Jerry M. Kantor | Sane Asylums: The Success of Homeopathy Before Psychiatry Lost Its Mind

00:00 These days, so many podcast hosts just riff through unprepared segments until they get to the next ad break for pills they know nothing about cheap razors and whatever else they can get a buck from. But The Hiresite Chats does it differently! We succeed or fail on the quality of content and your desire to hear more of it So you're about to hear another free first hour episode. It's here to prove the two-hour shows are worth subscribing for five shows a month for just $8

00:38 Members get a mobile friendly website, a decade of archives, a dedicated RSS feed for the best podcast apps and a lot deeper discussion that a single hour can allow for. Sponsor free with more for thee! Get a free seven day trial of THC Plus at TheHigherSideChats.com Enjoy In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats. His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times. From 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a- I'm Greg Carlwood These are The Hireside Chats

01:35 Rock me like a hurricane, higher side chatter's doing the thing from sunny San Diego. I'm Greg Carlwood and we are well aware of the sorry state of Rockefeller Medicine and the petro pill pushing pharmaceutical industry offering up financially motivated solutions that often come with a big laundry list of negative effects for the one symptom they might make go away We've seen the demonization of natural ways, herbology, holistic medicine, energy healing and a wide range of non-invasive, non chemical based options that still manage powerful results despite them being pushed out of any academic circles and dismissed as primitive woo woo nonsense. But of all the logs on health and medicine fire, the darkest saddest and most extreme is the western industrial ways of treating mental health

02:21 MKUltra experiments, lobotomies, electroshock therapy and a legacy of insane asylum facilities that operated more like torture prisons than any sort of hospitals. Not to mention the drugs given out for depression anxiety bipolar disorder and a wide range of categorized and labeled mental conditions are often the most harsh and dangerous of all That said, I was recently blown away by the book of today's guest Jerry M. Cantor entitled Sane Asylums The Success of Homeopathy Before Psychiatry Lost Its Mind In it he resurrects a forgotten history of utopian-esque healing centers in the 19th century that never really make it into conventional medical education though they were very widespread very effective and of course snuffed out as the competition for the cold capital driven industry its become

03:10 Jerry himself is a faculty member of the Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine and owner of Vital Force Healthcare LLC, a Boston-area homeopathy and acupuncture practice. He also has the pleasure of being the first acupuncturist to receive an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School's Department of Anesthesiology, as well as being his own publisher with Right Whale Press putting out previous books like Interpreting Chronic Illness The Convergence Of Traditional Chinese Medicine Homeopathy And Biomedicine The Toxic Relationship Cure Clearing Traumatic Damage From A Boss, Parent, Lover Or Friend With Natural Drug-Free Remedies and The Autism Reversal Toolbox.

03:51 Well, it's certainly a pleasure to have him here. The homeopathic healer hidden history restorer and shining light in the darkness Mr Cantor my good man welcome to the higher side Greg I have never heard an introduction like that That is fabulous All part of the old nine to five around here, but thank you for doing this. I first heard you on with my friend Gordon of rune soup and I just had to poach you for my own show because i've been very interested in missing chapters of history and methods of healing outside of our conventional system And this book taught me a lot about both

04:28 I think many of us hear homeopathy and we think diluted medicine or weak medicine, but now I know the term nanoparticle cross-adaption. And we've learned in previous episodes some interesting things about water memory that may or may not relate. But talk to us about how you view homeopathy, how it relates to psychiatry and what the mechanisms are that drive it? Wow! That's a big question It is Well, I'll give you one of my little talks that I give to clients. Yeah so homeopathy like Chinese medicine like acupuncture does something really simple you know when i was in junior high school I had a teacher who said something that caught my attention she said that no definition of living a living thing is complete without including irritability That means the living thing you poke it and it reacts. I thought that was pretty funny and I didn't really

05:26 No, what to make of that till much later on. So acupuncture pokes you it's a mini-mini stabbing and homeopathy is a mini poisoning so both of these methods exploit the body's irritability. Well okay but how you poke and when you poke that's the key thing Okay back to homeopathy because people have a pretty decent idea of acupuncture I think when I'm talking about it at the level of common sense. I'll tell people that A good remedy is like a permission slip to the subconscious We don't call it the subconscious and homeopathy you call the vital force And the difference is that the vital force is these subconscious but imbued with all kinds of all the physical Capabilities of the body, it's one in the same thing It's not something separate as no mind so a remedy when it matches the person really well

06:19 it releases a reaction that really wants to happen, but has not been able to happen. Why hasn't it been able to happen? Because the trauma that caused it or the events responsible may be and could be something inherited was too big, too constant to be overcome we are basically designed to overcome everything We have this brilliant immune system which the homeopaths call the vital force because is no simply at physical level but basically it keeps us healthy by episodes of acute illness. Acute illness detoxifies us and what's good about that, we usually generally survive acute illness, it has a beginning, middle and end, and involves the body identifying a pathogen or emotional assault mobilizing against it with either immune response histamines antibodies or at the emotional level

07:13 Pulling out one of the five emotional tools in our inborn toolkit, you know anger grief worry fear and joy And overcome it like a tool each of those emotions is supposed to be used and then put away when you're done with it So where was I going? You're asking about psychiatry here. Yeah, and also the mechanisms that make homeopathy work Yeah, so that's really the question right? It's so global its Our tendency in the modern world is to describe things in reductionist terms, and that simply won't work with homeopathy. When you take a remedy that matches you—well let's go back to how homeopathy is researched right? The inverse of the law of similars—the law of similars is using like-to cure-like. The inverse of that I would call the Law of Inculcation and that applies to homeopathic research so let's say we get 10 people

08:03 who have nothing in common with any particular client, but they're healthy. So 10 individuals and they agree to keep their lives stable over a period of three or four months and they take this substance, a mystery substance every day for those several months and they keep journals no matter how varied they are if this condition is carried out that's called approving And at the end of that period time they forwarded their journals They've been keeping journals all along To the head proving master And then this big collation job takes place, which collate out from their journals the symptoms that are strange unusual peculiar as opposed to ones that are random and just too common to be of use. Those provide the picture—the remedy picture—of that substance and the substance can be a botanical it could be a mineral compound it could be venom of a snake or the venom in a bee sting

