Biolumanetic Technology & Homeopathy: A valid reflection of homeopathy today?

A discussion of clinical findings using Biolumentics within a homeopathic practice

  In August 1998 Charles Wansbrough and I began to use Biolumanetic technology in our homeopathic practice to facilitate the selection of homeopathic remedies.   We had decided that we would enter this project with an open mind and in the spirit of the unprejudiced observer.  We were aware that the world of homeopathy was rife with rules, beliefs and myths and we wanted to inspect these thoroughly for truth and also to be ruthless in assessing our results.  Everything was up for grabs.  Three and a half years later, after amassing much data, I felt it was time to summarise our clinical findings.  Whilst we are conscious that one can never separate the observer from the observed, we believe that our findings may represent a valid and authentic reflection of homeopathy today and its inherent difficulties.   This article is about homeopathy and I therefore do not wish to present a detailed description of the technology, but for the sake of readers who are not familiar with Biolumanetics, I feel obliged to give a brief introduction. 

  An engineer called Patrick Richards is the founder of Biolumanetics and like many inventions it was created quite accidentally.  Patrick originally designed an instrument to balance air temperatures to enable a more efficient management of energy.  However, when testing his technology in various offices, he discovered that the machine (which incidentally looks like a rather large stereo speaker) not only created a more uniform temperature gradient but also that the workers started to report improvements in their health.  It appeared to alter the magnetic field of the environment and also sensitive light meters also indicated an increase in light emissions in the working area.  Patrick then made further explorations using photography in the field.  Photographs when taken in this altered field often produced anomalous images of the subjects – either fuzzy or with multiple images.  After years of research, Patrick concluded that people suffering from health challenges usually produced fuzzy or distorted images when photographed whilst healthy individuals produced clear and ‘normal’ photographs.  A further development revealed that when subjects held a correct remedy or appropriate medicine for their condition were photographed within the field totally clear images were obtained.  Patrick went on to develop his own range of subtle medicines which he called chelates and he set up his own clinic using the technology to treat a wide range of disorders often untreatable by orthodox means. 

  Enter Charles Wansbrough onto the scene.  Charles had heard about the technology and had felt intrigued and excited by the prospect of a tool which might objectively measure the “vital force” and which would hopefully make the selection of a homeopathic remedy more efficient.   Charles eventually met Patrick in person at a conference and Patrick agreed to sell Charles a machine so that he might research the possibilities in the homeopathic arena.  Shortly afterwards I joined Charles in order to assist him in this endeavour.  I had been practising homeopathy since 1986 but had felt increasingly dispirited with the mediocrity of my results.  I knew that when homeopathy worked there was no other medicine to equal its power but to find the correct simillimum for my patients often felt arduous, confusing and downright impossible at times. 

  Our protocol was to take an initial photograph of our patients, followed by a detailed homeopathic case, and then patients would hold various remedies while we photographed them.  We made the assumption that a remedy which produced a coherent photograph when held by the patient was likely to be the simillimum or, at the very least, might constitute a beneficial remedy for that patient.  Coherence was our benchmark for any remedy which we gave in our clinic and we have seen from our results that this has proved to be a valid and pragmatic modus operandi. 

  Below I will discuss our findings. 

  1.      There are no major or minor remedies, only the correct remedy for the patient. 

  Charles and I embarked upon our venture with high hopes of finding a way to make homeopathy simpler and more effective.  However, we soon found ourselves feeling rather dispirited.  This was due to the fact that only very rarely did the polycrest remedies produce coherent photographs.  At this point we turned in desperation to Jan Scholten’s work on the mineral kingdom and without his input I think we might never have got off the starting block.  We discovered that every patient entering our clinic needed a very precise prescription.  There appeared to be no short-cuts or handy specifics.  Following on from our study of Jan Scholten’s material, we also were obliged to scan all the newly proved remedies and to read all the back issues of Homeopathic Links to hunt out unusual remedies.  In some cases only these would produce the clarity which we knew would provoke movement in our patients.  We have, of course, given polycrests in our clinic but these prescriptions do not constitute the majority of our prescriptions.  For instance, we have given Pulsatilla literally twice over the last 3 years.  This is not because we have not tested it.  It is just that the remedy often refuses to yield clarity even in those cases where one would swear blind that this was a “Pulsatilla case.”  I recall one particular case where any rational homeopath would definitely have given Pulsatilla – indeed you would have been mad not to – but the prescription which yielded total clarity was not Pulsatilla but the newly proved remedy Kauri (Agathis australis).   Similarly with Natrum muriaticum.  Often the remedy which was eventually given was another Muriaticum salt, for example Cuprum muriaticum or Aurum muriaticum  This would explain to me how prior to the technology often I would  give Natrum muriaticum in what appeared to be a classic Natrum muriaticum case, only to be severely disappointed by the result.

