THE HEALING POWER OF FEVER   Your Body’s Natural Defence Against Disease By Christopher Vasey Published by Healing Arts Press 144 pages, paperback

Recent studies suggest that over 90% of parents believe that fever in a child may cause harmful side-effects and that almost as many turn to fever reducing pharmaceuticals (antipyretics) such as ibuprofen once temperatures go over 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.8 degrees Celsius).

Such a reaction from a caring and attentive parent is very understandable. I’ve done it many times myself, albeit in the distant past. Indeed, for a parent not to react in such a way would either indicate nerves of steel or, to an outsider, perhaps neglect. That is, unless you are in the small minority who know that fever, far from being a threat to life and limb, is in actual fact… your friend.

If this is news to you, then look no further than Christopher Vasey’s latest literary contribution to natural health care. It’s called The Healing Power of Fever with the subtitle ‘Your Body’s Natural Defence Against Disease’. As is customary for Vasey, it’s a pearler of a book and well worth obtaining.

Bearing in mind that fever is still one of the prime reasons that parents call doctors out in the middle of the night, it might sound almost counter-intuitive to talk about fever as a ‘natural defence’. Yet, it was Western medicine’s founding father Hippocrates – whose Oath every doctor pledges when qualifying – who said ‘Give me a fever and I will cure all disease’.

We could be forgiven for not going along with this view given the fact that the retail pharmaceutical market is awash with a whole raft of cold and flu medicines, most of which portray the fever component of said diseases as the arch enemy that needs to be subdued before all else. Yet, even scientific evidence is apparently flying in the face of such dangerous conventional wisdom, as overwhelming evidence supports the notion that fever is one of nature’s greatest and most common healing responses and should, except in rare cases, be allowed to develop and run its full course.

There are, of course, instances which are usually extreme, when taking urgent evasive action to subdue a fever is sometimes called for. Fever episodes that involve the very young (three months or younger), the aged or anyone with seriously debilitating pre-fever infirmities, should always be dealt with under the appropriate watchful eye of a qualified health practitioner. Other than that, for the most part, it would be as well to acknowledge the largely beneficial effects of fever, of which there are many, for these benefits make it such an effective and efficient healer.

When a pathogen, or any unwanted organism, enters the body a substance called pyrogen is released that triggers the hypothalamus in the brain to raise body temperature. It achieves this by such means as inducing shivering, raising the metabolic rate, and goose pimples in order to minimise heat loss. This in turn launches the fever itself, which for its part, increases anti-bodies, helps produce more protective white blood cells, stops the spread of viruses to healthy cells by producing more interferon (which is incidentally also an anti-cancer substance), closes down bacterial access to a primary source of sustenance (iron), directly killing both bacteria and viruses by raising the temperature above that which they most thrive on. This was not a full list of actions, but I’m sure you get the picture.

When the fever is interrupted, however, as it is with an anti-pyretic, all these benefits and support processes go begging. Even though a fever or the prospect of one can be scary, the reality is that in the vast majority of cases any intervention that leads to the suppression of a fever will hurt the patient more that it helps them.

Going back to a more general point about Vasey’s books, I always think of them as some kind of ‘fools guide’ manual. They are kind of short sharp lessons in what to look for, what to do and how to do it, and The Healing Power of Fever is no exception.

From reading it you will gain a very complete yet profound understanding of:

• The role of temperature in the human body and why it is so necessary for life
• Why maintaining body temperature between very precise limits is so crucial
• What fever is and how to identify it
• How to manage, monitor and assess a fever
• The best way to support the body through the three stages of a fever (the onset, full manifestation and its end phase)
• The best methods of fever control utilising hydrotherapy, herbal medicine and diet
• How to recognise the genuine danger signs and what to do about them.

There is even a rather surprising chapter on how to create and manage an artificial fever. Perhaps not such an outrageous concept after all, given the many benefits conferred upon an already ill patient.

To quickly summarise, The Healing Power of Fever should be in the hands of all hypochondriacs (such as myself) and every parent. In the right hands, this tiny book could eliminate a lot of stress and grief. Its essential message – fever is a friend not a foe. Let it run its natural course, and finally, DO NOT STOP the process (unless you absolutely have to).

– Reviewed by Huw Griffiths in New Dawn 133

RADICAL MEDICINE   Cutting Edge Natural Therapies That Treat the Root Cause of Disease By Louisa L. Williams Published by Healing Arts Press 712 pages, hardback

New paradigms in whatever field they occur are often politely referred to as ‘ahead of their time’. More often than not this is a euphemistic indicator that we can expect the concept to be scoffed at or ignored for another few decades until it might be deemed more politically acceptable and less painful for the establishment to embrace. It is in hope that Louisa L. Williams’ impressive new book Radical Medicine never gets tarred with this brush.