08:58 The point is it's a blinded research study, and at the end of that we get a very clear idea of the state that gets inculcated in healthy people by that substance. And that information gets put into the Materia Medica. So for example if—you make a silly example of this—if 9 out 10 people respond on day 15 or somewhere in the second month, whenever they saw a piano they sneezed. As ridiculous as that is that's a useful symptom not that you want to cure that but that might be such a specific clue to that substance that would enter the materia medica and anytime we encounter that remedy would come up on the other hand if someone said in this second week that he got a terrible headache but come to think of it a rock fell on his head just before that...we don't count that

09:47 So the Materia Medica then is this amazing book which describes all the actions, all the effects that a substance can have on a person at the mental emotional and physical level. It doesn't discriminate between what we like and what we don't like And so in contrast to two other books, let me compare it to a toxicology book which only talks about the bad effects of substance can bring about or the physician's desk reference which talks only about well it talks about wonderful things that a drug does and behaves very in an embarrassed fashion about the so-called side effects. Both of those two books are dishonest in comparison with the Materia Medica of homeopathy So we get this very total picture of what a substance does

10:32 Then the other book in homeopathy is called The Repertory, and that's an index of every symptom. There are many versions of this by the way but it's an index of every symptom a human being can have referencing back to their remedy so homoeopaths toggle between those two books all the time trying to find out the remedy that matches you so they can then apply the law of similars And then when you give them the remedy that matches you that would cause the symptoms that you have at the mental emotional physical level The homeopath says, well okay. It's as if you've been poisoned by arsenic. Well you haven't really I don't suppose you have but everything about you fits that profile so a tiny tiny tiny amount of arsenic this mini-mini poisoning i've been talking about will give that to you to exploit your inherent irritability and release this global response that is waiting to happen this permission slip to the vital force and then over period of weeks and weeks

11:33 this processing takes place that brings many, many benefits. That's a I don't know. Is that simple or is that too complicated? No, no, that's good. That's good. I appreciate that and it is interesting because yes there's a quote in the book where you say for homeopathy our basic commonalities are organs systems bone structure or agreeing that what constitutes reality as a settled matter are of minor importance and it's more about like what makes people unique or different And that's just such a flip on the usual script And there's a line from the blog that I think is pretty interesting where you say, homeopathic products are so diluted. The originating substance is no longer detectable by any laboratory test yet the remedies work and you kind of gave us a little bit there about how they work in terms of triggering or kind of coaching or leading the body to just do its thing as it supposed to do trusting the body

12:35 But obviously that boggles the mind of a lot of people, that something can no longer be detectable yet also work. It seems like there's something metaphysical going on here? Yeah, couple things I can add to that it is what we call metaphysical but I was a philosophy student and the logical positives, and so forth in the 20th century tried to kill it but it never goes away because there's an aspect of truth to it. We do need to have system-wide type of explanations or things. Okay well at the energy level—I've got that chapter back which you referred to before from Iris Bell's research—there is kind of an entanglement, an energetic entanglement

13:18 that human beings have with the essence of these substances, that is really... Well I'm not going to say peculiar because it's just life. It's just life! It's hard for me to step outside this into a state of disbelief as a homeopath. I take for granted that everything has a consciousness you know things are organic and also non-organic we have books on crystals books like by Peter Tuminello And, you know very matter-of-factly we talk about the consciousness of one particular kind of crystal structure as opposed to another. The Native Americans always knew this is... We have just unlearned something profound because it was so technologically oriented It's not that strange Back to another part your question So the principle is like secure like? It's not identity its likeness. So you have to lead the energy a little bit. It's not completely congruent Congruency

14:15 is death. It's just a complete flat type of...it's not even a stimulus, if you give something that exactly the same as yourself and that's the problem with oh, a lot of immunology that's trying to mimic homeopathy if you do exactly what you think the person does first of all, you've ignored the fact that there are differences about people because they're still acting like people or generic and alike but second of all, you're not leading the chi I'm changing metaphors here. I practiced Aikido for many, many years and in Aikido you blend with someone's energy very similar to homeopathy but you leave the energy also a little bit so this is the idea of similarity not identity. Identity is called tautopathy and it ignores the fact that it pretends that you're absolutely generic person for example if you bring me five people then I arrange to have each one of them stung by a bee

15:08 for a little while, they'll all be exactly the same. They'll have swelling, they'll be in pain it will be aggravated by heat for a little while they're all the same but if you wait a couple of hours as the beasting trauma starts to abate all their individual differences will start coming out and those are the ones that matter In the acute stage you don't need to leave the chi at all It is enough when that state is strong enough to give a tautopathic remedy but not later on Interesting and you use the word trauma which was gonna be another thing i wanted to fold in here because it seems to be a big factor it seems like. From a couple of interviews i've heard of yours you talked about, the engine that drives a lot of our problems being in consciousness being a trauma at its root core

16:00 And that's interesting. I'm curious if you consider multi-generational traumas, past life traumas, birth traumas? It can get so broad that it's hard to be useful at least when I start thinking about the language used but is every disease illness flu a lot of that stuff is it at its core a trauma? Let me think how to answer that first of all legacies absolutely do play into how homeopathy works We absolutely do. Myismatic theory is really about legacies, and that's going to come out really clearly in a book I've got coming out next year called The Emotional Roots of Chronic Illness, Homeopathy for Existential Stress. So let's see as I say in battlefield medicine we are all the same we can be treated as identical under certain very very harsh circumstances anybody who was shot you know it was full of shrapnel for quite awhile they are the same

