Homeopathy: The Energy Medicine (CA)

"In general, if you're healthy and you get bit by a Lyme tick and you
go to the doctor and take antibiotics, you're fine. But if you're
sick, run down or under tremendous stress, and you get bit by a Lyme
tick and take antibiotics, [the antibiotics] push it deeper into your
body."

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http://www.palisadespost.com/content/index.cfm?Story_ID=2455

The Palisadian Post
Homeopathy: The Energy Medicine

December 06, 2006

Alyson Sena , Associate Editor

Treating illness is black-and-white for some people: take an aspirin
for a headache, antihistamines for a cold, antibiotics for a bacterial
infection. But if more people knew about alternative, natural remedies
that worked and were easy to find, they might use them, says Dr. Lynne

Paige Walker, a homeopath based in Pacific Palisades.

Homeopathic remedies are said to work on an energetic level to
stimulate the body's own healing energy. They are made from minute
doses of natural mineral, plant or animal substances.

"I think people are not satisfied with Western medicine," says Walker,
who has more than 25 years of experience as a pharmacist, including
five years at Capitol Drugs homeopathic pharmacy in Sherman Oaks. "I
think people need a different approach to medicine."

Homeopathy attempts to treat "like with like." The principle is the
same as pharmaceutical vaccination, but vaccines are macromolecules
that can produce unwanted side effects while homeopathic remedies are
so dilute that no molecules of the original substance are left in the
solution.

"When you take molecules and pull them apart, the
'communication'becomes stronger, which is the whole idea behind
homeopathy--that the more dilute they are, the more the molecules are
pulled apart and the stronger they communicate [with the body],"
Walker says. "There's less physical effect and more mental."

Walker, who grew up in the South Bay area, started her career as a
hospital pharmacist but became interested in natural alternatives
after she was diagnosed with a large fibroid tumor in her late 20s and
was told she needed a hysterectomy.

Acupuncture and Chinese herbs helped shrink the tumor, which
encouraged Walker to begin studying these alternative therapies. She
earned a master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine from
imperor's College in Los Angeles and a doctorate in homeopathy from
Hahnemann College in London.

Prior to establishing her practice in the Palisades three years ago,
Walker practiced homeopathy in Sun Valley, Idaho and the Hamptons (she
returns to both places several times a year to treat patients). She
also operated homeopathic pharmacies in Sun Valley.

Walker's varied experience has helped her see the benefits of a broad
range of natural remedies for a wide variety of ailments. She has
treated chronic diseases (hepatitis, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue
syndrome) since 1990, when she learned a German homeopathic "nosode"
treatment (made from a disease or pathological product) developed by
Dr. Reinhold Voll. She later applied Dr. Voll's method to treat Lyme
disease when she lived in Sag Harbor, New York, across from Lyme, Connecticut.

"There aren't very many good treatments of Lyme disease," Walker says.

"In general, if you're healthy and you get bit by a Lyme tick and you
go to the doctor and take antibiotics, you're fine. But if you're
sick, run down or under tremendous stress, and you get bit by a Lyme
tick and take antibiotics, [the antibiotics] push it deeper into your
body.

"The homeopathics boost your immune system and push [the disease] out,
so when you initially take the remedies, you look like you're worse
and you feel like you're getting worse because your symptoms come out,
but then they clear."

When Walker worked as a pharmacist at Capitol Drugs, she recalls, "I
would give remedies to people and tell them to come back and tell me
what worked and what didn't work. There was so much flow through
Capitol Drugs that it was easy to see what was working."

One female customer took camphor, a natural remedy, for a large tumor
on her tongue. "She had a surgery scheduled in eight days," Walker
says. "When she went to the pre-op and opened her mouth, the tumor was
gone."

Eventually, Walker compiled 200 consistently successful natural
treatments for a book entitled "The Alternative Pharmacy," which she
co-authored with medical researcher Ellen Hodgson Brown in 1998.

Yet Walker acknowledges that natural medicine and, particularly,
homeopathy, can be complicated and, at times, frustrating for the
practitioner and patient because some remedies don't work for certain
people or in certain situations.

"What I'm seeing now is that people are more toxic than ever--from the
environment, from the way they're eating," Walker says. "The remedies
are still effective; it just takes longer to get a reaction."

How Walker treats someone with a cold depends on what stage the cold
is in when the person comes to her. If the cold is just developing,
she tends to use a homeopathic remedy.

"The homeopathics stimulate your immune system at the very first
stage, knocking out the shock and quick-onset [of disease] and setting
you off on a different path," she explains. However, "if the cold is
acute, I go to a Chinese remedy, which is effective on the first,
second or third day."

Taking a pharmaceutical to kill the cold, Walker says, "commits you to
being sick for a week to 10 days. The antihistamines actually stop
your immune process'they've got Tylenol or aspirin in them so they
actually decrease your fever, but your body's using [the fever] to
fight the bacterial or viral infection. So [the antihistamine] gives
your body nothing to work with and automatically makes you sicker. It
might make your symptoms feel temporarily better, but ultimately it
makes you sicker longer."

Walker meets with new patients for 1-1/2 to 2 hours and uses a
biofeedback machine to get a sense of a patient's overall energy and
to learn where his or her body is out of balance. Biofeedback uses
instruments to identify involuntary changes--such as brain activity,
blood pressure or heart rate--in response to stressors.

"The machine puts frequencies into the body and checks the response,"
Walker says. "So if the machine puts the frequency of a normal liver
into your body and your liver is abnormal, your body energy responds
to it and it shows up on the screen.

"While we're doing that, we talk about what's going on in the
patient's life. I believe there's an emotional cause for every
disease, so I kind of focus on what that emotional cause is and how to
get those trapped emotions to move. Classic examples are that widows
usually get lung or pneumonia problems a year after their spouse dies
because the grief has settled in their lungs."

If a patient's body energy is low, Walker often prescribes a
homeopathic remedy that will help raise his or her energy before
treating the actual problem. "The homeopathic remedies stimulate your
own body's energy, so if your energy is low, you might not have enough
'umph' to make the [second] remedy work," Walker explains.

Her patients range from babies to adults in their 90s. She treats
hormone-related problems such as menopause and age-related problems
such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

"I think that menopause is a really amazing time of life, during which
a woman's energy is shifting," Walker says. "It's a time when
homeopathic remedies can help women release all the buried emotions
that are trapped and move on to the next phase of giving back to their
community."

Walker helps men with everything from prostate problems to depression.
"I teach men how to be more successful with their lives and more
successful at business by releasing their attachments to their old
belief systems [relating to attitudes about life or health]."

The two things she says are illegal to treat with homeopathic remedies
are epilepsy and cancer. "So I never treat cancer but I can help
patients with the symptoms of cancer," Walker says, referring to
nausea and pain, as opposed to the actual tumor. "I've had many
patients with cancer who have gone into remission."

Walker has co-authored eight books with Ellen Brown, including her
most recent book, "A Woman's Complete Guide to Natural Health." Her
Palisades office is located in suite 105 of the 984 Monument medical
building. Contact: (310) 230-0616.

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