  The precision which is required in homeopathy was also confirmed when I decided to bring into the clinic some patients of mine whom I had been treating over a number of years prior to the technology but for whom I had the sense that I had not yet found the optimum remedy.  (Truthfully, how many of these patients do you find on your books?)  I recall a mother and daughter who came.  I had Charles retake their cases and we spent about four hours struggling to achieve clarity.  The daughter, who suffered from sore throats and dysmennorhea  I had treated mainly with Silica and Tuberculinum over the years with some improvement but no lasting disappearance of her symptoms.  The two remedies which eventually cleared up the case were Iris Germanica and Calcarea silicata.  The mother had various complaints including recurrent bronchitis and anxiety.  I had lost count of the remedies which I had tried with her and I never had felt satisfied with the results.  The eventual remedy which was given which was to make a profound difference to her health was Betula Alba.  We found this all rather alarming but it did explain the difficulties I had encountered in both these cases. 

  The problem with having to find a highly individual remedy for each patient who walks into our clinic is that we literally have to scan thousands of remedies.  We found ourselves sinking under a morass of information.  At this point Charles started to work on a workbook where the remedies would be categorised according to their kingdom and also he began to create “webs” of the different kingdoms.  In this way we started to get some kind of handle on things.  We now are able to intuit much more accurately when a patient requires a mineral, plant or animal remedy.  The plant remedies, however,  present us with the greatest difficulty in that there are literally thousands of remedies about which we know very little. 

  2.      In an unknown case give an unknown remedy

  I have borrowed the above aphorism from Jan Scholten and we can confirm its validity.   At first we were tempted to try and fit the remedies we knew to the particular case.  After 3 ½ years of work we find ourselves in the unenviable position of completing taking the case and knowing more often than we enjoy that we haven’t got a clue what remedy the patient requires.  So I would say that after 13 years of practice I now know when I don’t know.  This may be a step up but it can often feel terribly daunting.  The problem is how do you find a remedy that you don’t know?  We do use the repertory (although Charles and I would confess not be the greatest of repertorisers) and all the books and computer programmes at our disposal.  But we also using dowsing at times.  We use our pendulums to hunt out unknown remedies when we are at the end of more analytical methods.  Despite being quite “classical” in our approach, we have no sense of shame in this.  We figure that our job is to find the best possible remedy for the person in front of us and we will use any methods to achieve this aim.  Often, however, I will use my pendulum just to focus my mind while I scan the remedies in our workbook and open myself up to inspiration from the gods.  I find myself wondering whether classical giants like Vithoulkas and Mangialavori actually rely on their intuition much more than they let on.  Charles and I both agree that the practice of homeopathy is the marriage of the analytical and the intuitive.  Some of our best prescriptions have arisen from a sudden intuitive flash in one or other of us and of course the best prescription is that which can be analytically validated as well.  This is not always possible if there is very little information about the remedy or it has only recently been proved.

3.      There is a wide variation of response to homeopathic remedies due to the differing energetic sensitivity. 

  This is where I am going to appear to contradict myself somewhat.  In my description of the technology I mentioned that Patrick Richards discovered that people suffering from health challenges would produce fuzzy pictures while those in good health produced clear images.  Actually, we discovered that the story is a little more complicated than this.  At first we were puzzled when patients would come into the clinic suffering from quite serious and/or chronic conditions and would produce almost coherent base photographs whilst others with much milder illnesses would produce much fuzzier images.  What was going on?  

