Transcription
So, good afternoon. And we will just start in a couple of minutes. It's 3:00. Okay. Few more minutes and we should be through. We should begin. Okay.
So, I think let us start and let people join at their own pace. So, we talk about stress every day, right? From a young teenager, a schoolgoing child to adults, all of us talk about stress. So, essentially, what is stress? Is stress bad? Is stress good? Is something that we are going to examine today.
So, one thing is very obvious. What a child experiences, what a teenager experiences as a stress is not stressful, probably, for an adult. And what is stressful for an adult is not stress for a child. This is one aspect of stress. The other aspect of stress is two people working in the same work environment, two students subjected to the same pressures of the curriculum. Both of them develop different illnesses, different symptoms. So, in these two settings that I have mentioned, we find that there is variation. There is nothing uniform.
So, what is the constant? The constant here is you, me, the person who is subjected to the pressures of life, to the pressures of environment. When we are referring to stress, stress comes in variety of forms. Usually, we talk about mental stress, emotional stress, but stress can come in the form of physical environment. Stress can come in the form of a pandemic that we saw in COVID at a very physical level. Stress can be due to environmental pollutions, as we see in highly polluted cities, maybe Delhi, Mumbai, and a large number of people in that situation develop very similar kind of illnesses.
So, if we examine this whole phenomena, we find there is an interaction between the outside world. The outside world consisting of people, consisting of environmental factors, consisting even of biological factors like a virus, like a bacteria, like a fungus. All these factors want to disturb your inner harmony. And our mind and our bodies are constantly interacting, counteracting these outside stresses. Now, as long as we are able to effectively counter these stresses, counter these forces, we remain free of symptoms. We remain free of diseases. And this is called adaptation. We have learned adaptation since our school days. How plants adapt, how animals adapt, and humans being within the animal kingdom, we also adapt.
We have also seen lower animals succumbing to environmental stress, to changes in the outside environment in which they are placed. We also see plants, the moment you change the place where they are, even potted plants, and put them at a different place. Sometimes they will wilt, sometimes they stop flowering, sometimes they stop growing. The shift is small for the plant, but the impact is big. So, what is actually happening? Every living creature is under threat 24/7, right from the moment of conception. Not even birth. In humans, conception. In plants, maybe the seed. In animals, too, at conception or at birth. And our biological systems are largely extremely effective in countering these stressful factors. Therefore, life thrives. Therefore, humans grow.
In fact, ample number of studies have shown that the most productive and the most creative people have come from very, very deprived environments. In fact, people who are not subjected to these deprived environments and they have lot of affluence, at some point of time, the body does not bring out its best resources. So, essentially, it is how our inner resources go on to counter these threats. And when we talk of stress in our usual language, in our day-to-day vocabulary, we are talking about distress. Something that is so overwhelming that it will make us sick.
Let me give you the other extreme and take you back to the times of lockdown during the COVID pandemic. During the early few days of the COVID pandemic, for a large number of people, it was a big relief where the work pressure was not there. You were by and large at home. Your travel was curtailed, and we felt good and happy. But as the lockdown started prolonging, no work or less work, no travel, no moving out of the homes started becoming a stress in itself. Being confined became a stress. So, we see two extremes. When the outside pressures are intense, we, our adaptation fails. And when the outside pressures are very little, you have no challenges left out. Say, for example, no work. There is no challenge in life. There is no struggle in life. In such a situation also, this becomes stress.
What is required is the middle path. The optimal stress, what in scientific language is called eustress. This is that enough amount of challenge that is given to you, that is served to you, that keeps your body, the mind, the immune system in a sufficient state of functioning. It is a very narrow bandwidth, a narrow quantity of stress. Anything on the right or the left, more or less, has a greater possibility of breaking down the organism's machinery, and that is where sickness enters.
