For many years I was practicing 19th century homeopathy, using traditional polychrest remedies, such as Calcarea carbonica, Pulsatilla, Lycopodium, and Natrum muriaticum, but not really getting the results possible from homeopathy and expected of it in many of my cases. My patients would be benefited, but often the improvement would not hold, or the first dose or two would work, and subsequent doses would fail to yield anything. Traditionally, we are taught to reexamine the case when this happens to see if there is something we had missed earlier, or misunderstood. Another common explanation was that the remedy image had changed. This explanation, though I applied it in my practice, did not appeal to me philosophically, because I could see how one could change from a less healthy remedy state to a healthier, for instance from Pulsatilla to Calcarea Carbonica, but it was hard to accept that you would change to remedies on the same plane of illness, like from Pulsatilla to Natrum muriaticum.

This is when I began to see and learn from treating myself and family members, and then my clients, that the materia medica, (the body of knowledge about medicines that we are taught as homeopaths), applied for the most part to a healthier age. The medicines and their effectiveness had not changed, but the population had.

What was to account for these changes? Why is it that people were not putting out remedy pictures that were clear, but instead there would be elements for several remedies at the same time in the picture. Let me try to illustrate this concretely.

In a healthy Pulsatilla or Natrum muriaticum individual none of the unaccountable symptoms should be present. In the previous centuries these would be very typical and commonly encountered remedy types. There would be few, if any unaccountable symptoms, and when a homeopathic remedy would be administered, the results would be prompt, efficient and long lasting.

This is not the case anymore, because almost all the cases look like mixed cases now. This is what I thought for a long time, but I have seen that rather than looking at my clients and lamenting that there is no order to the cases, I have learned that a new order has emerged, different from that of the past, but appropriate for the age we live in. The remedy which characterizes the age we live in more than any other is a nosode called Carcinosin. Nosodes are a class of remedies made from disease substances. These are excellent for getting at deep genetic causes.

What accounts for this change? How is the Twentieth Century different from the nineteenth or eighteenth century? How is the life style different? How are society's values different? Are the expectations on human beings different from what they used to be? What about the stresses we are under? Are they greater than they were in the past? Are human beings relaxed anymore? What is the influence of mass medicine on our health? Can vaccines and antibiotics have changed human beings so drastically? Has the age defined us or have we defined the age?

Let me try to address each of the above questions briefly. Yes, this century is very much different from the last. Let me list some of the differences, and we should all think about how these differences influence our psyches.

These are all things related to transportation, monuments to our love of travel. How much natural resources, and personal resources have we all sacrificed to this love? How much of our incomes do we devote annually to indulging this pleasure? Has it really improved our lives, or has it lowered our standard of living, and our health.

In homeopathy we have two big remedies that have a love of travel. One is Tuberculinum, the nosode of the nineteenth century, actually the remedy, which more than any other carried the spirit of that age, and Carcinosin, the remedy which embodies the spirit of our century. If one listens to the sages of China, they say that the wise man does not go abroad. He stays at home and cultivates himself. If he cannot find what he seeks inside of himself, he certainly will not find it, if he travels half way across the earth.

I believe that the energy created by the transportation boom and phenomena is one of the major contributing causes to the lowering of the health of the population.

Another great difference between this century and earlier centuries is that our time is extremely structured. We have the eight hour work day, the six hour school day, activities that we have to be on time to in the evenings. Most of us wear watches. How does this concern with being on time affect us healthwise. Where has our freedom gone? We have regulated ourselves like clockwork, by the train schedule. Two remedies stand out for needing to be on time - Natrum muriaticum, and Carcinosin. Again the image of cancer coming through.

What about the workaholic syndrome. The need to be responsible in order to survive. The problem of people taking on too much responsibility, more than their fair share, and the opposite phenomenon, of people not assuming enough. The whole theme of responsibility is very major in cancer. Carcinosin and Calcarea carbonica are our two main remedies for people who take on too much responsibility at an early age.

This phenomenon of encouraging our children to grow up too quickly can be very detrimental to their health. I believe that overworking our children at schools, requiring them to assume too much responsibility and to display too much success at an early age is predisposing them to cancer.

When one looks at our suburbs, all the streets are neatly lined up, the lawns well manicured, the trees trimmed by the city, the houses in excellent repair, beautiful cars, parked in two car garages. This perfect and fastidious image that we all try to maintain, how healthy is it? Do we sacrifice ourselves, our time, our health to maintaining it? Ultimately does it serve us, or do we serve it? Again Carcinosin and Natrum muriaticum are the remedies par excellent for this perfectionism and fastidiousness. My belief is that we are all expending too much effort, too much of our vital energies into trying to maintain this order. We try to control and take charge rather than let things develop naturally, as they would and do when we leave nature alone. Underneath this need for perfection, lurks a terror of chaos and lack of control, a fear of letting go.

What is the responsibility of modern medicine in the phenomenon of the reduced health of the population. How has allopathic medicine changed the landscape of the earth. Here I am thinking of the hospitals erected everywhere, the landfills full of medical waste. What have the vaccines done to us? Unfortunately, vaccines have probably done a great deal to lower the health of the population on a scale we cannot even begin to fathom.

I will mention one vaccine which is no longer used, but has caused untold damage - the smallpox vaccine. The vaccine mimics gonorrhea in the body, and causes alterations to genes similar to that disease. If a person has received the smallpox vaccine, it will be genetically just as if he had been infected with gonorrhea. In order to get cancer, homeopaths believe that the gonorrhea miasm must be present in the body. So is it possible that we have a cancer epidemic today, partially because of the smallpox vaccines administered half a century ago?

We can go on and on defining the ills of the twentieth century and how they have defined us, but time is running out. My closing remarks are that the age is cancer. Everything we see around us is a monument to it. The outside and the inside are one. Maybe in order to adjust to it and survive in the modern world, we have to adopt cancer characteristics. I believe that human beings changed and then the world we made took on a form to match the inner state. In our endless desire to make things better, faster, cleaner, neater, we have destroyed the original simplicity and purity of both ourselves and the world around us.

Can homeopathy help to restore that inner simplicity and purity to the people who use it. Yes, I believe it can. We have to match the force and vibration of the illness to the force and vibration of the remedies, and I know that homeopathy has remedies with the depth and scope to address the problems of modern man. I must add an addendum, and that is that it cannot do it alone. We must all evaluate the lives we are living, and think whether our lifestyles are healthy. If we are living unwisely, we have to make changes. I will make a few recommendations along these lines.