This is not a book that the world of medicine can afford to ignore. It needs and deserves to be recognised for the ground it covers and for the relief it could bring to thousands of sufferers of ill-health.

Interestingly, some of the material contained in Radical Medicine was very much part of progressive fields of medical practice and research back in the nineteenth century and even earlier.

Williams demonstrates the continuing relevance, impact and implications of these breakthroughs with regard to today’s health care environment.

I prefer complex ideas to be expressed simply, briefly and succinctly so that lay people can understand them. Radical Medicine however ticks only two of these three boxes, for it is anything but brief.

Williams begins the narrative with two challenges: one to allopathic medicine, the other to naturopathy. I would say she throws down an additional third challenge, that being the sheer size of the book. It’s really big, coming in at almost seven hundred pages of double columned small print. It looks more like an encyclopaedia and doesn’t immediately come across as your average bedtime reading material.

The two challenges she throws at the health care industry are brazen but undeniably true. The first, to the allopathically inclined, is that “conventional medicine isn’t working.” No real news there but Williams then goes on to document her reasoning behind this comment in one of the best and briefest demolitions of modern medicine I have yet come across.

The second, directed towards naturopaths, is that despite the failings of conventional medicine and regardless of the relative safety of natural treatments, holistic medicine isn’t going all that well these days either. Naturopaths may be reluctant to admit it, but the awkward truth is that the mainstay remedies and traditional treatments commonly prescribed are not keeping up with the increasing toxicity found in our environment, diets and personal consumer products. They may have worked well in a pollution free world, but performance can be lacking in today’s world.

Louisa Williams argues the time has come for a more genuinely ‘radical’ approach to health care. Radical that is, not in the sense of new and pioneering, but rather radical as in “going back to the root or origin, being fundamental, far reaching and thorough.”

There is no point trying to summarise the detail of the issues covered in Radical Medicine as there is simply too much information and this review cannot do it justice. The objective here is to skim across the conceptual side of things and encourage readers to gravitate on their own to those aspects of Radical Medicine, whether general or specific, that most interest and resonate with them.

Louisa Williams, by the way, is a highly qualified naturopathic, psychology and chiropractic practitioner. She has specialised in environmental medicine and detoxification and has successfully set up and run a number of clinics.

The first chapter heading of the book is titled ‘The Four Miasmic Disease Tendencies’, a heading that reads like gobbledygook to anyone who hasn’t studied homeopathy. For that matter it might also scare homeopaths who haven’t studied constitutional homeopathy. Don’t, however, get put off by the unfamiliar.

Miasm means constitution and, homoeopathically speaking, we all broadly fit into one (and sometimes more than one) of the four basic miasmic profiles. They are called, in order of ‘better’ to ‘bad’; psoric, sycotic, tuberculinic and luetic. Depending on the miasm of an individual, he or she will have a disposition toward some ailments and not others, and an inclination to different intensities and severity of sickness when ill. Psorics, for example tend towards acute skin issues and recover quickly, whereas luetics tend towards more degenerative diseases and recover more slowly.

Getting to grips with these miasms genuinely helps one understand the significance and implications for treating complaints, particularly so when it comes to reading recovery symptoms and the direction of an individual patient’s progress.

At this point in the book, the constitutional profiling done in detail, Radical Medicine starts to get into matters relating to pathways to disease, remedial strategies and the rest.

The principles and practices described in Radical Medicine may not be entirely new to everybody, but for the most part they have either been suppressed or buried for quite an extended period. Few of them, if any, are included in naturopathic college curriculums and nearly all would require a significant amount of retraining on the part of holistic practitioners in order to get comfortable with the diagnostic and prescriptive methods that Radical Medicine pushes.

This is particularly so with the various treatment protocols frequently referred to throughout most of the book. For a practitioner to run with these treatment modalities it would be imperative that he or she train with, or form alliances with, others who are competent in prescribing constitutional homeopathic remedies, gemmotherapies (remedies based on a preparation comprising embryonic plants), isopathic homeopathic remedies (based on the principals of ‘sameness’ rather than ‘similarity’ as in classic homeopathy), auriculotherapy (based on the applied stimulation of light, laser, very mild electrical fields or needles to specific points on the skin of the patient) and several more therapies that are mentioned along the way.

Therefore, whether you are a health seeker looking for promising new approaches to address existing health problems, or a practitioner keen to develop new and effective holistic skills, getting practical with Radical Medicine techniques could be daunting.