17:00 And yeah, you've got to get the shrapnel out. You've got to stop bleeding and you gotta prevent sepsis it doesn't matter who the hell you are So that does not have its root in consciousness I have to say I mean there's some aspects of that everybody might go into shock Where is the line Greg between a state of shock? Which is... Is there division between the conscious part of that and the physical part your soul kind of leaves your body when you're in shock That's a consciousness aspect at the same time Of course There are all these emergency actions going on physiologically in you. So I mean, consciousness is never a part of it! We are living things and it's only for the sake of convenience or treatment that we pretend that it's not going on there. In the emergency room clearly someone's not gonna be doing psychotherapy on you they have a very mechanical thing to do

17:50 But a little bit later on, and when you come out of that you better believe that you're going to have to pay attention to how that recovery is going. It's an example I've come up with there it's a sadistic example again give me five people and I arranged to have every one of them stabbed in the shoulder right for a little while they'll all be exactly the same they'll be horrified they'll be in pain there will be bleeding you got to stop the bleeding you gotta prevent sepsis, but now wait a day or two and there'll be tremendous differences between these people. Let's say I stabbed the Hells Angel in the shoulder—and now I'm stereotyping Hells Angels—but he might think this was nothing, this is pretty routine part of life and think nothing of it. Someone else will deeply traumatized by it. Someone else with a hemophiliac-type problem might have difficulty stemming the bleeding

18:40 another person will be completely triggered because it reminds them of something that happened in their infancy or their childhood. All those other things start coming out as an acute condition then turns into a chronic one, so yeah we have to go back... there's many ways of talking about the trauma side of things but Unless we cease being a conscious creatures organisms consciousness is part of it and unites everything about us I find that so surprising that in the West. This is a hard one to crack You know if you're an acupuncturist If you go to an acupuncture, can you tell the acupuncturists? That's you've got loose stools

19:16 the acupuncturist will automatically know that you worry too much. Automatically, that's wired into the system and conversely if you're a worrier they acupunctures will ask you about your stools and expect them to be loose it's hardwired into that and they make that connection people are just always amazed oh really how'd you know that or if you've had a deep grief the acupuncture will assume that you're having respiratory issues, something's going on with the lung or vice versa. If you've had long-standing respiratory issues gonna assume that maybe you've had some kind of long standing grief so that hard wiring connection is there in Chinese medicine and homeopathy it's one step further It's one and the same thing we don't even need the concept of wiring its one and the same thing So if you read about any these medicines in a material medica that I referred to before every single remedy will have a mind section

20:08 So we'll talk about how the remedy, how that state of inculcated in the person in the research phase is represented by thoughts, emotions, fears, peculiar behaviors. They all appear there so consciousness at every stage it's there even when you're treating something You know, very mechanical. A very blunt kind of trauma. Interesting! Because usually with the example of the loose stool thing people would immediately go to well what are you eating? What's your diet? But then instead say that you seem like a person who worries a lot... That is very interesting Is there a common thought about people who have chronic allergies or chronic sinus issues

20:52 Well, there's a lot of differentiation within that. It's interesting—there are remedies that I guess this would suit naturopaths who like to think that way who are not really necessarily deep homeopaths remedy made from certain kinds of pollens or from wheatgrass that are quote-unquote for allergies more typically in my work where the consciousness comes in a remedy like calicarbonicum which is potassium carbonate now this is interesting it's a great example Okay, someone comes in and says I've got allergies. So I take their case and I find in taking the case that the person has...and it might take a while to get to this place you know, it tends to be rather judgmental they go in for black-and-white thinking nothing wrong with that The positive side of that is they think categorically They've got a very clear idea about what's right? And what's wrong maybe not about everything but about things that matter Interesting

21:49 And my litmus test question for this, because I've done this a long time. I'll say you know tell me something ever hear in your head yourself saying I can't believe so-and-so said such a thing? I can't believe he would think that who on earth would not be pro life! I mean come on this is you know those exact words I can't believe okay So I hear that I get my answer to that question then i'll say Do you ever get any gunk in your throat? Do you have a tendency to clear your throat?" How'd you know that, of course I do. I'm constantly clearing my throat." And then they'll say, oh, well, I noticed you've got some puffiness under your eyes right now. Yeah how did you know yeah, I've had that for years if it's a woman i might ask at this point tell me something have you ever had a miscarriage well yeah what's that got to do with anything

22:36 When did you have the miscarriage? Oh yeah, in the first trimester. I say bingo! Thank you very much—you've given me the remedy." The remedy, calicarbonicum connects the dots as follows… Yeah, the person is judgmental—they have black and white thinking and they export their opinions where it matters. This mindset —and this is explaining why this goes beyond my pay grade—is mirrored at the level of the mucous membranes The mucous membranes, epithelial tissue they like to be moist and they're all over the body. And when you get an accretion of moisture they deal with it so that's its process so that the mucus membrane stay at a certain degree of moisture When you need this remedy calicarbonicum there is insensitivity to the presence of moisture So they tend to be too damp or too dry

23:23 And that's why so-called allergies appear. You know, the allergist will be blaming the outside, oh you're oversensitive to those allergens but the homeopath if calicarbonicum is the case no it's on the other side of that boundary. You are a black and white thinker and this is mirrored in your mucous membranes and so they cannot tell about the accretion of dampness or either they're either too damp or too dry That's why you have what you think are allergies. And if you've had a miscarriage in their first trimester Okay, the mucous membranes lining the endometrium when a blastocyst settles in there. They're too dry the blastocyst Floss off and that's why you had a miscarriage looked at from the point of view of this remedy calicarbonicum damn so You know I'm always thinking I when I talk about this I'm a fan of humor and I think about Saturday Night Live character as Stuart Smalley I think it was mm-hmm used to say I'm good enough. I'm smart enough and gosh darn it people like me

24:21 But he said something else I thought that was apropos. It's easier to wear slippers than to carpet the world Okay, so carpeting the world would be the attack of the allergist who says you can't have this You can't have that Oh Mike and the person what am I going to eat? What am I gonna where am I gonna go? No, you can't do this again doing That is like carpeting the world whereas putting on slippers would be taking the remedy just fixing what you know your own your own level of comfort Pick the remedy, calicarbonicum. Get past this judge mentality and then lo and behold you'll find that the world suddenly is more receptive to your presence." Wow! See that's amazing because this audience knows that for the last 12 years of this show anytime we talk about I

