life, it is more important to be a “free spirit” than pretty much anything else.

Without this free and freeing attitude, we are doomed. We would then be spending our time restricting both ourselves and each other, and as we do so, we would be moving further and further away from life’s ideal flow.

Getting back to the original title of this blog, I still wonder whether or not freedom is truly the highest value. I don’t know. It might be. In ancient mythology, Uranus was equated with the Sky or Heavens, and was considered the pre-eminent universal energy before any of the other Greek and Roman Gods came into being. In Tibetan Pulsing Yoga, this original primordial Greek God is equated, as an archetypal symbol, with the principle of freedom.

It has been said that truth is the first casualty of war. . . and I would like to add that freedom is the first casualty of civilization

This notion might, in a nutshell, be the root cause of the majority of humanity’s current problems, including the medical ones sweeping our planet. However, it does not have to be so, and a different type of civilization – and a different type of medicine – can be “allowed” instead, if we choose it. The “Living Systems Revolution” helps to define and encourage this process.

I hope that as medicine evolves – and as FCT continues to grow, and all of us connected through it grow in each of our lives – and as human civilization faces up to the global problems we have at present – our collective future will be characterized by strengthening, rather than weakening, this value of freedom.

In most modern cultures, it seems at times that there is an almost manic dependency on a regular intake of medicines of some form, whether or not it is really justified or indicated; this has become our zeitgeist, the social expectation around medicine. How many people do you know, for example, who go weeks or months at a time without taking a single medication or supplement for anything? Why has such a person become a rarity in the modern world?

In my last blog, I shared some clinical tips in relation to my own case history of migraines. Today I will continue the story to illustrate some further points. . .

As a clinician, do you know when to wait and when to act? As a patient, does your clinician know this?

And do you, too, know when to give yourself a break from those daily vitamins or over-the-counter items that, after all, may not always be quite as continuously needed as you might think?

This is not a small matter, but can make the difference between success and failure. Here are some examples.

When I was learning the piano as a child, I remember my wise teacher My Deryck Seymour telling me the following about the music of Amadeus Mozart. I was learning a sonata and over-using the pedal, which is a part of the piano that prolongs the sounds of notes that have been played. Mr Seymour shared the following sentiments with me (conveyed, here, in my own wording, of course, as many years have passed, although I remember the original sentiment, and some of the wording, clearly):

Simon, remember that when you are playing Mozart, every pause is deliberate. You see those pause signs there, written in the music – these are not casual markings in the score. To me, Mozart’s music is more about framing the silence, than about the music itself. He makes the pauses in sounds, and the silences, matter – he makes it so that you will hear them – he surrounds them with sounds which then stop at rhythmic moments, accentuating pauses and silences. And by the time you get to the end of the piece, he has completed an introduction to silence where, if you have been listening carefully, he will have transformed the silence into something beautiful.

The same is true in medicine, where active interventions frame the periods of inactivity or the absence of active interventions.

Those periods of apparent inactivity are actually filled with activity – they are pregnant with healing. These are the times that the patient’s body is busy doing its own work.

If we narcissistically regard ourselves (i.e., healthcare professionals) as the ones healing our patients (or, for that matter, our medical interventions), then we will never appreciate this. However, so long as we remember that we are only referees on the sidelines of the football match, whilst our patients’ bodies heal themselves, then there is a chance that we may also remember that the overall value of our interventions depends just as much on when we don’t act, as on when we do; just as much on what we don’t do, as on what we do do.

And sometimes, not acting can be more helpful for healing than giving a medicine. Something worth remembering!

This is true on many levels, and especially nowadays that the great majority of both conventional and alternative medical interventions are invasive, usually given continuously without any breaks, and hold a high chance of causing side effects. Medical inputs are often over-used in a fairly undiscriminating manner, rather than being reserved for times of genuine need.

The ideal to aim for is not a handful of regular medications, supplements or remedies of any type. The ideal to aim for, wherever possible and medicall appropriate, is none at all. And I say this in your best interest, even if it’s not in the best interest of companies making products to sell! I am standing up for the individual’s (lasting) health, not shareholders’ bank accounts’ (temporary) health. . .

We should aim for a pristinely undisturbed healing mechanism (i.e., the combination of our various organ systems involved in the healing response) in the body, which can in normal circumstances go about its daily work without having any medical inputs whatsoever. And then, when medical inputs are needed, they will be far more effective, powerful and meaningful – and in the meantime, many unnecessary side effects can be avoided.

Today I will share an example of when, having given the right remedy, the best course of action is then to wait.

In his Field Control Therapy (FCT) plan of treatment for me as his patient with a history of migraines, where mercury was identified as a primary causative agent, Savely Yurkovsky, M.D., a brilliant physician and cardiologist in New York, USA, also found (using bio-resonance testing) residual effects of head trauma were a key component of my problem (note for bio-resonance testers: don’t forget the “Trauma” test vial – which commonly matches the Cranial Bones during FCT testing). However, as is often the case, this was second priority to first removing heavy metals from the tissues. Very often, the after-effects of physical injuries become prolonged due to heavy metals.

This is the so-called “toxic injury” effect.

Certainly, anyone with a history of mercury dental fillings at any past or current time in their life (or their mother’s life) who then has an injury of some kind, should assume mercury will invade the damaged tissues and have a potential to slow recovery. Treatment of after-effects, then, should emphatically not tend to be of a primarily structural nature of intervention (chiropractors, osteopaths, cranio-sacral therapists and physiotherapists, take heed!) This should in most cases be secondary to detoxifying the tissues – to ensure permanence of healing and also that realigned structures stay realigned instead of continually falling back into previous misalignments.

At the current time there are far more chiropractors in the world than FCT practitioners, and most of these chiropractors and other structural workers have not studied FCT either, and so you will not hear this advice very often! But I suggest it is advice to be treasured – it could transform your life one day, and has transformed many lives already. Note that I am not expressing any grievance towards chiropractic, here – but I do believe that every chiropractor should study FCT and either practise it alongside their existing work, which would tend to greatly improve clinical results (as chiropractors who have studied FCT have reported), or learn when to refer patients for FCT before doing structural work.

In my case, Dr Yurkovsky successfully “finished up” his overall treatment of my system with a profound classical homeopathic treatment for head trauma – Nat Sulph (natrum sulphuricum).

Yes, FCT and classical homeopathy can in tandem be used, to great effect, to identify and assist in the healing of residual after-effects of traumas.

Nat Sulph is a remedy which all FCT practitioners, as well as all structural workers such as chiropractors, should study in depth.