One fly in the ointment for Australians is that most of the directions given in the book for further information, suppliers and practitioners, are based in the USA. These are difficult, however not insurmountable problems, and hopefully just a question of time before they get resolved.

One very important modality that keeps coming up in the narrative of Radical Medicine is that of “energy testing.” Energy Testing is more a diagnostic tool than a form of treatment and again, as with most of the modalities mentioned above, is not something new, but has been around in one of many forms for thousands of years. Dowsing being one of its original tags, energy testing these days is more likely to be done via muscle testing or highly sophisticated state of the art technology. Importantly and constantly throughout Radical Medicine we are reminded of the extreme relevance that skilfully applied energy testing can have in respect of the accuracy and speed of both diagnosis and treatment when using ‘radical medicine’ techniques.

This could well point the way towards which groups of holistic practitioners might best form the vanguard, or a new generation, of ‘radical medicine’ practitioners. Any practitioner who currently understands and uses energy testing techniques in their existing practice would be well primed to add the techniques described in Radical Medicine to their existing range of services.

Kinesiologists are the first and most obvious that spring to mind. Most would already be well trained in muscle testing as their primary form of ‘bio’ and ‘psycho’ feedback and their most basic of training would have included similar vibrational remedies and body pressure ‘acu-points’ which the application of gemmotherapies and auricular therapy rely upon.

There is a sense of ‘everything you ever wanted to know but were scared to ask’ in the way that the book reviews and analyses some of the world’s most pressing global public health issues. If you ever wanted to be fully informed on matters, for example, relating to any of the following, then this is one of the best sources I have yet come across.

Mercury: Its history in medical practice through the ages up to and including the continued use of it in the field of dentistry and vaccination programs (despite it being the second most toxic element know to man after plutonium).

Antibiotics: Its trajectory from life saving wonder drug to its progeny, the super virus. How it is dangerously used as a prophylactic against mouth infections and its role in potentiating pathogenicity of chronic focal infections.

Childhood Vaccinations: Williams calls vaccination the ‘ugly twin’ of homeopathy and has written the most professional demolition of this pernicious practice that I’ve read to date. Read it for yourself and you will never want to get your child vaccinated. Keep a copy of this section handy for anyone you know who might be thinking of getting their child vaccinated and make them read it. It’s comprehensive and brilliant.

Homeopathy: Not a subject that is easy to explain fully to anyone at the best of times, but excellently done in Radical Medicine.

Industrial and other Chemical Pollutants: The toxicity that pervades us in the modern world comes to us from air, water, food, cosmetics, cleaning products, furnishings, pharmaceuticals, furnishings, building products… you name it. In effect it’s impossible not to be affected by them. Radical Medicine takes you through the primary sources, the substitutes and the strategies and remedies for their avoidance, removal and your detoxification of them (the latter being a linchpin of successful radical medicine procedures).

Diet; Healthy and Harmful Foods: This is actually the title of the chapter that Radical Medicine devotes to this subject and, as most of us are interested in ‘what’s good and what’s bad’ in the way of food, it is written as a particularly easy section for the casual browser to just dip into. The work of the Weston Price Foundation, which is headed up by Sally Fallon, is heavily relied on and for that matter heavily referenced throughout. If you are concerned that your supermarket aisle might be a ‘valley of death’ but aren’t quite sure, then read this section and you will almost certainly increase your chances of living a longer, healthier life.

Poor Dentistry and Focal Infections: It makes me feel inadequate to mention this subject in such a brief and cursory way, because these two, very closely related subjects, are a core element of Radical Medicine’s primary message. There are many standard dentistry practices that get hauled over the coals by Williams and most of them in some small (or big) way end up contributing to the development of focal infections in human mouths that end up spreading to other parts of the body.

Though unfamiliar to most of us, the term focal infection simply means ‘point of infection’. They can be either primary (i.e. where the infection started), secondary (where the infection spread to) or part of a chain of focal infections or ‘disturbed field’ distributed through the body (as the body seeks to spread the burden of intensity of the infection).

An infection that starts in a molar could migrate say, to the pancreas, where it will relieve some of the burden of the worsening primary infection. If both the primary and secondary infections are left untreated, the condition worsens and the infection may migrate further and deeper into the body’s tissues, thus creating a chain of disturbed fields.

One of the central messages from Radical Medicine is that practitioners be made aware of the existence and significance of focal infections so that they can be trained to identify and treat them. Ignorance of them is most definitely not bliss.