25:19 But I treat myself as a guinea pig too, and I try to say to the audience well hey this has worked or this hasn't. Sometimes it's unfortunate because i'll get really motivated by a guest and they make a really great case for their thing then then I have to say well it didn't work for me but I feel like you know even this audience who filed this show can tell that when you say the person would have black and white thinking, be a little judgmental and export their opinions. You kind of are describing me." And so that's just really interesting! Now what I have to take your case Greg doing that on the basis of this would be what i call cocktail level prescribing. Sure sure within homeopathy there are many many different versions of this and I would hate to lose credibility by sending you out for that remedy yes yes there are nuances but i'll tell you a funny story about it because it's one of my favorite remedies and I just get such a kick out of

26:10 just as my way of education. So I had a guy come to me who I've been treating successfully for some time, by the way this remedy is also described in my book In The Case Of The Naked Schoolgirl at the end that you'll see that this child who takes all her clothes off in school winds up benefiting from this remedy it solves our problem but anyway this particular guy he wasn't taking his clothes off and yet all kinds of stuff I was working with guess he had allergies or some point and then anyway I gave him this remedy, calicarbonicum. So some background about him. He was a banker. He was a runner. He was an environmentalist and he came from a family where everyone was a staunch Republican for generations. And they had high level political positions as Republicans and governors and lieutenant governors and senators and assembly people. Everyone has a matter of absolute knee jerk action would vote automatically vote Republican regardless of anything

27:09 That's the other aspect of calicarbonicum. When you're a black and white thinker, you tend to be a traditionalist—you like things as they are. You don't like things to deviate too much. You like holidays. You like things as they are. And that girl in the book who took her clothes off was resisting transitions and she just liked things as they were. She also proclaimed a calicarbonicum point. This is my birthday suit! I've always been like this I know exactly who I am, you can't transition me. So this guy anyway...I had been treating him for a while and then I wound up having to give him calicorbonicum and he showed up in my office the day after the election between Gore and The Younger Bush so he comes in, he's sitting there staring at me like he's not saying anything, he's just staring at me! He said what the hell did you do to me? What's the matter what are you talking about? I voted Democratic!

28:08 So the remedy, I mean it changed something in him and opens him up. It loosened his black-and-white thinking to the point that he could no longer deny a certain gray area which was at his party was really not satisfying his urges towards environmentalism and he broke with this enormous tradition. One of my absolute favorite stories Yeah, it's a good one. The mind body connection is so weird and through these little examples I feel like we chip away at the conventional model and help people to understand the many multifaceted ways this can be true and how it can be used And I can't believe were 30 minutes into this thing and we haven't even really talked about the book but it is really interesting covers of

28:54 a little known part of history. I mean, we have talked before about how Rockefeller Medicine came and took over... The words get clunky traditional alternative medicine is the medicine that's used more throughout history and more throughout the world but we say conventional to describe Rockefeller Medicine and they really did do a number on the language and flipping the script on that We have talked before about how the petrochemical pill industry took over holistic herbology, but we haven't really talked about how it factors into psychiatry and mental health. This is just a huge interesting thing that your book is all about you use the term which I think is very apt the Dead Sea Scrolls of Homeopathy and Psychiatry tell people what you mean by that and broadly what is in that book?

29:49 Well, Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah I mean it was a trope. It's just sort of a joke as if I had to discover the Dead Sea Scrolls. I would notice looking at websites of medical schools and hospitals looking at their origins...I knew that many these places were originally homeopathic but that was never mentioned! They found the way to scrub that stuff away so my original task involved digging deep into the origins. I'd find the name of the first superintendent of a hospital the originator of a medical school, and start researching them and their colleagues. And then that's how I'd find it. It was going really...an excavation job in history. The internet of course is useful but it has its limits but still it would lead you to the actual books that you get to read so I would order these books at places like University Michigan has a digitalization process even Google has great source Google Books they've been reconstituting these books in digital form So I got a lot of material

30:51 And so I likened it to finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, just as a way of getting people acquainted with the idea that this was not that easy to do. In fact it was deliberately pretty much deliberately shunted aside. These are not convenient truths for today. Johns Hopkins has been consistently putting out books describe homeopathy as a sect or heresy, and they're written by non-homeopaths. And it sounds like not that important of thing but that point of view contaminates the history departments at all universities especially the ones which have medical history departments

31:28 And it's not a good thing. It's just not a good thing when your history is hijacked you lose the ability to choose later on So that's the backdrop for that Yeah, it was very interesting stuff to find but I couldn't believe how isolating it was because people would say I didn't know That and I said well That's why I wrote this but you just feel very alone when you occupy your truth that Other people don't have and that compelled me to write this. I said my god, i'm not going to keep this to myself I absolutely have to get this out And so I don't go crazy So I don't think i'm the only person carrying this deluded beliefs out preferred realities have a lot of power they really do Um and you know that greg? I know you know that Well, I definitely have my preferred realities but

32:14 In terms of that kind of a segway is that when it comes to. The rockefellers and the robber baron class in the things they were doing back in the day it is really all oil energy and medicine, and there's a real analogy that as you can unpack a book like yours and see actually these homeopathic hospitals were very widespread. They were preferred by people and they had better results, and then they just stuck all the toothpaste back in the tube you can also go down a rabbit hole about energy and see that there used to be a network of electric taxis throughout New York And they would just swap out the batteries for a newly charged one and get back out on the road

32:58 There were all kinds of interesting energy technologies that would blow the mind you'd be like there's no way There's no way they had that way back then Same goes for, you know cars used to be able to run on alcohol used to be able to run on hemp and they just systematically removed all that stuff and said nope you run on oil only and there's a Side thread that prohibition was largely about alcohol as a fuel not so much about alcohol consumption But that was the kind of the cover story, but I just think this is always so interesting This huge umbrella of things that have been suppressed in exchange for the profits of the robber barons in various areas. And you have a quote in the book where you say,