It has helped many people, and particularly where the trauma involves the head and/or spine and even more especially when there are mood changes accompanying the trauma. In addition, it is in Dr Yurkovsky’s view a common constitutional remedy which has been under-used by homeopaths overall. It is a combined remedy containing aspects of two popular ‘polychrests’ – the “watery” Nat part (as in Nat Mur) and the “fiery” Sulph part (as in Sulphur). However, bear in mind also that Nat Sulph as a trauma remedy is also very useful at times even when the constitution is a different remedy.

In my case, the head trauma dated from my early childhood, but had had long lasting effects on aspects of my health up to the time I attended Dr Yurkovsky’s clinic about a decade ago. Yet the first example of what I mean by “waiting” is that Dr Yurkovsky waited about a year before treating the head trauma directly, for the simple reason that it was not a priority of treatment during this time but, according to my body’s own pace of recovery, needed to wait. He spent that first year using FCT to treat higher priorities – multiple organs and tissues under the burden of heavy metal toxicity and related pernicious factors, etc. In a word, the “usual suspects”.

Now, in my own clinical practice, I pick up residual effects of head trauma fairly commonly, to varying degrees, but I rarely treat it immediately, due to other priorities of treatment that tend to take precedence (although not always).

This also illustrates several other aspects about FCT and classical homeopathy, respectively:

• • We don’t need to treat every pernicious layer we uncover during testing – it is better to prioritize and focus, and leave lower priority layers either for later and/or to sort themselves out while we remain like football referees on the sidelines – letting the match play itself out, and not controlling all the players, but just interceding when we are really needed.
  • FCT is best viewed not only as a temporary way of addressing a particular health condition, but also as a long-term ongoing health support. When things are going well, pacing is slowed and appointments can be longer apart, but it is best to keep going on an ongoing basis, simply because FCT enables excellent means for having a regular “tune-up”, and after all, we take our cars in for a bare minimum of an annual tune-up, and surely our bodies are more valuable to us – as well as more sensitive and complex in functioning – than our cars? Along the way, there are frequently layers upon layers, too, and it is mainly for my long-term patients that I get, over time, to be able to work through many of these layers. In other words, short-term patients that breeze in and out again can do so and gain benefit but, even if they get excellent results in the desired target areas, won’t be getting the full advantages of FCT. This will be like taking a car in only when it needs quick repairs, but not taking it in for an annual check-up to ensure it stays road-worthy and well-maintained. For these reasons, for example, in my own lifetime I don’t envisage any time in the future when I would not want to continue with regular FCT treatments for myself.
  • Constitutional treatment is a case in point. As a classical homeopath, I have the great benefit of having a period of time to get to know my patients while I am treating them using FCT, so that by the time I seek to give a constitutional treatment – which is in many cases not until many months (or sometimes a year or two) into the plan of treatment – it is then easier to choose the right remedy.
  • In contrast, in my view perhaps the single greatest criticism which I have about classical homeopathy (apart from, also, the fact that classical homeopaths don’t tend in general to apply FCT or recognize blocking factors like mercury and EMFs) is that most homeopaths start trying to give a constitutional “simillimum” from day one, the first day they have met a patient who, at that stage, is usually a stranger (N.B. I say this because in order to choose the most appropriate classical remedy, gaining an understanding of the key motivations underlying a person’s character is a key factor that contributes to the process of remedy selection, in the case of classical homeopathy, although it is not needed in FCT). Choosing the right (i.e., optimal) constitutional remedy is thus infamously challenging in some cases for classical homeopaths.

That in itself is not dangerous or problematic, because the normal practice, apparently, for at least a portion of classical homeopaths (unlike in FCT, which is more precision-based) is to spend a period of time giving a patient a series of remedies, one at a time, until “bingo!” the correct one is hit upon. Yet some homeopaths, in their most complex cases (which is usually not the majority of patients), then spend most of the consultations seeking that elusive “right remedy” which hasn’t necessarily been found yet, and thus requires more and more time to continue searching for.

I believe there is a simple and eloquent solution to this insidious problem at the heart of classical homeopathy. All homeopaths should either begin a plan of treatment by using FCT, or they should at least take a referral from an FCT practitioner who has already been treating the patient using FCT, before they start the classical homeopathy. In the former (ideal) case, it allows them more time to get to know the patient while doing FCT, so that there is a higher chance of choosing the best classical remedy when the time comes; in both cases, the FCT can clear the patient’s channels of major bio-accumulated toxicity such as heavy metals, so that the classical prescription is then much more likely to “take root” in fertile soil (instead of an excellent seed being cast on barren ground). Here I’m giving classic examples of how two separate medical modalities (in this case, FCT and classical homeopathy) can help each other out and work best co-operatively. (And I should add, for the sake of completeness, that bio-individuality always wins out, thus there may be exceptions sometimes where classical homeopathy is needed right from the start as first priority).

The second component of my own case history which illustrates my point about the value of waiting relates to my second year of treatment under Dr Yurkovsky’s care.

After a year of FCT, my migraines were already much improved, with much less intensity and frequency. This was a gradual, sustained improvement which closely followed the various treatments given during that year. (Also improved or resolved, by then, were my other health conditions, which, for the purposes of these last two blogs, I haven’t brought into the discussion, as they do not relate directly to the theme).

At this stage, Dr Yurkovsky then gave me Nat Sulph in a single potency, and told me to get back to him a period of time later.

Over the following months, I got back to him a number of times, and had consultations with him, but they were all short-lived because each time he re-tested me, he simply said, “Don’t take any further FCT or homeopathy for now. The Nat Sulph remedy is still acting in your system. It’s best to wait and do nothing.”

(Note for homeopaths or aspiring practitioners: On the FCT Graduate Programme, Kevin Eakins and I teach the exact procedures and criteria for evaluating priority of remedies, and whether a remedy is still acting or not, and how to judge when and how to utilize classical homeopathy for an FCT patient).

This went on for a long time. From memory, I believe it must have been about 9 (or was it 10?) months before Dr Yurkovsky finally said, based on the latest re-test, “It has completed its action. Now we’ll proceed with more remedies”. And so he proceeded again with regular FCT treatments after this. My migraines were, by this time, all cleared up for good! It was as though Nat Sulph, as Dr Yurkovsky predicted, finished off the case effectively, after FCT had already done most of the work.

