Suppression – One of the Biggest Culprits of our Crisis? Some Comments on Stephinity Salazar

Samuel Hahnemann's homeopathy went through various phases, and the development is not finished, not even today.Initially, it was a simple empirical method: Hahnemann observed that medicinal substances taken by volunteers produced symptoms in healthy people.When used for the very symptoms in sick people, the disease could be cured.Often, not always.Hahnemann tested the most common and some less common medicinal substances of his time, some 100 initially, in healthy volunteers.These so-called "provings" established the homeopathic material medica, the symptom collections homeopaths used (Walach, 1994;Walach & Teut, 2015).But even with a much more expanded materia medica, Hahnemann could not cure everyone, as he initially thought he could.Perhaps some megalomania on his part was also what spurred him on.At any rate, later in his career and after much trial and error, he arrived at his miasm theory of chronic diseases.This is what Dr. Salazar presents nicely in her paper.It is an attempt of getting at what I have once called the temporal Gestalt of the disease pattern: how symptoms and diseases are related within a person, and even beyond individual lives across the boundaries of generations into transgenerational patterns (Walach, 1986).Hahnemann observed these patterns and related them to the big infectious or parasitic diseases of his time: scabies (psora), gonorrhea (sycosis), and syphilis.Modern theorizing referred to by Dr. Salazar added tuberculosis and cancer.These big diseases have one thing in common, Hahnemann thought: They are often treated by treatments which are thought to be curative, but which are, in truth, making problems worse long term.Hahnemann called this process "suppression", namely suppression of symptoms, away from the surface into the core of the organism, where the disease will, in the long run, seek other, usually more severe and more dangerous outlets.Take a modern example, atopic dermatitis (AD).This would be a paradigmatic psoric disease in Hahnemann's terms, a disease that is due to a "weakness" in the system.In modern terms, it is a systemic overreagibility of the organism, an imbalance between pro-inflammatory and inhibitory immune processes.AD is typically treated with topical steroid creams that normally work well.In more severe cases, systemic steroids are used to treat the inflammation proneness of the organism.The same is true for another atopic disease, mutatis mutandis, asthma.A "suppression" of symptoms works well, usually and for a certain time, but does not cure the disease itself.Often, the disposition is passed on to the offspring, who may or may not develop the same or a similar disease.However, often the cost of this "suppressive" treatment is a shifting of the disease.Atopic dermatitis might develop into asthma, after a while.Or a more severe disease might develop.Now it is time to introduce the temporal Gestalt.While modern theorizing would not