33:55 and its advanced methods remains inconvenient to the economic interests of the psychopharmacology. Sane Asylum's aim is to examine this past history so that a new path forward in the care and treatment of the mentally ill can be imagined." And I just love that, I think that sums it up right there what the book is about and trying to do help people understand the scope of these hospitals and how widespread they were back then, because it wasn't a small thing. Yeah. By the way I want to also say back to what your energy point is...I grew up in New York City and when i was a little kid we had trolleys there! There were trolleys all over the place heartbreaking to rip those trolleys up and eventually detract so that cars can go through there. It was such more livable city

34:41 What can I say? You're doing my job for me, Rick. You're laying this out." The hospital's utopian thinking flourished back then and so the asylums really tried...they married the moral care ethic of the Quakers and people like William Tuk with homeopathy but also all kinds of utopian visions and that involves self-sufficiency Selden Talcott's fantastic Middletown Hospital was a self-sufficient operation. He was a brilliant guy, he organized the plumbing and the inner structure of the buildings. He is the one who made use of the baseball field and brought baseball therapy into psychiatry but the self sufficiency of the operation was really a big deal I wrote a blog recently telling this story about what with this book originally i proposed it to Springer Press in Europe

35:34 And there were three major publishing houses that historically brought out homeopathic texts and histories. And Springer was one of them, and with the European kibosh on homeopathy they were pressured—absolutely pressured—not to make any more homeopathy books I said no that's impossible they'll have to make an exception for this it's so much like this earlier book A Hundred Years of Homeopathy well they told me with a straight face that there was no difference between the allopathic moral care asylums at that time with a straight face they told me complete nonsense. As an example, in my blog I give two examples—one is that up the road built exactly one year earlier was the Hudson River asylum almost exactly the same size as the Middletown Hospital. In fact it was a site that the Middletown Hospital originally wanted and that was a complete money pit! They lost $1.2 million of taxpayers' money

36:27 It was excoriated in the New York Times, and yeah they had moral care but no homeopathy there. And then up the road 125 miles away was the Utica asylum of Amariah Brigham—also supposedly a moral care institution where they had the notorious Utica crib so if you were acting out there as opposed to being put into a camisole or being talked too gently by the nurses at Middletown, Amariah Brigham puts you in his crib which is like a very narrow coffin that you couldn't move in. You couldn't move your arms, couldn't be legs. You were just absolutely inert in this little slat constructed 18 inch high coffin and yeah he did it to punish his clients, to break their spirits. Absolutely horrendous! And when you came out of there and unhinged the top that's where the expression to become unhinged came from. You're twice as crazy as you were when you went in. Great story I think back to the baseball

37:25 Seldon Talcott created a baseball team called the Asylums to represent his Middletown Hospital, and they were great teams. They played major league teams—they beat pretty much everybody! And up the road in Utica New York which was one of the origins of minor league baseball, the Utica Team was created and he called themselves The Pent-Ups I find this really so funny. So that was a nod to the hospital and his MRI of Brigham's notorious crib, but the point being that yeah there are significant differences between moral care institutions and if you don't know that if you're deprived of knowledge or the history You lose choice Back then if you didn't know the difference between the Utica and Middletown And he said well they're both moral care institutions. He might have found yourself in

38:10 in the Utica crib if you'd gone to Utica, but that would not have been the case at Middletown. Yes when you're deprived of the history you lose the choice that is a great phrase and the baseball therapy section is quite interesting it's like the ritual of the game just seemed to help people in some kind of weird macrocosm microcosm way just I don't know maybe having something to do but it's just so night and day Outside the box thinking that got them to do that sort of thing instead of just pumping somebody with pills. And let me ask you about the suppression aspect because if we kind of established at these were widespread, they were more popular allopathic

38:55 People and rockefeller medicine people they saw this as a threat there looking at it from the business perspective lot of times conspiracy. And business tactics are really just the same thing get together say how do we make money and stop our competition what did they do because their couple things that i did, Rockefeller working with Andrew Carnegie, enlisting the education specialist Abraham Flexner, author of The Flexner Report. You call that a watershed moment? Talk to us about that. Talk to us about this era of getting all this stuff basically removed from the medical system and leaving people with the only choice, allopathic medicine. Well my chapter in the book, Chapter 11 is Concessions through the Spirit of the Times

39:46 And it really was a pretty complex and slow moving process. It didn't happen all at once, yeah the Flexner report was absolutely part of that I don't think anybody could foresee how damaging uncontrolled capitalism could be The force of capitalism...I mean I guess i'm a Marxist on this point you know? It is a juggernaut! It has power Homeopaths were pressured left and right from government agencies Also the money all flowed into this so-called scientific medicine Well, they made all kinds of mistakes. They invited the Allopaths onto the staffs of their hospitals, onto the faculties of their medical schools and you know everybody did... The scientific revolution say what you may about the outcome with drugs it had a huge appeal in terms of really trying to figure out what was going on in the body, the dissections and all people who had created instruments that they wanted to use to measure functions and to learn about the body in physiological terms

40:48 Everybody talked that talk, and everybody believed even the homie past that someday they would find an organic cause for mental illness. They really did. And there were terms that everybody used that played into that dementia, praecox and paresis but the difference was... The difference was that the homie past even when they talked that route—and this would include William Morris Butler who completely bought into Craig Craplan's eugenics movement, and he produced a horrible book with pictures of so-called degenerates and so forth. Even so the homeopaths continue to prescribe on the basis of the totality of symptoms and not on these bogus physiological discoveries—that's the big difference! There were some other watershed moments I consider Frank D. C. Richardson

41:39 the poster child for the apostasy of the movement at the Evans Memorial Center. He had every credential a homeopath could have, and he sold his soul—honest to God! He took all this money to build the Evans Center and started getting very pompous about that, would say that only he and the Evans Center knew all the mistakes the Homeopaths had made. He's going to get rid of all the deadwood." And the Homeopaths couldn't really resist him because he was so prominent—he had so much money—and this is 1910 It's a very pivotal movement, and there are many versions of that all over the place. The Meninger Center—places that were originally homeopathic didn't disavow homeopathy. It was just that there was a spirit at the times where Meninger's son Carl would get into the business and they would just concede to the spirit of the times and go in this scientific direction. Homeopathy got marginalized