  After much research, we concluded that the base photograph revealed not so much the state of health of the patient but rather revealed their ‘band widths’ in relation to homeopathic remedies.  For example, a patient arrived at our clinic suffering from a painful type of arthritis.  His base photograph, however, was almost completely coherent which did not seem to reflect either the severity of his illness nor his distress.  Our task was to find a remedy which produced either an equally clear or even clearer photograph.  The remedy we eventually found was Granite which when administered cleared about 50 per cent of the patient’s symptoms.   On returning after a month for a follow up appointment the patient’s base was much fuzzier.  Based upon this case and others, we concluded that the base photograph actually provided us with a picture of the energetic configuration of the patient.  Some patients appear to have more tightly bound, armoured, energy systems which require a kind of “breaking down” before other remedies act.  This is reflected in the coherence of the base photograph.   We have found that these types of patients respond well to “wall” remedies like Granite or Berlin Wall.  The latter remedies seem to break down the armour of the patient and allow other remedies to be given with much better response.  In the case above, the patient was eventually given Strychnine which proved to finish off the case but I doubt whether we would have got anywhere with giving Strychnine as the first prescription.   Other patients whose base photographs are much fuzzier present a much wider band width, being more sensitive to a number of remedies.  As the treatment progresses their base photographs become clearer whereas with the former patients it is the reverse.  At the far end of the wider band width group are those who will prove any remedy you give them, what we might call the sensitives.  This type of patient is well known in proving circles as they sometimes produce symptoms which are the essence of the proven remedy. 

  There is a group of patients who will produce clear photographs when tested with well-selected remedies but who return a month later with no improvement or change whatsoever.  Some of these patients are suffering from incurable illnesses and this is understandable but there are others whose illnesses are not severe and yet do not respond at all to homeopathic remedies, no matter how well selected.  Thankfully, this has proved to be only a small minority of our cases but it has nonetheless proved highly challenging to us.  These days if we encounter a patient like this we do not waste much time in giving remedy after remedy as our brief is to be as efficient as possible.  We either turn to Patrick Richard’s modified homeopathic remedies which he calls Chelates and which can be given in various combinations or else in the more intransigent of cases we turn to sound therapy; we find a particular sound signature for the individual and they are given a “tone box” which plays this sound repeatedly and which they carry around with them.  We have often found that sound therapy is the only therapy  which can radically help patients suffering from illnesses such as MS or chronic ME. 

  4. Potency is not a crucial issue - accuracy of prescription is. 

  We have found the issue of potency to be more or less irrelevant in our practice.  We tend to keep it simple. 

1. Patients who are suffering from functional, non-serious illnesses tend to receive the appropriate remedy in the 200^th centesimal potency and this is given morning and evening for three days (6 tablets).
2.  Patients who have chronic illness tend to be given the remedy in a LM potency, usually starting off with LM1.  We have found that accuracy of prescription is far more important than the potency. 

  In the case of (a) when the patient returns for a follow-up appointment, usually after a month, a base photograph is taken.  If the patient is doing well and their base photograph is coherent then we do not repeat the remedy but ask them to return in a month.  If they are doing well but their base photograph is still fuzzy we test out the same remedy.  Usually this will produce a clear photograph and we will repeat the remedy either in the same potency or in a 1M.  If the patient is doing well and the base photograph is fuzzy but the original remedy does not produce a clear photograph when tested, we may consider that the remedy is close but not close enough so we hunt for another remedy which is even better.  This procedure has been borne out from empirical observation.  We perceive that homeopaths will tend to repeat a remedy going up the potency scale for the patient to eventually stall or even relapse.  Then the homeopath is forced to find a better remedy.  In our view this is because the original remedy was similar but not similar enough.  We believe that our technology fully reflects this truth.  

  In the case of (b) as long as the patient is doing well and the remedy produces a clear photograph we maintain them on that particular remedy taking them up the LM potency scale.  If the patient ceases to do well we will tend to search for another remedy. 

  Despite using a very narrow range of potencies in our clinic, generally we do not experience many aggravations.  I can recall only three aggravations in the time we have been using the technology and these were short and sharp.  Our sense is that if the prescription is very accurate the less likely the individual will encounter an aggravation of symptoms. 

5. The issue of the constitutional – an outdated concept? 

  Jan Scholten in his Epilogue to Homeopathy and the Elements writes that “patients are not remedies”.  Hence, we cannot say about someone, “she is a typical Calcarea.”  Life and human beings are far more complex and fluid and the concept of the constitutional cannot possibly reflect this, fixing the individual into an unchanging, almost rigidified state.  Surely the concept of the constitutional implies that individuals cannot change.  Maybe this theory did have more relevance in bygone ages when people were less urbanised and therefore healthier and less stressed.  Do we require a more sophisticated brand of homeopathy these days which takes into account the rapidity of change to which we have been subjected over the past 50 years?   I recall an article written by Peter Chappell where he wrote about his experience of treating an essentially peasant population in Bulgaria and how amazed he was to find that individuals responded beautifully to the well-known “constitutional remedies”. 

