| This Is Not Here Sue Lanzon |
I received an email today from the US
concerning the implication of anti-perspirants as a causative agent in breast cancer. This
was not news to me as, while studying homoeopathy, one learns very quickly about the
dangers of suppression of both normal and abnormal bodily secretions. There are three avenues through which the healthy human organism excretes toxins and waste: urine, faeces and sweat, and when any of these is not working properly, or there are external factors outweighing the efficiency of their mechanisms, abnormal secretions such as mucus discharges and skin eruptions follow. You are what you eliminate. Unfortunately, what usually happens when abnormal secretions begin to appear is that, through medical intervention, they are suppressed; antibiotics for a bad cough, steroid cream for eczema etc. This does not allow the body to rid itself of whatever is causing the imbalance but drives the problem deeper inwards. Therefore, an infection which starts in the mucous membranes, if suppressed, may travel to the synovial membranes surrounding the joints and one starts to see arthritic problems, or the treatment of eczema with steroids pushes the problem further into the organism, which in turn affects the lungs, causing asthma. The lymphatic system (the drainage canals of the body) becomes compromised. The pinnacle of this skewed approach to discharge is vaccination, whereby the inflammatory diseases of childhood, which play a major role in strengthening the immune system and building health, are suppressed before they even appear. Is it a coincidence that at the same time as we have been so subjected to the suppression of inflammatory, discharging processes, the sclerotic, tumour- forming diseases have become so widespread. I think not, and from this angle cancer can often be attributed to the continual suppression of pus and catarrh. However, there is more going on than purely physical responses. Suppression is a hall-mark of our culture. It is a means of social control. Without it, it is believed, there would be anarchy, chaos. But suppression is also a means of disconnecting us from our inate wisdom, and when that connection is lost on a psycho/spiritual level, the wisdom of the body is also deeply disturbed, and must manifest symptoms in order to draw our attention to the core imbalance. As Jean Houston says, “We pathologise because we cannot mythologise”. In other words, the level of forgetting has reached such depths culturally that when presented with any scenario which demands a communication with the self, (or selves), the conscious mind has no resource models to draw from, no ritual with which to explore, no map of integration with which to navigate, and illness is often the result, as the physical body takes the burden of the strain of an unexpressed, or unmade connection in these deeper realms. This theory of the roots of disease can be applied to anything from a head-ache to a heart attack. In looking at the causes of cancer it is important to look one step further, due to its prevalence in the west; one in three people will develop cancer at some point in their lives. Cancer patients often have a history of recent loss or bereavement and it is now accepted by the medical profession that there is a link between this and the onset of the disease; shock and grief send the immune system plummeting and the mechanisms by which to grieve “healthily” are unavailable due to both cultural factors and personal reluctance or inability to feel fully engaged with the grieving process - denial leads to suppression leads to cancer. But often cancer appears in seemingly healthy, happy individuals, who are “struck down” by the disease with no obvious emotional trauma as precedent. It is by no means inevitable that trauma will produce a carcinogenic state. Events themselves are unimportant in this context - it’s what the individual does with them that counts. Small events traumatise one person, large events do not traumatise another. What then, is the trigger for cancer, the common thread? In general, science says that external influences are the cause, (although inherited susceptibility is now recognised as a contributory factor), and the body is the machine which reacts. From acid rain to anti-perspirants, pollution to power-lines, there are certainly enough culprits around, and I do not dismiss any of them. But beneath all these, way down deep in the nitty-gritty, the major loss in a cancer victim’s life is often their own sense of identity. Physiologically, the immune system is constantly concerned with identity. That is what it is for, its primary function being to decide what is friendly or inimical to the organism. Cancer cells are cells which have lost their identity. Simply, they have forgotten to die, and instead proliferate. Auto-immune diseases are those in which the body has become confused about identity, and begins to attack itself. Vaccination is a process by which the body is forced artifically to defend itself, bypassing the normal stages of infection, any one of which could see the infection resolved. The identification mechanisms are thwarted. Psychologically, any emotional suppression, whether it be of grief, anger, guilt, hate; a history of abuse or domination; a history of nursing a sick spouse or relative for a long time, (a scenario so relentless that the identity of the carer becomes submerged by the dictates of the situation); an excessive sense of duty, over-conscientiousness, over-responsibility, (eg children who are burdened with having to behave like adults), a need to please, a need for perfectionism, a need for control - all these point to a lack of freedom of expression which can lead to confusion or loss of identity. They are, also, all indications, among many others, for giving the homoeopathic remedy Carcinosin.* Edward Whitmont called cancer “the penalty of the unlived life”. As our increasingly fragmented cultural and social waywardness has forced us to disengage from the collective unconscious, from myth and ritual; as the references which held our ancestors together have disintegrated; as science and technology have dismissed the sacred relationship between humans and the rest of nature to the extent that we hold the means of our own planetary destruction; the unlived life is to a greater or lesser extent something which we all experience, starting in the womb. The increasing emphasis on the individual, beginning with post-war prosperity, continuing through the “Me” decade of the 1970s, the explosion of free-market economics in the 1980s, encapsulated in Margaret Thatcher’s iniquitous phrase, “There is no such thing as society”, to the current obsession with self-help books, and availability of myriad therapies and techniques with which to find, or at least look for, the “self”, reflects this crisis. Approximately ninety five per cent of my patients require Carcinosin at some point in their treatment. This does not mean that they are pre-cancerous in a bodily sense, but that their mental and emotional pictures reflect the elements which are needed to produce a carcinogenic state, the macrocosm of the society mirrored in the microcosm of human behaviour. I’ve given Carcinosin to my children, my mother, my partner, my friends and to myself, all of us relatively healthy types, with freedom to move across emotional boundaries and the means with which to do so. But the carcinogenic influence is now so pervasive that nearly all of us require help to integrate, with each other and, most importantly, with ourselves. The magic of homoeopathy is such that it often only needs one dose for someone to make that shift and connect with a part of the self that was not being heard. Lastly, two things leap out at me from the list of mind symptoms for Carcinosin in the homoeopathic Materia Medica. One is a love of thunderstorms, as if the emotionally suppressed individual is assuaged by connecting with the extreme overt manifestation of the power of nature, a potentially destructive power, but one that produces electricity. Does it help them perhaps to “plug in”? The other is a love of dancing. Isn’t it curious that we have now invented a drug, Ecstasy, which enables one to dance all night. As Ian Watson has pointed out, Ecstasy is an “empathogen”, it induces a state of empathy and opens the heart. No wonder it is classed as a dangerous drug. Sue Lanzon, December 1999. * Carcinosin - a homoeopathic nosode, made from disease tissue. References:
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