42:37 I think it's just the power of capital. You can make money on something and that drives everything I'll tell you a story. When i was in China, I asked one of my physician mentors, I said Dr Liu where is the research department here? Thinking he's going to say oh we have a lab down the hall. I was studying acupuncture at Nanjing College of Traditional Medicine and he looked at me kind of funny said what do you mean? I said acupuncture so old how do you develop new treatment strategies? So he thought for minutes that then he did kind of smile and he said Oh! You mean the library. What he meant by that new treatments are discovered or refined, but they always go back to the old text to see what in the old texts would substantiate their new approaches. Very very much—I'm not a Talmudic scholar I am Jewish but i'm not a Talmudic scholar But in the world of the Talmud it's exactly the same way

43:29 you have to answer even the most modern questions, but you don't throw the old books away. You go back to the old books and find a precedent that some way or another relates to the modern circumstance." But the thing is that doesn't make anybody any money! Having an old dusty library that only some people can read—and those old books were written in language so old Not everybody could even read them. It would be like someone being an English major and reading Beowulf in the original, it doesn't make any money for anybody. It doesn't play into the economic engine whereas scientific research regardless of its outcome whoa boy does it pay off? There's so many things to study and that research and to substantiate and to debunk you know and so many things to try out. It makes jobs for people that access as resources You cannot underestimate the power of that

44:18 And people love instruments and they always think that they're going to get more information from an instrument than from somebody gently feeling your pulse or looking at your tongue. It's too bad, but that's how things go with the power of the economic engine of capitalism is just astounding! And it's hard to resist. Right right...and The nuances to economic models are a little over my head But I mean when it comes to capitalism? I just think free markets have just never been free. A privileged few control markets and suppress alternatives until they establish a monopoly, and then they present everything as if well this is just the best way to do it. And in the case we're talking about now it's just clearly not true so

45:03 You know, in a total free market when people have absolute choice to go to a homeopathic center or an allopathic center. Sure I support that but it's just never really been that way so these criticisms... A lot of them can be addressed by just taking this privileged elite that really started in the robber baron days and just finding some way to keep them from affecting policy, keep them from like legislating against their competition. I mean that's kind of most of our problems i think

45:39 Boil down to that and the fact that a lot of people think the markets are free when they just are completely captured. And hit that is what it is but another example that has the creation of the american medical association this is another big factor in how things got so backwards that you write about in the book, it's how they centralized and standardized education and practice of medicine so that every PhD graduate that has come out of that system, they make fun of homeopathy because why would their educators lie to them? And it's just like, that's just another example of it. But I guess as we're coming up on the end of the first hour here if you could take the best from this era in the 19th century that we're talking about these utopian hospitals something like The Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital that you call The Mother Church of these types of facilities

46:38 If you could take the best from this era and intertwine it with what we know now, any advancements that have come in our modern age? Any new insights? What would your perfect modern hospital homeopathic hospital look like. Yeah I that's in my fever dream at the very end of the book and last chapter investing insanity. You know I'm a kind of a fan of bio neural feedback. It's amazing to me how little we've advanced in terms of connecting organic function of the brain, anything that you can measure with a treatment. You know if you have a kid who has a special needs problem they'll do this neurological workup. Have you ever encountered this? Parents come to me and show their neurological work up of their kids maybe 15-20 pages long and at the end of it they're recommending something for attention deficit disorder

47:30 You know, very few things have where you can really definitely see the connection between an organic head issue brain issue with a problem. A bullet going through a certain part of your head that will have a certain effect. Um...a lot of it is not clear at all even though people talk like that all the time. All the theories about chemical imbalance in the brain are nonsense. The whole idea of a broken brain is nonsense but neural feedback Again, it's not fringe. It's the purview of psychologists. They do what they call a brain map of your brain frequencies and this is a very clear picture and when you can interpret that, you actually can create an algorithm and have people go into feedback protocol which adjusts for that. This is the most amazing thing I can't think of any other modality in psychology

48:20 more psychiatry, in which you have that connection between an assessing instrument and the actual treatment. So that would be part—to your question I would like to bring the asylums back at a manageable level because back to the other thing why they fail was they part of their success there were too big these states started sending everybody to these places and they couldn't do good homeopathy when there's 2 000 people there and they would underfund them and they'd have bad staff they absolutely deteriorated as a basis of their success. But yeah, so if we reinvent them and I like the idea of small asylums where we can certainly put our clients who are so drug involved that we can detox them under safe conditions 24 hours out of the day and not lose them as soon as they have a regression you know back to this cycle farm business

49:07 We need new asylums, and we need to also respect the Medley Hill. Not be embarrassed about it as a stigma but the embarrassment is that we can't deal with them as human beings! That's the embarrassment. These are problems of life and they can be grappled with directly—you know gently with homeopathic remedies—with acupuncture, with massage possibly hypnosis neurofeedback but give people a chance to really recuperate and enjoy their life. We do not want to warehouse people, send them back into the community all drugged up and pretend we've fixed this problem." How do you legislate against hypocrisy Greg? I mean they have to be a lot more honest about things it can't be done i mean places like Switzerland for example homeopathy is part of the medical system there it can be done It's not an intractable completely intractable problem

49:56 But you have to have people who have a certain level of consciousness and a sense of responsibility in this area, and they aren't kidding themselves. I like it. A little neurofeedback, some homeopathic remedies, acupuncture a little baseball therapy and yeah you got a facility that can outperform the best of the best of what Rockefeller Medicine has to offer Stay tuned for when i create my mega crowdsourcing program! And so as we're starting to wrap this thing up one of the big goals with the book is to. Recognize this suppressed chapter of medical history and then use this knowledge to resurrect these modalities to the mainstream and show people hey that's not it's not new this has a rich,