I am not saying that all classical homeopathic prescriptions need last so long, nor that all classical treatments should be this pure without any other remedies being taken or allowed. It really depends on the individual context. Sometimes Dr Yurkovsky gives certain FCT remedies for support during the middle of a classical homeopathic course of action, and particularly when he considers that the remedy is being temporarily blocked. And many times classical remedies finish acting within only a few weeks, or within a month or two. My example above is longer than typical, but the point I wanted to make is perhaps all the more well exemplified by this as an exception in terms of length.

Don’t be afraid to ask a patient to take nothing, or to wait!

Or, for the general public we could put the same advice like this: if your physician and other healthcare practitioners have recommended a pause, or periodic gaps, then don’t necessarily be concerned about periods of time in which no FCT or other medicine is being taken, and don’t necessarily persuade yourself that something always needs to be taken on a continuous basis! This is a part of the big corporate deception which has infiltrated into modern medicine, and into the collective psyche, to the point where most people nowadays simply assume that “medicine” is an intrinsically daily, continuous procedure in most cases – and where the idea of Mozart’s “pregnant pauses” that, far from being inactive, are filled with therapeutic activity inside of the body, are anathema.

This is especially so when remedies (e.g. such as homeopathic or FCT ones) that have already been given are continuing to do their work.

As practitioners, we are only referees – we are not playing on the field, and we are not strikers, so we don’t need to be seeking to score goals from minute to minute. But we can judiciously choose and time our inputs to help guide the players (i.e., the organs within a patient’s  body) to do so. . .

Jonathan Frewing, who is an FCT graduate and a very talented healer and practitioner, once observed during an FCT training day lunch break that we filter out who we are from pure information. There was much talk of zero point fields at the time and his words were spoken on the spur of the moment, said in passing and quietly and in a way that could easily have been forgotten. However, for years his statement has stayed with me. Many times I have returned to his words and pondered on the vision and wisdom inherent in this simple, yet profound statement.

Out there in the vast, interconnected, seemingly infinite hinterland of information fields is the memory of every atom that has ever existed, every physical and chemical reaction that has ever taken place, every life form that has ever lived in the full glory of every moment, every emotion that was ever felt, every conscious thought that was ever formed, and so on, and so on..

His hypothesis is that we simply download who we are from the infinity of space. It is a vision which can be incredibly inspiring or incredibly frightening. It means that I have the potential and to some extent the choice to become whoever I want to be. I can become trapped in evil or hatred or I can identify with the good and the purest love.

Carl Gustav Jung is supposed to have said that he’d rather be whole than good. I think he meant that whatever identification we undertake must be rooted in deep honesty – anger is anger, hatred is hatred – to deny the present moment is to avoid fully identifying with anything.

I am so frequently reminded of what I can’t achieve in daily life. I am unable to turn back the aging clock. I am unable to fly without the help of an aeroplane. I (currently) cannot speak mandarin Chinese. I was born a male and I will die that way. And so on. And so on.

However, despite appearances I am inclined to agree with Jonathan that my limitations have much to do with my mind set and the peculiarity of what my mind has learned to identify with. This mind of ours is formed from the singularity of evolution and life as it has evolved here on our fragile planet, Earth, in our little corner of the universe.

There is actually tremendous optimism in this vision because it implies that instead of being fixed in a prison of flesh and bones, I am as Shakespeare said “the stuff that dreams are made on.” I can use my little life that’s “rounded with a sleep” to give back to the very universe that gave birth to me.  It’s my job to choose what I become before the sleep sets in.

So how do I go about re-inventing myself? How do I maximise the chance to change what every day, every moment brings? I feel that joy has something to do with it. If I enjoy the choices I make I’m far more likely to stay with them in the long term. Having fun is important.

Consciousness feels like a fish that slips out of my hand every time I try to grab it. I’m told that being in the now is the key. I’ll be honest with you, I have no surety about what that means. Just like the fish, the moment I am conscious of being in the now it slips away. Perhaps that’s the essence of the now: it can be experienced but never owned.

The reason I keep coming back to Jonathan’s vision is that it illuminates much of my thinking about information fields and healing. These fields contain everything so presumably we are free to download whatever we want. However, I suspect that it’s not that simple. We are also where we come from, our ancestry, our past, and the choices we make in the ever-present now.

Homoeopaths talk about spoiling the case with a wrong choice of remedy. They refer to the potential to confuse or damage the picture on the vital plane. Recently, my mentor in homoeopathy, Dr. Banerjea, said that he considered damage with a homoeopathic remedy to do more harm than that caused by our more preferred poison, pharmaceutical drugs.

This is an interesting thought and I interpret it as follows. It’s not that we can damage the information fields that drive us. However, what could be damaged by the inappropriate use of subtle energy medicine is our connection to these fields.

What I feel is happening is that damaging (as opposed to therapeutic) signalling could cause us to lose definition of the filter that defines who we are. This means that the type of signalling used in FCT, if misapplied in untrained and unskilled hands, may also have the potential to cause harm. I believe that there is much less risk than with homoeopathy (and that’s a topic for another blog) but it must be there nevertheless.

I believe that aging is the steady but inevitable loss of definition in the filtering process Jonathan referred to, so in fact we can only speed up or slow down the growth of the gap.

Pathological signalling with homeopathy would be similar to the nocebo effect whereby we may consciously intervene in such a way as to cause the patient harm rather than benefit them. How many cancer patients have followed their oncologist’s predictions of how long they have to live to the “letter of the law”?

I remember the rhyme I was young: “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” I wish it were true. How prescient the words “first do no harm” seem now.

This brings up an interesting question. Your patient has a lifestyle impediment to his or her health. You feel it’s unlikely that they are ever going to give this up. Do you boldly go where no one has gone before and tell them the harm that this may cause them? Or do you stay silent and avoid the potential nocebo effect? It is far worse to be a smoker and to know the harm it may cause you than to be a smoker and to be totally ignorant of the damage… So what do you do?

I challenge you – the reader – to give me your opinion! It’s your case, your patient – what do you do?

There are as many questions as there are answers in this blog but it outlines once again the central premise of my argument that information fields are the essence and the source of who we are.  More than we know and more than we have ever experienced to date, they are the key to all healing and damage at personal, planetary, and universal levels.

I believe they represent the common horizon that brings together spirituality and science. That’s a big claim so I had better back it up at some stage. Not today, however. Today I’ll end this here for now and await your reply to my challenge. I have my opinion but I’ll stay quiet until I hear your views…

Today I want to start a series of personal blogs in which I will share clinical tips for anyone practising bio-resonance testing, as well being of common interest to lay people wanting to broaden their understanding of health and medicine.

I will start with a useful clinical example from my own life – that of migraines.

