I know of nothing more foundational to improving your health than understanding the healing crisis.  In life things are often not what they seem.  Our so-called education and life experience often lead us to fallacious assumptions that do us damage.  No place is this more true than with how the healing process works.  To experience optimal healing you must understand the process.

EXAMPLE

            Let me give you a composite, fictitious example of this process culled from 20 years of experience working with thousands of people with healing crises:  Jane came to Pacific Health Center with concerns with fatigue, sinus problems, headaches, depression and PMS.  Testing indicated lots of nutrient deficiencies, food and environmental sensitivities and a number of toxins, including Candida albicans yeast overgrowth.  She was accordingly put on a more natural food diet, told which sensitive foods to avoid, and given customized homeopathic formulas to stimulate detoxification, drainage and allergic desensitization.  Her program was rounded out with basic nutritional supplements to correct her indicated deficiencies.

            Now if everything’s working correctly, Jane should start feeling better, right?  Not really!  Jan actually does feel some improved energy almost immediately and is convinced she’s on the road to recovery.  But then one morning she wakes up feeling like she has the flu — aching all over, headache and very tired.  She call up our clinic, convinced that there’s something wrong with her program, only to be told that her program is right on track, everything’s happening as expected and that she is just experiencing a “healing crisis”.

            Then Jane makes an erroneous decision and quits the program angrily demanding her money back.  “I came here to solve my health problems, not to have you make me get sicker,” she says.  And that the last we hear of Jane, the lady who wouldn’t understand how healing takes place, refusing the embrace the healing crisis as the pathway to solving her health problems.

            Of course, most of our clients, especially if they’ve attended one of our seminars or listened to one of our tapes or CDs, understand and are even expecting a healing crisis, so they persevere through this minor discomfort.  Nevertheless, there is a need to better understand this process.

UNDERSTANDING “SYMPTOMS”

            Today’s conventional medicine views symptoms as the disease.  What’s the first question your M.D. asks?  “What are your symptoms?”  They regard the absence of symptoms as the absence of disease.  Conversely, they regard treating and stopping symptoms with drugs as the elimination of disease.  This utterly false philosophy of healing has resulted in not only people being sicker and sicker, but in conventional medical treatment today killing at least 225,000 Americans annually, making it the third leading cause of death (Barbara Starfield, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association, 7/26/00, p. 483-485).

WHAT SYMPTOMS REALLY MEAN

            Though symptoms may indicate a disease process, the little known truth is that symptoms often indicate a healing process.  Just as the absence of symptoms does not equal the absence of disease, so the presence of symptoms does not necessarily indicate the presence of disease.  Bruce Fife, N.D., in his excellent book, The Healing Crisis (HealthWise Publications, P.O. Box 25203, Colorado Springs, CO 80936) states:

Symptoms, however, are a reaction of the body in an effort to fight off illness or disease within the body; they are not illnesses in themselves.

Let me illustrate the concept this way:  Let’s say you notice water running out from under the bathroom door.  That’s a symptom.  You decide to “treat the symptom”, so you go get a roll of paper towels and start soaking up the water.  Or maybe you even get a mop or a large capacity water vacuum, as you think, “As long as there’s no water coming under the bathroom door, I’ve solved the problem.”

            That, of course, would be totally absurd.  The first thing any normal, sane person would do is open the bathroom door to probably discover that the toilet was plugged up and overflowing!  You get a plunger and unplug it so that the water no longer overflows.  Instead of treating the symptom, you instead eliminated the cause.  Now, unplugging the toilet is not always the most pleasant job.  It typically involves some temporary, minor discomfort, but it solves the problem.  It works the same way with our bodies.

WHAT IS A “HEALING CRISIS”?

            I would define a “healing crisis” this way:

A heightened cleansing process whereby the body eliminates toxins resulting in a temporary worsening of symptoms followed by improved health.

A healing crisis is something new for most people . . . but why?  Shouldn’t this be a normal and frequent experience?  It isn’t when your pattern is one of suppressing toxins.  When you eliminate more toxins through your body’s main elimination pathways—the liver, kidneys, bowel, bladder, skin and lungs — you naturally feel worse, particularly if your body is very toxic and you haven’t allowed it the opportunity to regularly cleanse.

SUPPRESSING TOXINS

            Our bodies have a natural detoxifying process stimulated by fasting.  Even if you think you’ve never fasted, in reality everyone fasts every day between their last eating in the evening and the next morning when they break the fast — otherwise known as breakfast.  Most people wake up with a minor healing crisis — they feel crummy . . . until they get that first cup of coffee.

            This so illustrates how utterly confused and deceived most people are about health.  From your night’s fast, your body has just started the cleansing process — it’s saying, in effect:  “Finally the chance to get rid of all this junk!”  So, your body, trying to save you life, starts getting rid of those accumulated toxins as quick as it can.  Your response?  “Give me a cup of coffee!”  Did you ever think about what the coffee is doing?  With its caffeine drug, the coffee falsely stimulates your adrenal glands, making them think some great “fight or flight” emergency is underway.  In your adrenalinized state, the healing crisis reaction stops, driving the toxins back into the cells.  Next time you have your morning coffee, realize you just interrupted your body’s cleansing and detoxifying process — you suppressed your toxicity.