50:48 well documented now history and we can just rely on that to help us out and bring this stuff back to the mainstream in important. Aspect of seeing homeopathy rise is that people need to be able to find good practitioners do you have any advice on finding good people or a network to use, or some type of certification to look for when it comes to finding quality people in the fields of homeopathy? Or even acupuncture because a lot of times people might try it once or twice not have results and then dismiss the whole field. But there's clearly a range of talent within the field right how do we find the good people

51:30 Well, with acupuncture it's really easy. Everybody is licensed now. It's licensed in every state which is really cool when I started out it was voodoo medicine we had to practice needling at night secretly because putting a needle on somebody was illegal if you weren't a doctor Now I'm amazed to say people come out of Ivy League schools and they become acupuncturists and no problem Of course its not covered by insurance yet that one litmus test Okay, homeopathy. Well the gold standard for certification and we do have certification there's not much licensure for it that might be one state that licenses homoeopathic physicians I think is either New Mexico or Arizona and they used to be a few Connecticut used to do it

52:06 But right now, we kind of have to be settled for the CHC certification. The Council for Homeopathic Certification and that's the gold standard so if you want to find somebody who is a good homeopath, you'll have good luck go to the council for homeopathic certifications site CHC and see who is licensed, who certified in your state. The silver standard would be NASCH, the North American Society of Homeopaths They're also well-trained, but they don't take an examination to get their credential. That's kind of the only difference. The CHC is the more rigorous one so you can find that I don't know we were always debating whether we want to get complete regulation control over these kinds of professions that brings a lot of problems with it as well.

52:52 But homeopathy as yet is kind of a hodgepodge. You have naturopathic homeopaths, they may be credentialed themselves within that, within naturopathy there's the American Institute of Homeopathy which is for physician homeopaths and they can credential themselves so if you're a physician you can practice anything you want here are the godlike physician but if you want to get trained in it properly no matter who you are acupuncturist, nitropath, chiropractor...you know you'd be getting the CHC degree That's the most rigorous and really will put you right into the mainstream of classical homeopathic practicing. Great, great! That's so useful because sometimes we're just shooting in the dark and we don't have the great results that we might want but

53:34 I'm definitely motivated to look into it now more than ever and it's still a little mysterious, the processes. It almost seems like homeopathy is a form of or adjacent to alchemy when it comes to creating these remedies. That's not an embarrassment! We're absolutely... we're alchemists I think so. I love it! Well, now i'm even more interested because that's the type of person that I want to be my healer and my family's healer So...I love it but this has been really enlightening and uh.. I am honored to play a small role in trying to turn the tide on Rockefeller Medicine And return to the sane ways by having you here to talk about this stuff Tell people anything else they should know about your websites your books or practice before I cut ya loose

54:20 Yeah, you can check out my books at writewellpress.com even if you go to the website for sane asylums and there are quite a few of them Simon & Schuster has one Intertraditions has one You'll get access to portals concerning what I do In terms of what could be done...I'd like to revolutionize what's happening at the level of academia As i say, I think it is an embarrassment that I had to write this book It should have been written by at least 1 or 2 historians And that's a failing That's a shortcoming At the level of academic history either in the general history departments or the medical history departments. There's a lot of collateral damage when your history is hijacked, and petition your local college to teach this history. I guess getting this book into their hands would be step one but we all need to fight for our history. We don't want to become what somebody else thinks we are. We don't wanna lose our history to somebody who finds it inconvenient and wants to promote something that will do us harm

55:20 based on their self-interest. So many things to do, I think that's about it. Your interviewing me was a fantastic boon don't sell yourself short Greg and that introduction you gave was out of this world your most articulate and knowledgeable interviewer i've had so far Wow well I certainly appreciate that and all the work you've done thanks again It's been really great talking with ya keep fighting the good fight out there Take care Greg Thanks so much Hallelujah, homeopathic higher-side chatters! How about that? A guy who knows a lot about a lot happy with how this turned out. I've become a big Jerry Cantor fan He wrote a book that covers a pretty unique and underappreciated time in American medical history as well as being a longtime expert in homeopathic practice so weaving through both of these subjects to me made for a compelling two hours

56:19 I could understand some people saying, geez another show with a medical theme? That's three in a row. And i suppose that's true. I personally think George Wiseman Dr Robert Malone and Jerry Cantor are pretty far apart but I could understand a person having that opinion The truth is I have two other episodes recorded that have nothing to do with medicine, but i switched up the release order just a bit because I wanted to get Dr. Robert Malone out pretty much right away and one of the others just took a little more time to work through in editing so this too-much medical stuff thing IS a consideration I made when I booked my guests and even though I did keep the diversity high

57:06 I then went against my own logic and changed up the release order. So it is what it is, but we spent half the time with George talking about alternative energy and half the time with Dr Malone talking about transhumanism and the goals of Agenda 2030...and both of those clearly I consider to be quite different than an expose on moral care, alternative facilities to Rockefeller Medicine and how they were attacked by the system and eliminated as competition Plus, Jerry makes homeopathy sound almost magical and I appreciate his approach to healing. I will give him props because it took a lot of balls to say all throughout COVID that yeah there's nothing really special about this i treat it the same way I treat any illness in my practice and we haven't had any problems that's no small thing to say right?

57:58 And the whole thing about viruses was the big criticism with Dr. Malone, oh he's controlled opposition because he supports the general virus model Well I think he gave us a lot of juicy stuff that would be worth any listener's time and if you for yourself are sure viruses don't make us sick great 90% of the interview wasn't even about that maybe even 100%. Even if you think a person is controlled opposition I still see a lot of value in parsing through the stuff they're saying, in a lot of cases. And with that one I got comments like you should learn about Dr Tom Cowan or Dr Andrew Kaufman Well we've had Dr Kaufman here before and he made a great case for his position and I've mentioned Dr Cowan many times He's turned me down, he's not interested on being on THC for some reason

58:52 But the bigger point that I would want to make is that i try to offer up a wide range of alternative takes and angles. I don't plant my flag on one conclusion and now every potential guest must check that box! I definitely keep it alternative but, I also try to guard against info silos and echo chambers so if you always want this show to be one thing... You're gonna be disappointed I have no problem with really extreme opinions like viruses don't make us sick, which is probably the most extreme opinion in medicine or the earth is flat. We talk to people all the time who slide that in there and that's all good but if your criteria to listening to anyone is that they check boxes like that you're going to have about five to ten people in rotation because that's a small club

59:49 Anyway, Jerry was a lot of fun. We talked about angles I hadn't considered before and I'm glad he gave me some guidelines to look for when trying to find a practitioner with his sort of perspective that's pretty valuable to me When he connected certain symptoms to certain social tendencies or personality types That was the highlight explaining how certain things can happen to a person and in the short term, something like a stabbing is going to look the same. But then over time maybe there's a connection between who heals faster and who doesn't with their previous traumas or their thought processes that was pretty interesting Is there something in that mix as to why someone might get an infection on their cut and someone else wouldn't?