Finally, and depending on one’s bent in the mind/body debate, Louisa Williams leaves her most controversial modality to the last, that of the realms of psycho-spiritual healing. Though some may dismiss the field at best as peripheral or at worst irrelevant to matters concerning health, others deem it not only a relevant component to all health issues, but the very cornerstone of the future of holistic healing. Radical Medicine gives the issue a healthy plug without polarising or infringing upon anybody’s beliefs or personal values.

Williams simply maps out and describes her three recommended optional strategies for psycho-spiritual healing: transpersonal psychology, rebirthing (and breathwork) and thirdly, the Diamond Approach (or the Ridhwan Path). They’re all described in detail and with directions for further information if required. I have no doubt they are all well worth following up.

Louisa Williams ends Radical Medicine by thanking her readers for having completed reading the book and urging prospective practitioners of her ‘radical’ approach to lead by example and in every way possible.

I can only respond by thanking her for writing such an inspiring book in the first place and hoping that enough people who read this prodigious work can collectively provide enough critical mass to translate her ideas into widespread practice. Get a copy, read it and be inspired!

 – Reviewed by Huw Griffiths in New Dawn 131

THE COMPLETE BOOK OF TRADITIONAL REIKI   Practical Methods for Personal and Planetary Healing By Amy Z. Rowland Published by Healing Arts Press 288 pages, paperback

With so many people seeking alternative healing methods and embracing non-invasive health techniques these days, there has been a huge growth of therapists and healers who have studied the ancient eastern art of energy healing, referred to as Reiki.

Yet, question many of these practitioners and a large proportion of them do not know the history or the spiritual journey of Reiki.

Whilst many books offer general overviews, The Complete Book of Traditional Reiki by Amy Z. Rowland focuses only on this particular branch of healing and offers both a practical and historical point of view.

Reiki practitioners direct universal energy into the physical body of a client through hands-on and energy field healing to assist the support of health and the reclamation of wellbeing.

It is a simple and easy to learn form of energy medicine that swept the globe to the point it has become commonplace in the high street and in the hospital. Whilst there are many healing techniques and systems, Reiki has been even embraced by mainstream practitioners and skeptics, therefore a deep and insightful study has been long overdue.

The Complete Book of Traditional Reiki takes the reader through a traditional Reiki level 1 class giving the reader insights into the tradition. There are many illustrations and photos of the author conducting a healing session and the book is filled with clever hints and tips to support the budding therapist.

The Japanese word Reiki means spirit-guided or soul-guided life force, and this reveals a lot about the nature of the energy. The author contends that a divine infinite intelligence directs the healing process, and the only role of the therapist is to simply attune the hands and allow this experience to simply flow through from a higher source.

“It is in just such simple ways that most Reiki practitioners learn to integrate Reiki into their everyday lives,” Amy Z. Rowland writes. “As they do, their lives begin to change, because their understanding has changed.”

Reiki is often used on sick people, but the author indicates that even simple actions such as applying Reiki hands to a single cut flower in a vase and watching the flower perk up, glow with life, and ultimately live longer than other cut flowers “restores a sense of wonder.”

The author then discusses the origins and purpose of Reiki as she describes the attunement process by which a student connects to the power to channel life-force energy. She also gives complete instructions for standard and optional healing hand positions.

This book is a concise teaching manual, an extensive reference work as well as compelling reading for anyone considering taking a Reiki class or receiving a Reiki healing. Perhaps most importantly, the author dedicates a large segment of the book to the founder of Reiki, Mikao Usui. Much of his personal history is shrouded in mystery and appears to have been embroidered into a more “Christian” philosophy to make it more palatable to the western mind. The author is at pains to point out that this embroidery occurred shortly after World War II and during the Cold War, and therefore anyone of Japanese descent living in the United States was subject to scrutiny.

The Reiki five statements, that are used as guidelines for daily living and meditation, encourage everyone to make wise and healthy choices. These guidelines are: Just for today, I will let go of worry; Just for today, I will let go of anger; Just for today, I will count my many blessings; Just for today, I will do my work honestly; Just for today, I will be kind to every living creature.

I am delighted to recommend this concise, enlightening, and thoroughly enjoyable book by Amy Z. Rowland. It is a definite “must have” for any serious student of alternative healing techniques, but also for those wishing to understand the essence of spiritual energy, Prana, Chi or Qi, as it is better known.

The book has many illustrations, diagrams and photographs and does not expect the reader to have any fundamental knowledge of Reiki or other healing modalities. It is well written and easy to read, and most importantly, offers a universal or planetary healing viewpoint of this ancient spiritual art.

– Reviewed by Lesley Crossingham in New Dawn 130