  6. The issue of the simillimum

  The above leads me on to a discussion of the simillimum.  This is a very complex issue and Charles and I discuss this ad infinitum with no absolute conclusions.  We have read Massimo Mangialavori’s beautiful cases where he finds a perfect remedy for his patients and then this remedy is repeated on and off over a period of years, with the patient advised to take the remedy whenever he suffers from an acute.  Unfortunately, this does not reflect our own practice.  We have found that if a very precise remedy is given, the “state” for which the patient is being treated tends to dissolve rather rapidly.  Obviously, if the state is very engrained this process might take a little longer, but it usually does not take years and years.  If the state has been dissolved we do not understand why the same remedy should be given again.  It is our experience that once this state has dissolved, another state (underlying this state) will rise to the surface requiring another prescription.  It is almost as if all the patient’s energy is going into coping with a particular problem.  Once this problem is resolved, another deeper issue will arise to the surface requiring treatment.

  To give an example from our own practice: we took the case of a woman who had problems with anxiety and guilt around the rearing of her baby son.  We gave her Calcarea bromatum which successfully reduced both the anxiety and guilt.  She was a different woman when she returned after a month.  However, about four months later she returned to our clinic wishing for more treatment as a sexual issue which was a problem for her had not been touched by our prescription.  We knew that our patient required another remedy to heal this particular layer which led us to prescribe another remedy, Natrum fluoricum.  Now, I suppose Massimo would argue that had we been better homeopaths we would have been able to find a remedy which encompassed all aspects of this case: the guilt, anxiety and sexual issues.  We are now back with the tyranny of the “constitutional remedy”.  Whilst Charles and I attempt to give prescriptions based upon as much of the totality of the case as we can, this is not always possible.  Either it is because of our lack of knowledge, or perhaps in a lot of cases it is because there is no one remedy which covers such a totality.  It is perhaps significant that Massimo acknowledges that only a third of his cases do wonderfully, another third are mediocre and the remaining third do nothing at all.  Perhaps this is more a reflection of my last point, that in certain cases it is impossible to find a remedy which covers the totality. 

  7. Miasms – a myth?

  We have more or less thrown out the concept of miasmatic treatment as we have found it to be a not particularly useful concept in practice.   We give nosodes based only upon the symptomatology of our patients, i.e. only when the particular nosode is the simillimum at that particular time.  We have never found the nosodes to produce coherent pictures when based upon a theoretical reading of the case e.g. there is a lot of sycosis in the case therefore we should give Medorrhinum, or there is a lot of cancer in the background therefore we should give Carcinosin.  Nosodes are therefore not considered any differently than any other remedy.  Similitude is the only basis upon which we prescribe a nosode.   Perhaps the miasmatic theory was only developed in the first place because Hahnemann lacked enough potencised remedies to fit his cases.  We consider that Sankaran’s more elaborate miasmatic theories are purely symbolic in nature i.e. he has identified patterns of energy which he corresponds to miasms.  These theories help him to find appropriate remedies but in no way do they reflect an actual “reality” of miasms. 

  Conclusion

  My experience over the past 3 ½ years has been that I have been on a very sharp learning curve.  The technology is rather akin to being in the presence of a master teacher who tells you more often than not that you are wrong and the ego finds it sometimes very difficult in the face of such severity However, I can honestly report that I have learnt more about remedies and prescribing whilst using the technology than in the ten years prior.  Hence, the potential of Biolumanetics to make a massive contribution to homeopathic knowledge. 

  We have, however, been somewhat disappointed by the lack of interest in the technology by the homeopathic community in general.  We have encountered very few homeopaths who perceive the potential of this technology, as if the community were frightened to look outside of their own preconceived notions and rigid mind-sets.  Using the technology has been a completely heuristic process, forcing me to abandon my own rigidity of thinking and innate conservatism.  It has made me a much more creative and inspired homeopath.   The technology appears to call forth the highest level of practice from the homeopath and we feel it reflects the difficulties of present-day homeopathic practice rather than producing them.  It is not an easy option, but the results so far have been worth it.