And I will be asking the question: how precise do we really need to be in medicine, without over-complicating things? How important is precision, and how do we best achieve it when it is needed?

In my teens and early twenties, I used to suffer for many years from the most dreadful, tormenting migraine headaches. They would occur perhaps about 8-10 times a year, and always in the small hours of the night, waking me from my sleep groaning in agony and unable to remain asleep due to the emerging pain in a focal point at the back of my skull. Left alone, the pain was so intense that it not only prevented me from going back to sleep, but would leave me lying in mortal despair and wishing for relief, and feeling so bad that death appeared a nicer prospect than to suffer any more minutes of such agony!

Thankfully, I found that pain-killers would subdue the pain temporarily. It would take perhaps about half an hour for my system to assimilate the pain-killer and nullify the pain receptors. Then the relief would wear off within about 6-10 hours. Sometimes, by then, the migraine would be in remission, fading already; other times, it would be there, still waiting, prowling beneath the surface, so that I would need to repeat the pain-killer once more. And then I would not have another migraine attack for another month or two.

I first met Savely Yurkovsky, M.D., as his patient, about a decade ago. Using bio-resonance testing, as a part of his system of Field Control Therapy (FCT), he found mercury in various parts of my head and other tissues, and gave me treatments to remove the mercury from my system in layers.

Dr Yurkovsky’s treatments helped tremendously with not only the migraines, but also several other health conditions I had at the time.

By “helped tremendously”, I should qualify that by saying that Dr Yurkovsky’s course of treatment completely and permanently resolved a number of chronic conditions and symptoms I had had over many years before I went to see him, including the migraine headaches as well as my other health problems. After the FCT course of treatment, I came out feeling like a new man.

What I want to share for today, though, is specifically how he used bio-resonance testing (BRT) to find the resolution of the migraines.

In FCT, we nearly always like to go to the source, and in practice that often means looking for the precise organ(s) or tissue(s) where a priority pernicious process is reaching a head. This sets what we do apart from not all but at least many of the other existing forms of alternative or integrative medicine: there are a few other forms of medicine which, like FCT, seek to uncover health problems at the level of exact organs (Traditional Chinese Medicine and orthodox Western medicine are two obvious examples that can be credited).

Add to this, also, the parallel precision of seeking out the exact pernicious factors causing the most stress to those organs, and then FCT sets itself apart even from its nearest competitors – such as those mentioned above – by uncovering also the exact layers of heavy metals, chemicals, infectious agents or other factors which are most distressing the priority internal organs, in a precise manner which bases itself on prioritized information.

Let me pause a moment to explain what I mean by “prioritized”. This means that the question is not, for example, “What amount of mercury is in the brain?” but rather, “How stressed is the brain, or a part of the brain, on a scale of autonomic stress covering the whole body? And, if the brain is displaying priority levels of stress, what are the highest priority layers causing stress to this person’s brain at this time?” This is actually information that is clinically more useful, in general, than quantifiable amounts, which tell us nothing about priority and context; even though there will be some who are so addicted to measurements that they find it difficult to think any other way – and to those individuals I would say, “Our priority here is not to cater what we do to your preferred mode of thinking, but to get sick patients well again!”

This is because, in my experience, quantifiability serves often to reassure minds rather than necessarily to serve a concrete healing purpose, whereas prioritization is most of the time a more pragmatic and useful clinical aim to emphasize.

Let me give a simple example of this: if a man has died of poisoning and has several hundred measurable poisons in his system, surely it would be more important (useful) for us to know which of these killed him, rather than being able to quantify the exact amounts of each one in a particular body compartment such as the bloodstream (which, in itself, would not reflect amounts in internal organs anyway)? It is well known in toxicology that out of a hundred toxins, the one that will kill a person first is not the one in the highest quantity, but the one which is most toxic to a given organ. In other words, quantifying the toxins is of secondary importance compared to assessing the quality of impact (degree of toxicity – both generally and individually) and, even better, finding a way to assess priority of impact. And BRT excels not at quantifying the toxins numerically, but at (a) pinpointing their locations; (b) prioritizing their individual impacts in a way that is highly useful clinically.

Why, though, is such precision needed? I remember an FCT student asked me this many years ago. He attended a seminar with Dr Yurkovsky, and said:

Simon, FCT looks good, but still I don’t get why we need several hundred different test vials for so many different organs and tissues, and so many different pernicious factors. Surely things don’t need to be that precise? It’s just complicating matters. I prefer simple things.

As often occurs with me, I remember people’s questions (when they seem to be pertinent or interesting ones, at least!) for a long time afterwards, and sometimes go back to reconsider them from later perspectives. After having gained more years of FCT clinical experience of my own, since I was asked the above question, I now feel in a stronger position to answer his question meaningfully. I was asked this when I was relatively new to FCT study myself.

I agree that simplicity is always best, but only provided things are not over-simplified. Sometimes complex solutions are needed for complex problems, and the human body is essential a complex system.

Read up on the fields of “complexity theory” and “systems theory”, as Dr Yurkovsky has been doing, and you will immediately see why there is a need to look into the body’s various internal organs with great precision in at least many of today’s health situations.

Through not doing so using an intelligent means adapted for the purpose, as we find in FCT-informed bio-resonance testing, we find ourselves essentially impotent before a vast array of today’s incurable illnesses. In such a circumstance, I am willing to accept a slightly higher degree of complexity in the treatment approach, if it will allow us to achieve greater success in curing illness.

At the same time, Dr Yurkovsky has always sought to keep matters as simple as we can afford to keep them. Thus, we could have 5,000 or 10,000 test vials in our kits, if we wanted to be less discerning, but he has endeavoured to keep that number as low as possible – at a little over 1000, instead – seeking to discern the most clinically useful vials – the most clinically useful degree of precision necessary to get the results we’re looking for.

There are other layers of answer, too. Systems theory has helped me understand the human body much better. According to systems theory, each living system contains within it a series of interacting sub-systems, which themselves contain further sub-systems within them, and so on. In other words, there isn’t only one level of system to cope with (e.g. the level of the human being as a single unit – which would be simpler to contemplate). Instead, since multiple “levels of system” co-exist within us, then naturally, problems can arise at any of these levels, or several at once.

For example, the lungs are one level of “sub-system” within the overall body. If mercury invades the lung tissue, then we have a problem focused primarily at this level of sub-system, which then affects the sub-systems above (body) and below (lung cells) it.