So, with this very broad concept of stress, I would like to proceed with an actual case story. Let us name this lady called Nora. She's around in her 30s, and this woman thrives on routines. She's happy when everything is scheduled, everything is as per routine, and any small disruption, any small change unsettles her, makes her anxious, and she's overwhelmed. When things are predictable, she's comfortable. But the moment she's out of this zone of predictability, it gives her a sense of danger, and a fear is something that is evoked in her. She struggles to be assertive, and her voice is barely above a whisper if there is a confrontation. Any conflicts will paralyze her. When there are loud voices in the room, she shrinks, she trembles, and her breathing starts becoming shallow.
The man whom she got married to became her own tormentor, and he tended to control every aspect of her life. Doesn't allow her to go and see her family. Locks her up in the house for several days at an end. And as time passed, she stopped resisting, believing that life is just confined into this home and to keep this whatever little peace that was there. She cut relationships with her siblings, even though still she is not very happy with the decision of hers. And in around 2008, this woman was diagnosed with a very fatal autoimmune disorder called scleroderma. A disease in which you will find that the blood vessels contract. The blood vessels shrink and produce gangrene of the fingertips. Also, the skin hardens. The esophagus hardens and does not move. So, swallowing becomes a problem. Lungs can again lose its elasticity, and also the kidneys can get affected. So, the disease can have a very fatal course, extremely painful, and definitely the quality of life is compromised, and so is the lifespan compromised.
This woman is now under treatment for over almost around 3 years or slightly over 3 years. And what with homeopathic treatment, what we find is very encouraging. In the first year of the treatment, she could not even sit in an air-conditioned room because her fingers would turn blue and eventually become black because the blood vessels would contract. She could not swallow her food. She could not open her mouth because the skin around the mouth tightens. Already walking two flights of or one flight of stairs, she would start getting breathless because the lungs were also involved. And now, at the end of 3 years, she is able to tolerate not only just an air-conditioned room but even winters without a problem. Her skin has softened. Her swallowing is no more a problem, nor are the lungs further destroyed.
And what happens at the mental state? Mentally, she's now able to stand up and assert what she has to say and not just yield to the husband's force. While it has led to conflicts between the two, she has discovered her own sense of assertion, which is very important. Something that was suppressed. She was happy to tell her husband that I can now be independent and I do not need to be with you. Something, some inner resources that were required, which were unexpressed earlier, are now getting expressed. Her inner defenses are coming back. This is what homeopathy could do for her in the last four years. She continues to take treatment, and we will need to see what happens in future.
The understanding here is, what changed? Did the outer environmental stress disappear? No. In fact, it probably worsened or it remained the same. But what, how is it that she stopped falling ill? One is the ability of the body to cope with the outer environment, which is a cold environment which you could not tolerate, has improved. To at an emotional level, the resilience which was missing has come back, and it is continuing to come back. She is able to withstand the loud shouting of her husband and also not just withstand it, but even respond to it in an optimal way. So, the same system with enhanced resources over a period of time is now, what we can see, the outside threat factors, the environmental stressors tend to remain constant. So, where did the homeopathic medicine help? Is to bring back her resources, both at the level of the mind and at the level of the body.
I can also share another case of a lady with tremendous panic attacks. She was on psychiatric medications, and yet she would be extremely anxious, and she would get into a panic with the slightest adversity in life. Her sugars, in spite of the oral hypoglycemic agents, continued to remain out of control. And she sought for our help. And over a period of time, not only her panic attacks disappeared, we were able to bring down and completely stop her psychiatric medications which were used for her panic and anxiety. It must be now more than three or four years she's with us, and she didn't need them. Her sleep was a big issue for her when she came to us. That improved, and her sugar levels improved to the point that we could reduce her oral hypoglycemic agents.