HEALING CRISIS OR DISEASE CRISIS?

           This really is the number one question:  How do I know if I’m having a “healing crisis” or if I’m really sick?  In addition to the beneficial healing crisis, we can also experience the disease crisis where we are just plain sick.  How do you tell the difference?  The symptoms may be largely the same in both, and in both cases the body is trying to get rid of toxins.  Here are some guidelines for distinguishing:

Healing Crisis

1. Body is becoming strong and healthier.
2. Result of good health habits — improved diet, supplements, detoxifying program, etc.
3. Result of the body’s increased ability to eliminate toxins.
4. Often comes on suddenly after a period of improved health and energy.
5. Usually brief — 1 to 3 days duration.
6. After healing crisis feel renewed energy and health.

Disease Crisis

1. Body is struggling to remove toxins to survive.
2. Result of bad health habits which have increased your toxicity and decreased your immunity.
3. Result of the body’s inability to properly eliminate toxins.
4. More likely to follow pattern of stagnant or declining health symptoms.
5. Usually longer in length than a healing crisis.
6. More likely to feel weak and “drained” after recovery.

HERING’S LAW OF CURE

            Constantine Hering, a Hungarian homeopathic physician in the 19th Century, is famous for his editing the Materia Medica, the invention of nitroglycerine as an angina drug, for founding the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia (no longer homeopathic), and for Hering’s Law of Cure, which states:

All cure starts from within out, from the head down, from the most important organs to the least and in reverse order as the symptoms appeared.

            That may sound a little cryptic, so let me explain:

1. From within out— You can’t treat symptoms — you must
   first deal with the causes on the inside.  Deal with the inner cause and the outer symptom will eventually go away.  Asthma might go away leaving you instead with a skin rash.  Thus, skin problems suggest healing from within out.

2. From the head downward— In a healing crisis with a fever, your feet may get hot as you heal. Or the arthritis on your upper body might improve before that on your lower body.  Some also see this as the likelihood of experiencing emotional symptoms as well as physical during the healing process (Ironically, most people would respond to the increased emotional [head] symptoms by taking a suppressive drug, compounding the healing need).
3. From more to less important organs— If endocarditis ( a heart inflammation) goes away and then you have arthritis, you’ve healed from the more to the least important organs.
4. In the reverse order symptoms appeared— In the healing crisis people frequently experience symptoms from previous illnesses as the body cleanses. The toxins from your various illnesses are accumulated in the tissues of your body, layer upon layer.  Therefore, the toxins from the most recent illness will be experienced first in the cleansing process.

RESPONDING TO A HEALING CRISIS

            Okay, so now you appreciate what a healing crisis is and how it can benefit your overall health . . . but what should you do when it happens?  Here are some do’s and don’ts:

Don’t during a healing crisis

1. Don’t run off to your M.D. expecting understanding or help.  He or she is trained to treat symptoms with drugs.
2. Don’t take symptom-suppressing drugs (pain-killers, anti-inflammatories, psychiatric drugs, etc.) if at all possible.
3. Don’t eat junk food or a lot of hard to digest foods like animal proteins.

Do’s during a healing crisis

1. If you’re taking a homeopathic Detox Combination from Pacific Health Center, temporarily discontinue it, as noted on your Supplement Schedule instructions.
2. Get extra rest.
3. Drink lots of distilled water—possible even double the normal recommended amount of half your body weight in ounces of water daily.
4. Eat light.  Focus on fruits and vegetables, juice fast, plain water fast or do our 7 Day Cleansing Diet.
5. It would probably be helpful to discontinue all nutritional supplements temporarily except vitamin C, which you might even increase to 3000-6000 mg/day.  Vitamin C has a strong effect of binding to toxins and pulling them out of the body.  Thus, it can speed the toxin elimination process.

Bottom line, we need to understand the healing crisis as our body’s built-in healing process and then cooperate with it, rather than suppressing it with drugs.

Better Health Update is published by Pacific Health Center, PO Box 1066, Sisters, Oregon 97759, Phone (800) 255–4246with branch clinics in Boise, Idaho, Post Falls, Idaho and Portland, Oregon.  E-Mail:  drkline@pacifichealthcenter.com.   Monte Kline, Clinical Nutritionist, Author.  Reproduction Prohibited.

DISCLAIMER:  The information contained in this publication is for educational purposes only.  It is not intended to diagnose illness nor prescribe treatment.  Rather, this material  is designed to be used in cooperation with your nutritionally-oriented health professional to deal with your personal health problems.  Should you use this information on your own, you are prescribing for yourself, which is your constitutional right, but neither the author nor publisher assume responsibility.