The most attuned medical intervention, to “hit the nail on the head”, will be the one that doesn’t bluntly look at the whole body, or at a single part of a lung cell, but which is capable of assessing the lungs as a unit (in the given example). In other words, getting the “level of system” right at each point in our investigations will assure more success, as we will not be diverging energy into the wrong neighbourhoods of a city – we will be going straight for the district where trouble is brewing.

Thus, for my migraine headaches, Dr Yurkovsky pursued a series of interventions of varying degrees of precision, addressing the highest priority layers with greater and greater precision until the result was achieved.

This is not a “hit and miss” procedure. Think of it like a screw that you need to turn, and you have a range of screwdrivers of different sizes. Your set of screwdrivers is not a “hit and miss” set of tools for the job – they are precisely the right tools, which have been skillfully chosen for the task at hand based on an analysis of what needs to be done (which is a nice parallel, perhaps, for the underlying essence of what is done in an FCT consultation). However, a separate question is the one of precision: how precisely does the size of the screwdriver need to match that of the screw, in order to be able to unscrew the screw with success (and without forcing it either)?

The answer to this question, of course, is that the “correct” size is simply the one that is close enough to achieve the job of unscrewing the screw smoothly. There is no “one size fits all” answer that will apply in all cases, because screw sizes vary. Most of the time, they will tend to fall into certain brackets, though, which we can recognize and easily manage.

So for example, we may have a choice of using a 3.8mm screwdriver, or a 4.5mm one which may be the next size up in our toolkit, yet perhaps if we had a 3.9mm it would be even more perfect for the screw size, yet in practice, we do not need a 3.9mm screwdriver because the 3.8mm one is perfectly adequate. In other words, in discussing the question of precision, I’m making the point that we need ideally to choose the degree of precision most adequate for the job – neither more nor less precise than it needs to be.

Next, we see that, for example, we may have a set of (in the analogy) let’s say 20 screwdriver sizes, and we find that these gradations of precision can achieve the desired result in the great majority of cases. However, there may be times where we discover the need to apply a less common size gradation or degree of precision.

To clarify my intent, and the overall relevance of this discussion within the wider scheme of things: these are the exceptions, and so this blog is about an exception, rather than the rule. . . Yet through discussing the exceptions, it may help us judge those sorts of distinctions, and deepen our understanding. So the purpose of this particular article is not to give you a general idea of how FCT works in a majority of cases (we have many other articles aiming for more of a general overview). . . Instead its aim is to assist both the general public and bio-resonance practitioners in potentially improving or refining their understanding of degrees of precision in medicine, and why it is good to have many additional precise tools available even if only for exceptional cases – and how to resolve those exceptional cases using these various degrees of precision as per need. . .

The degree of precision, and priority, which we need to apply clinically is basically defined on an individual basis by the degree that is needed to achieve success. Thus, even if a slightly blunter tool is used to start with because in a majority of cases it is “sharp enough” for what we need (and hence in FCT, we have over 1000 test vials, but most of the time we only need to use less than 50-100 of these as our main tools, giving excellent results in most situations), it is important to have higher levels of precision available for when we need them. (As a sidenote to advanced FCT practitioners: this also explains why, outside of our main testing platform, it remains relevant for us to keep our less commonly needed vials, too, in an additional platform or kit boxes – for the times when something atypical makes all the difference to a particular case. . .)

Dr Yurkovsky found mercury in multiple tissues, and this was the primary causative agent, as confirmed both through repeated FCT tests over the course of treatment as well as the complete cessationn of the migraines when it had been removed. I hasten to add that I have discovered, since then, that mercury is a common cause of, or contributing factor to, migraines and headaches for many people, which may make my case example interesting to at least a portion of others with a similar history.

But since multiple tissues were involved, it was for a time more difficult to pinpoint the exact tissue, for me, which was most precise to the migraine itself while it was happening.

I should emphasize, now, that the rest of this article is specifically about what we call “PRN” or “As Needed” remedies. These are not active treatments addressing priority layers based on a new bio-resonance test. Instead, this is the best that any doctor can achieve within the realm of medical possibility, by way of offering some additional remedies which a patient can keep on the shelf for possible future use “in the event of. . . ”

In other words, if doctors were Gods or even just fortune-tellers able to predict all the future developments of a complex system with sufficient precision to predict weeks or months ahead, more might be achievable. However, as we know, this has already proven impossible in complexity theory in terms of attempts scientists have made to map patterns in complex systems with anything approaching accuracy a number of weeks or months into the future. As we all know, you have only to look at weather forecasts to see how they become increasingly inaccurate the further into the future they are trying to predict

In the case of FCT testing results, they are valid on the day of testing, and tend to remain valid for up to a few weeks. How many weeks will vary depending on the individual (which is part of the concept of “uncomputability” which I’ll come on to below with a quotation), but we tend to advise patients, as a thumb-rule, to preferably not put off taking the actual remedies beyond two weeks (after having been tested), although, in certain cases, such as when the tubercular miasm is predominant, even the two-week timeframe would not be soon enough – but in most patients, two weeks is a reasonable working estimate of the period of time that can be considered acceptable. We also add that the sooner, the better, in terms of what is ideal (i.e., the closer in time the test and treatment are in FCT, with less of a gap between them, the better).

Likewise, attempts to build super-computers to chart the future of complex system activities beyond a certain point have proven a failure, which is a very interesting branch of modern science.

The reasons are simple: complex systems (a) are complex; (b) have the property of not only being complex, but also open, which means that the variables are continually compounding and changing, and (c) in the case of living systems, we have added complexities too, due to the property of being dynamic. And, interestingly, even in the case of a computer, which is considerably less complex than a human being, the same issues rear their heads.

To illustrate what I mean, here is a quotation from an excellent and informative book I am reading at the moment, “Programming the Universe – A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos” (2006). It discusses the intriguing question of whether the entire universe could be considered a giant computer, with all phenomena representing information fields and the processing of information within that computer. It is written by one of the world’s leading experts on complexity theory, Seth Lloyd, MIT Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering, long-term adjunct member of the Santa Fe Institute (an institute dedicated to complex systems research) and the first person in history to find a way to build a “quantum computer”:

Uncomputability: A bit is a simple thing; a computer is a simple machine. But this doesn’t mean that computers are incapable of complex and sophisticated behavior. One counterintuitive result of a computer’s fundamentally logical operation is that its future behavior is intrinsically unpredictable.

The only way to find out what a computer will do once it has embarked upon a computation is to wait and see what happens. In the 1930s, the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel showed that any sufficiently powerful mathematical theory has statements that, if false, would render the theory inconsistent but that cannot be proved to be true. All sufficiently powerful systems of logic contain unprovable statements. The computational analog of an unprovable statement is an uncomputable quantity.

