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Last month I made mention of the lung and its connection with the lung meridians as identified in acupuncture. This month I would like to consider the subject of the lung as an interference field in more general terms. The lung is easily overlooked, as the symptoms produced by lung interference fields often do not relate to lung symptoms at all. Lung interference fields can cause pain syndromes, fatigue or other symptoms without any cough, shortness of breath or other sign of lung problems. Of course this is true of other organ interference fields as well. The key is always to look for an illness, trauma, or surgical or dental procedure in the weeks or months before the onset of the patient's symptoms. There is usually a latent period, long enough that neither patient nor physician makes the causative connection. Lung interference fields may be unilateral or bilateral. When they are unilateral, non-respiratory symptoms are usually (but not always) on the same side. If you are able to identify the interference field with autonomic response testing or some other method, treatment of only one side is necessary. If the identification is made by history alone, there is no reason not to treat both sides. I remember finding a lung interference field in a middle-aged man with chronic fatigue syndrome. He had had pneumonia many years before and "had never been right since". Neural therapy of the lung immediately improved his energy level. Although attention to nutritional and other factors was necessary as well, repeat neural therapy treatments over several months resulted in a cure of his chronic fatigue syndrome. The patient who has asthma, chronic cough or recurring bouts of pneumonia over the years often has a lung interference field. Neural therapy can "cure" asthma, put an end to chronic cough in some of these patients and prevent recurrence of pneumonia. It is particularly effective in treating pleurisy. I suspect that most readers of this newsletter (like I) deal mainly with chronic medical conditions. And for that reason we do not often have the opportunity to manage acute illness. In one respect this is a shame, as neural therapy is a very effective treatment for a potentially serious acute illness i.e. pneumonia. In pre-antibiotic days, pneumonia was a killer of young people as well as of old. Imagine then the impact of this report that came out of the old Soviet Union in 1944: (Speransky AD: Experimental and clinical lobar pneumonia. Am. Rev. Soviet Med. 2:22-27, Oct. 1944). This paper was remarkable in a number respects: It described a simple and effective treatment for pneumonia in the most challenging of circumstances - the malnutrition, crowding, poor hygiene and stress of wartime. In addition, the report was written by AD Speransky, the famous Russian neurophysiologist, who in the 1920s and 1930s headed one of the greatest physiological research institutes in the world. His landmark book: Basis for a theory of medicine had been published in 1935, just before the Stalinist purges that destroyed so many of the Soviet Union's finest researchers, intellectuals and others. Reading the English-speaking research literature, it seemed as if Speransky had disappeared, but here he resurfaces, applying theoretical knowledge from his research laboratories! The technique that Speransky used was to inject large volumes of dilute procaine intradermally into a diamond‐shaped area extending sagitally from C3 to T4 and covering the medial halves of the scapulae. Typically the fever vanished within 18 to 24 hours and the patient recovered quickly afterward. This sounds remarkably like the neural therapy that was being developed independently and concurrently in Germany. Korr was aware of this article and emphasized its importance to the American Osteopathic Association at their annual conference in 1948. He recognized that the segments that Speransky was injecting with procaine were the same that the osteopaths were manipulating and that the therapeutic mechanisms were probably identical. This simple and inexpensive treatment of pneumonia was soon overshadowed by the newly discovered antibiotics that were then becoming available. Antibiotics have for over 60 years become the gold standard, but new conditions may be inviting neural therapy to make a return to the stage. Speransky's studies showed the response to treatment was independent of the species of pathogen. It is therefore likely that otherwise untreatable viral pneumonia responds to neural therapy. (I have treated too few cases personally to make general statements about its efficacy). A second, not to be overlooked benefit of neural therapy is its cheapness. And probably most important of all is its independence from the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. Neural therapy can be used in treatment of acute illnesses as well as chronic. Pneumonia is the acute illness where its efficacy is the most dramatic and the best documented. As always, I am interested in comments from readers who have had direct experience in treating pneumonia by neural therapy. Sincerely, Robert F. Kidd, MD, CM ___________________________________ Some feedback on last month's newsletter on neural therapy and acupuncture from a reader in Ecuador: I want to share something with regard to the use of procaine injections into auriculotherapy points. I have seen many times Sekundenphänomen (lightening reactions) in ‐ e.g. chronic sinusitis, resistant to conventional medical measures, responding within seconds to procaine injections into auriculotherapy points corresponding to the pelvis. Also relief of thoracic pain in patients with abdominal interference fields using procaine in the corresponding auriculotherapy points. Dr. Luciano Iván Coral Loza mail to:dr_ivan_coral@yahoo.com |