Again, it is the same thing in this woman. Whatever where were the stresses outside and inside, the internal emotions also become a stress, well taken care of by improving the inner resources of the system. Once this happens, the disease symptoms start improving, the disease load starts improving. Disease essentially is one's ability, failure of one's ability to optimally adapt to the outside stress. If you are supposed to adapt at a level 10, your system somewhere is only adapting up to level seven or six. And the homeopathic medications shift this gear and put you back to 8, 9, and in many times to that optimal level of response.
Stress, in other words, also tells the ability to adapt. When you are unable to be flexible, when you are unable to be fluid enough to meet the challenges of the outside world, you tend to fall sick. You tend to become stressed. So, the logical question then is, what does this homeopathic system really do for us? And how is this happening? So, homeopathy, and we have seen this over a number of cases across the world, has the drugs have the ability to modulate the immune system. Modulate it in a way to bring it to optimal level. If it is lower than required, it pushes it up to a level what is required. And if it is too sensitive, like it happens in allergic conditions, it kind of brings it back to where it is supposed to be there.
And how does the homeopath do this? So, in a homeopathic consultation, a classical homeopath will typically want to take a very detailed history of your disease, your suffering. So, for example, if you go and tell your homeopath that I have got hypertension, or I've got diabetes, or I've got acidity, I've got migraine. This is not what he will stop at. He will ask you more in details. Tell me their suffering. Tell me the symptoms. What increases your headache, or what increases your blood sugar, or what decreases your headache? What factors affect you? Now, within this question, the whole idea is to discover the individual response of your system. Because that is important for homeopathy. Your system, your individual system. You may have the same name of the suffering, or you may have different names also. The idea is to understand what is stress for you. That is very important. And then we will also ask, tell us about your life. What are the stresses in your life? And we will also ask, how do you handle these stresses?
So, let me give you an example at this point. Say you have a difficult boss in your office. There would be somebody who would be able to navigate this authority in a very pleasant way and without feeling stressed, is able to accomplish the work. And the same authority, there is another employee who ends up becoming frustrated, or who ends up becoming extremely frightened of that individual, and ends up, over a period of 6-8 months, developing hypertension, high cholesterol, or diabetes. Or even an autoimmune disease, like what we saw in this Nora's case earlier. How you respond to the outside difficulties is determined by your personality, more often than not. And this personality is understood in the history taking of the homeopath.
And as we all know, the formative years of life go on to shape the kind of people we are. So, more often than not, you will also find that homeopaths will ask you about your childhood, even if you are 70 years old, because how you are, what you are subjected to as a child, and how you responded to it, by and large, remains constant even a per, even till the period of 70 years. What really changes is only the way you manage that. And the homeopathic medications and the homeopathic history is trying to see the pattern that is running constant through all your life. These are stress patterns, potential stress patterns. And then they are the ones which are responsible for disease. And homeopathic medications are known to completely heal these patterns which have a potential to make you sick. Emotional patterns, even physical patterns.
So, to understand the physical patterns, the homeopath will definitely ask you about the illnesses that you have suffered since childhood. And also, he will ask you about the illnesses that run in the family. He will also ask you what are your tastes? What are your environmental preferences? What is the kind of environment that you don't tolerate? So, all these factors go on to understand your physical makeup and your personality. And by asking all these questions, your homeopath is trying to find out a pattern that is running through your life. And with the medications, because the choice of the medicine for you in homeopathy does not depend on the name of the disease, but it depends upon these patterns, these emotional patterns, the physical patterns that run through you. Therefore, the first interview of a homeopath goes on for maybe two hours, by and large.
So, this is how homeopathy will handle stress and help you, help your system handle the stress, and make you more resilient, the system more resilient to the same outside stressors. So, I believe that we have spoken quite in detail about what stress is, what homeopathy is, and how the homeopath deals, helps you deal and optimize your response to the stress. So, I believe some of these questions I have already answered in the panel. So, see you soon again with yet another very interesting topic for knowing more about homeopathy and what homeopathy can offer in your healthcare. So, see you, and you can subscribe to our channel for very interesting videos and information.