…Programming computers to perform simple human tasks is difficult: getting a computerized robot to vacuum a room or empty a dishwasher, even to minimal standards, is a problem that has outstripped the abilities of several generations of researchers in artificial intelligence. By contrast, no special effort is required to program a computer to behave in unpredictable and annoying ways.

Getting back to medicine, and to FCT: Each time an FCT practitioner assesses a patient, a treatment plan is drawn up. Then the patient will usually come back for a follow-up consultation after a period of weeks or months, as a cyclical process of treating layers of toxicity is typically undergone. During the interim period, after the initial treatment, but before each follow-up, there is typically a period of time when life continues and problems sometimes arise due to environmental factors, lifestyle factors and/or ongoing health factors. If and when this happens, then, depending on the patient (and even more so if the pacing has been delayed or slowed beyond what was recommended), we usually advise them to contact the practitioner right away, but sometimes it is not needed or not possible, and, where the practitioner feels it is relevant, certain remedies may be offered to keep on the shelf for “possible future use” as “likely options” for certain given eventualities.

Thus we have two strands, here, which I will single out clearly for my case example:

1. The primary course of treatment, through periodic re-tests and treatments over a period of time. In my case, this led to dramatic, sustained improvement of all symptoms, leading after a period of time to complete resolution of the health conditions, including the migraines. I was delighted at the successful result.
2. Secondarily, and optionally, certain “as needed” remedies on the shelf may be offered, particularly if symptoms may arise or tend to arise periodically in between treatments, and in my case, this was to help me manage a migraine while it was taking place. Unfortunately, I never actually had a migraine on the exact day or week when I had an appointment with Dr Yurkovsky. As I mentioned, they only came on about once every month or two, and unpredictably so. And naturally, I was not able to phone him at times such as 4am when they would often arise. So he offered me options for possibilities I could try, when the migraine occurred. As described above, such predictions are “uncomputable quantities” in complex systems. However, remedies can be chosen which have tended to be helpful in past clinical situations, and usually they are adequate for this task; and if not, a different selection may next be explored instead which, like the previous one, is not chosen randomly, but based on choosing the specific tools most likely to be needed. In this case, think of it like a carpenter who will be travelling to work on pieces of carpentry in another country, and asks you, “Can you give me some additional tools I am most likely to need when I get there, in the case that a particular need suddenly arises?” You can, and will choose those best adapted to everything known about the case in hand. But a soothsayer, you are not

It is worth emphasizing, of course, that serious chronic ailments don’t tend to simply disappear in a puff of smoke. . . usually they have taken many years to develop (often in parallel to a period of bioaccumulation of toxins of long duration), and then it takes a bit of time to unravel them again.

In the case of my migraines, they were about 80-90% resolved within a year, and 100% resolved during the second year. Please bear in mind that this was about a decade ago, too, and that Dr Yurkovsky has evolved the FCT system further since then, so that what was already a brilliant result back then (for which I will be forever grateful to him), would nowadays be even faster in a typical migraine case of similar history. In other words, the period of time that a given condition tended to require in treatment ten years ago, has become in general significantly shorter in many cases, thanks to the improvements Dr Yurkovsky has made to the system, turning a brilliant “flying machine” into an even faster brilliant “flying machine”.

Naturally, then, while we are addressing the chronic state (i.e., underlying long-term issues in the system such as toxicity bioaccumulation, ingrained infections, etc.), sometimes it is helpful to provide some FCT remedies, where possible, to help manage short-term symptoms too. That is the topic of the rest of my blog below – not the treatment of my migraines, but rather, their short-term management via “uncomputable quantities”, and the amazing end result of Dr Yurkovsky’s actions.

The long-term plan of treatment proceeded. My migraines became gradually less intense and less frequent, in stages after each of the FCT treatments was given. But I also wanted some way of affording relief when a migraine actually occurred and preferred not to depend on pain-killers, and if an FCT remedy could be given in place of the painkiller, then great. First, Dr Yurkovsky offered me the following sarcode (organ support remedy) for this:

-          Brain

It is an excellent remedy, and often a fine choice for such situations, but when a migraine was coming on for me, this remedy did nothing to stop it.

This example – which mirrors hundreds if not thousands of others very similar to it in this particular way which I have since observed with my own patients – also illustrates how the primary function of FCT remedies is not the placebo effect, because an FCT plan of treatment doesn’t resolve everything in one fell swoop, but rather, in a layered process, and so there are often times that a particular area of the case doesn’t shift until a particular point is touched (think of it, if you like, as its “turn in the queue”). It is as though a carpenter needs to find exactly the right screw to turn before that part of his design will come to fruition. Magically believing that you have found the right size of screw simply doesn’t cut the muster, as a thumb-rule.

So I continued to rely on painkillers instead, for the immediate future, as Brain simply wasn’t doing the trick. Dr Yurkovsky advised, and I agree with him based on my own clinical experience since then, that in an acute situation, if you have given the right FCT remedy to alleviate matters quickly, you would expect a result usually within the first half an hour, or sometimes you might want to allow up to an hour. So although I was trying Brain sarcode when migraines occurred, after an hour of unremitting agony in my head, following and untouched by the Brain sarcode, I would again have to resort to the painkiller instead.

Next we tried another remedy (sarcode, again) in place of Brain::

-          Supportive Apparatus + Nerve Tissue

This is a musculo-skeletal and neurological remedy particularly useful in other cases where the location of the pain was similar to mine (i.e., rising up from the neck towards the head), and it was also a remedy which had been needed in my treatments anyway, so it was a sensible choice as another likely helper for the “uncomputable quantity” of the “PRN remedy”. However, although this remedy had helped in other ways, like Brain it was not able to stop a migraine for me in the moment it was happening. Again bear in mind that FCT aims primarily to remove the underlying causes, to prevent future occurrences of symptoms such as these migraines, and in this respect it succeeded nobly; thus, along the way, a remedy to help alleviate a temporary symptom, too, would have been a nice added luxury, to enable me to cut out the painkillers sooner.

I was at that time only a patient, not yet a student or practitioner of FCT, so my knowledge of the process was limited. However, I also tried some other remedies which I chose on my own, at various points during the hours when I observed a migraine “coming on”, in my search for a quick relief, and these hadn’t helped either; such as Nerve Tissue, Capillary, Lymph, Adrenals, Kidney, Connective Tissue, Emotional Centre and Cerebellum. And there are plenty of others that might have been tried, but weren’t. I had also previously tried other interventions in the moment of the migraine occurring, such as targeted TCM of various types.

Remember that guy I quoted earlier? The one who asked why such precision was necessary? Well, just take a look now at the possibilities I have mentioned in terms of so many tissues playing a conceivable role! We could easily, also, add the influence of others in the body, such as the bone marrow, on the local syptoms, if we wanted to. If he were reading all this, he would surely be shaking his head, saying, “I told you so! So much precision, and nothing brings that short term relief anyway! Why bother breaking things down to all of these separate organs and tissues? Surely the tools are too precise?”

On the contrary, the precision simply hadn’t been directed, yet, at the exact spot that would be so powerful in its impact that it could serve to stop my migraine in its tracks while it was happening.

Well, nothing I had so far tried, in terms of short-term alleviation, was capable of even slightly diminishing the pain of a migraine once it was underway, or even once it was beginning to emerge (at which point, it seemed impossible to stop in its tracks – it felt, each time, like an unstoppable train going resolutely down the tracks, and your only choice is to get out of its way). All of the remedies mentioned so far, and others, helped me in other ways, and contributed towards the overall progress I made over the plan of treatment. But I hadn’t found a remedy which would be capable of stopping an actual migraine in its tracks, for me, once it was underway, as a matter of acute support from time to time. . .

Dr Yurkovsky kept trying – and this is the main point of this blog – especially for any practitioners reading this: Do not stop trying. Do not give up so easily, whatever the goal is.

Do not think that just because nothing has worked up till now, for a given objective, that nothing will work.

Sometimes it just means that a little more detective work will be needed – and that is something which all doctors, of all types and forms, have to live with, due to human bodies being complex systems. . . There could be many situations with different permutations, but in this particular example, it shows how it is possible to have not refined your precision quite enough to hit the spot optimally yet; that you’re using the right kind of tool (screwdriver) and of a right kind of size, but that some further precision of the tool size would make a difference to turn matters around.

Always remember this, and your patients will be forever grateful to you that you continued the detective work! I can’t begin to tell you how many times this simple piece of advice has borne out, in different ways and contexts and over various lengths of time depending on the context, and extending far beyond this single, simple example. A given therapeutic result may be blocked for an entirely different reason – as the environment or lifestyle may be a key factor – and are often so – and so all these possibilities need to be remembered, and I’m not seeking to over-simplify a complex question!

And so it was that Dr Yurkovsky hit upon the spot with the right degree of precision for the acute alleviation of my migraines when one was happening. One day, the remedy he suggested I use was this one:

-          Cerebral Artery

I assumed it would be just one more in the list, and no more effective than any of the others. How wrong could I be!

A migraine came on, and I took Cerebral Artery. Then I looked at my clock (4:40am) and groaned in bed, thinking:

Oh God, how will I get through the next hour? Here we are again. . .

(Reminds me of the John Lennon song, “Whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right, it’s all right!”) I was eyeing up the painkillers, but determined to wait until 5:40am before going for them – a procedure that, as mentioned above, I had already undergone a number of times with support remedies that didn’t stop the pain while it was happening, not to mention lots of things I had tried from other therapies in previous years.

For the next 10 minutes I was writhing in bed, in the usual agony, and with no different expectations or hopes to usual.

If you can think back to any times when you have been in such intense pain that you can barely maintain your level of conscious thought, then you will understand me when I say that even just to reach for the remedy, on each occasion this had occurred, took a great effort and some groaning. . .  Far from entertaining any notions of expectation or belief, there was no room in my mind for anything but pain, quite apart from my knowledge and assumption, by this stage, that no remedy, from anyone, was going to be capable of alleviating any acute migraines for me quickly. Thus each time I took a remedy in such a situation, it was in itself an act of will-power to even reach for it and give it a try (and one which sometimes I did not even manage), even if just so that I could honestly know later on that I had at least given it a chance, because every bone in my body was as if shouting to me, “Don’t waste your time, don’t suffer another hour of agony when you could be taking a painkiller!!”

It may be likened, perhaps, to being out at sea in a boat, in the middle of a storm – you will not have a moment to stop and think about whether you believe in Fate or God to protect your boat or not (although if you did stop for a moment, you would be more likely cursing your fate rather than expressing your trust or faith), because in the moment of the storm’s fury you will be totally preoccupied dealing with the catastrophe on the boat and running around trying to survive.

Then suddenly, the pain began to diminish. It was too good to be true, so I kept still, thinking that maybe it wasn’t really the case or wouldn’t last. It seemed too good to believe, so I disbelieved it. (Rather than placebo, here was a moment when “nocebo” might have occurred!) But sure enough, the pain continued to diminish, and within another 2-3 minutes, the pain was gone entirely. I still couldn’t believe it. After this, I had the most divine, pain-free sleep you can imagine, and woke up like a new baby stretching its arms to shake off the fairy-dust.

From that point forward, I didn’t need painkillers for my migraines any more, while, in parallel, the FCT treatments themselves continued for the overall plan of other symptoms, detoxification and system healing, with complete resolution after the course of treatment.

And here is, then, a simple and practical answer to that question, “Why is such precision needed, compared with other therapies?” The answer is: because it works. And because often it works even when nothing else works from any other form of medicine or therapy.

Let’s start with a question: what is the most cost effective, most under-rated healing tool available to all medical practitioners, alternative or otherwise? You can’t see it or feel it. It gives no readings and requires no dispensing. Some call it the power of positive thinking while others prefer to think in terms of spiritual connection and prayer. Whatever label you give there is a non physical, non-directly measurable force that aids healing. Its effects have been measured in double blind studies and there are countless anecdotal stories from patients and doctors alike to testify to its effectiveness.

It doesn’t fit into the neat biochemical world of modern medicine and so we’re all a bit embarrassed by it. How do we deal with this kind of “inconvenient truth”? Well, we can give a pejorative label and refer to it in hushed tones as some sort of underhand practice.

Yes, I’m referring to what is lovingly known as the placebo effect and wondering what place this has in medical practice. I think it’s fair to say that the conventional attitude is one of suspicion whereby during a drug trial the patient is being “hoodwinked” into believing that a pill is “real” whereas it has in fact no active ingredient at all. Its sole function is to set a baseline standard that the “real” drug has to beat.

Miraculously, in a consistently high percentage of cases taking this “fake” medicine, the patient’s condition improves. Not only that but placebo performance is gaining ground by creating higher baseline results for the drugs to beat every year. The fact that many patients continue to stay well on this long term non-medication seems to be a fact which is ignored or stored away under unexplainable phenomena. Clearly something is happening here that current paradigms fail to explain.

I’d like to explore some personal perspectives on this subject. My current views regarding placebo are largely informed by Ervin Laszlo’s theories of information fields. What Laszlo argues is that in its most fundamental essence the universe is composed of an infinite network of intersecting information fields that interact in such a way as to constantly refine and develop the intelligence they hold. It seems we live in a universe whose mission is to get smarter.

Basically the universe is talking to itself in an intimate learning process all the time. These information fields seem to know no barrier in space or time. We think of information as passive (ie: simply data held in libraries, computers, memory banks etc…) but in this model information is actively and continually affecting the nature of everything. It appears to be infinitely accessible at every point in space and at every point in time.

It also appears to be inextricably linked to matter and the observable universe. For example, homoeopathy shows us that the element, sulphur, has a completely different personality from potassium or oxygen or calcium and so on. I believe that matter is formed from information that is carved out of space. But the relationship is not one way: all matter, inanimate or animate, is in a bilateral relationship with information fields.

Living systems are special cases of information based phenomena in that they appear to have the ability for varying degrees of awareness. In the case of humans this awareness has reached a point whereby we have the power to consciously feedback and change the very information fields that formed us. We are both formed from information and are the process of its transformation into higher intelligence. As someone with an engineering training I immediately sense the danger of a positive feedback loop leading to instability.

This is why our species is at such precarious point in time. The sorcerer’s apprentice has learnt the power of magic but does not know how to control it or does not have the maturity to use it in a responsible or holistic way. We are laying down pathological templates in the information fields that direct and inform us, society, the environment, and the planet not only for ourselves but for future generations as well. We have learnt to run before we could properly walk. However, I digress and this is a subject that deserves an article of its own.

If we are essentially information that has reached a certain stage of sophistication or “knowledge” then disease is a state in which that “knowledge” has become degraded or confused or muddled up. In a nutshell pathology is the loss of identity to a greater or lesser extent.

Placebo is perceived to act on the basis of what we can see, hear, feel, touch, taste ; what we believe and where we place our trust or confidence. This is because mainstream thinking does not even recognise that anything beyond the directly measurable universe can affect us materially. This assumption is evidently not true.

Homoeopaths state that the effect of homoeopathy cannot be “placebo” because it works on animals. This is true but is not complete. Placebo and homoeopathic healing are different but only to the extent that they are disparate aspects of the same phenomenon: the healing power of information fields.

They both work as the result of tapping into these information fields so that our information becomes upgraded, order is restored and healing follows as surely as day follows night.

I can think at least six examples of healing through information fields:

1) Healing through exchange with another human in close physical proximity (eg: therapeutic touch or reiki)
2) Healing through subtle energy practice or technique (ie: using qi in acupuncture or qi gong)
3) Healing through the use of information acting at biological, organ, tissue, cellular, or elemental level without the need for any conscious thought at all (eg: homoeopathy & FCT)
4) Healing through the intention of another person, at a distance, without the need for presence or contact (eg: distance prayer or healing intention at a distance)
5) Healing through spiritual practice & experience (eg: religious prayer or shamanic ritual or meditation)
6) Healing through one’s own belief or trust – typically scientific belief (eg: placebo effect)

The diagram below summarises how these six categories can all fit together into the overall picture of information based healing:

Clearly I’m taking a reductionist approach here to phenomena which in reality are not entirely separable. For example any time a subtle energy therapy such as an acupuncture session is delivered, there is also a human exchange involving loving or healing intention.

Likewise (as Simon Rees has pointed out to me) in so called double blind trials of homoeopathy, the placebo handed to patient carries the knowledge of the therapeutic intent of the homeopath. There is a saying in homoeopathy that it’s the prescription that is homoeopathic rather than the remedy. Thus no matter how “inert” the substance, by virtue of the event of the practitioner/patient interaction it becomes the carrier – a focal point of action – of the homoeopath’s prescription. If the remedy intended was for example, Pulsatilla, then the placebo handed to the patient becomes a carrier of that “quantum package of information” known as “Pulsatilla.”

There is no doubt in my mind that so-called energy medicine such as homeopathy and FCT tap into information fields and create “magical” cures by raising the “body IQ” of the patient. In fact I doubt that any lasting cure can ever be accomplished without the use of information. So by ignoring the effectiveness of placebo or even its very existence simply because we have no paradigm to entertain it, modern medicine is relegating itself to palliative procedures. And these are based on a biochemical paradigm that is several steps away from where the real action is happening.

Our bodies use biochemistry in the way that a painter uses paint. The way we try to understand the human body – this masterpiece of art we inhabit every day – is similar to trying to appreciate a Picasso painting by counting the pixels of different colours or putting our nose up against a Rembrandt in order to analyse one square centimetre of the canvas.

But ours is not a static creation, stable for all time. By the time the analysis or test is done the object of our interest has changed, moved on, more concerned with its role in the dynamic process we call life.

In pursuit of scientific respectability, we have robbed medicine of its spirit and we’re left with an empty mass of double blind studies, reference numbers, medical labels, and models based on observable data and processes we can measure.

Placebo’s place in that sterile world is one of an oddity, a phenomenon we seek to explain away by reference to mind games. Slowly we begin to embrace the unknown through tentative attempts at bringing it back in from the cold with fields of study such as “psychoneuroimmunology.”

But all the time we need to position it at a level where it can be explained in biochemical terms. Placebo is bigger than that. It is the tip of a massive iceberg that holds beneath it the promise of a vast potential to heal and cure. However, we must first dare to “know” what we can’t directly see or measure.

Hahnemann said “aude sapere” – dare to know. In other words dare to know that which you cannot fully understand. Never stop in your quest for a model which explains but never let the lack of such stop you from being all you can. Dr. Yurkovsky has always operated beyond the accepted limits of scientific wisdom but he has never stopped in his quest to understand the results of his work.

So I hope you will forgive my reductionism here. My intent is not to try and take apart the inseparable but to pause for a moment and try to define the separate entities within the overall phenomenon we call “healing.” What I conclude is that it is intimately interlaced with therapeutic information that can never be bound within a single language.

Embracing this higher paradigm and letting go of our obsession with the old one is not possible with intellectual analysis alone but requires a dynamic and interactive process of experimentation -> results -> analysis -> experimentation -> results…. and so on. I’m looking forward to your results no matter how strange they may sound to me.