1:00:40 I'm not sure, but i like the creative ways of looking at stuff like that. And really when i find a guy who has dug up a suppressed or hidden part of history in science or medicine or any of the areas that stepped on the profits of the robber baron class and thus were taken out of the textbooks... almost out of spite! I want to help get that history back out there And when Jerry calls these documents he found the Dead Sea Scrolls of Medicine, I think that's just a great way to describe it too. So lots to like! Lots to like! But we are breaking from the broad category of health and wellness for awhile Looking at what i have booked through the next two months It's pretty wild and all over the place

1:03:23 The Plush Show RSS feed that works just like the free one. Blah blah blah, put it on your Christmas list if you feel so inclined we have a gifting system built right into the purchase form too I'm doing what i can help me help you In higher side news We had a big ol' Black Friday Cyber Monday sale on merch for those who noticed and it was wildly popular So many new THC t-shirts and hoodies and coffee mugs are out in the world thanks to everyone who picks something up. Of course, if you're a Plus member you get 10% off merch anyway all the time! Always be closing... And I was also just a guest on three other shows quite frankly which was maybe seven or ten days ago and a lot of fun

1:04:11 Then the Gramerica guys had me back on after spending two weeks in Egypt. So I caught them up on all the news they missed from Kanye's trainer to FTX to Balenciaga and that was a lot of fun too! And then also much fun, Gordon had me back on RuneSoup to talk about our top 10 conspiracy books of all time he had his top ten list and i had mine and we just talked about them and why they made the list and it was awesome Three really fun guest spots for those who don't think they hear me talk enough on THC if those people exist. And if you find that those episodes aren't out yet, I imagine they would be the next ones on deck also, I guess if you know any other podcasts you'd like to see me on let them know I'm ready

1:04:58 Finally, let's look at the calendar and see where THC fans are meeting up with THC fans. Hiresidemeetups.com is the place to do it and for December we got two meet ups happening on December 3rd one in Philadelphia one in High Springs Florida then on December 4th one in Pompton Lakes New Jersey December 8th The LA Truthers coming together once again December 10 Don't make me say it. Patchogee, New York and Greybull Wyoming much easier to pronounce also December 10th Vancouver Washington and Glendale California December 11 we have the Asheville North Carolina meetup and December 17 there is one in Fayetteville New York

1:05:47 And I think that closes out what we have on the books for December, but it's looking pretty action packed except for the week of Christmas which anyone could understand. But that's it! Go to the calendar for more details and if you don't hear about anything close to you hop on there and make your own. There is really no agenda from me It's just a fun and free way to make sure you have more like-minded people in your local life connected through this Weird Stuff podcast because that's what I got to offer That said, I hope you guys enjoy the holidays and succeed in being the best versions of yourself you can be. Less friction and more love right? Smooth out any remaining disturbances in your field embrace for 2023. I'm getting outta here big thanks again to Jerry saying Asylums is The Book! I've done my part Your move healthy hospital history suppressors moral care concealers and homeopathy hiders

1:06:52 Sometimes when I get down, I eat a bunch of corporate junk. But that makes you fat in industry! Have to face it wrong Got an addiction to the digital technology And then I try to quit but it's too hard. See discipline is a knife Discipline is a big conspiracy Every one of them

1:09:28 And that is another show complete! Remember, as much as you enjoyed this which is just the free first hour I hope you'll become a Plus Member to hear the full two-hour interviews. You also can engage with other Plus Members in the comments and the forums and you'll find your answer to one of the most common questions I get which is where can I find those cover songs that you use at the end of the show? Well they are free downloads for Plus Members too And without Plus Members, I can't hire the occasional musician to bring these odd cover song ideas to fruition. Plus members are how I'm able to do what I do without ads and without the big machine being on my back! We can fit so much more into a two-hour interview and I'd do my best to make it worth your time and money." The conversation only gets deeper, weirder, and more controversial in that private hour. How could it not be the way things are going?

1:10:20 But the best way to sign up is at TheHigherSideChats.com, where new first-time subscribers always get a free 7 day trial because I'm just that confident! There's no PayPal on the website but if you need to use PayPal then sign up through Patreon and you get all of the same episodes Our website is a credit or debit system, but you can also scope out the other options like a few various cryptos. Cash or check mailed to the P.O box and I'll even barter with most people if you have your own business and produce something nice that my wife or kid or taste buds might like But the architects of consensus reality have made it clear that these themes and topics aren't really welcome on the main stage. And so this is how we secure a little counterculture corner for ourselves, and I hope you'll join PLUS because that's the only way it works!

1:11:08 Besides, you can cancel any time right on your profile page. The most common concern I hear is people just being unsure if THC Plus will work with their podcast app and the answer is probably yes! But if not we have several high-level app recommendations for whatever phone you use and the website is made for mobile too We're trained to tip a waitress for bringing us a sandwich, but that tip doesn't give you access to a second sandwich. Really I'm not asking for any more than that and think I offer better service. Come get your second serving of tasty conspiracy goodness in exchange for that small token of your appreciation. Beyond that let it also be known we have grown and survived as long as we have by word-of-mouth

1:11:51 I don't care so much about social media likes or follows, but tell the right people about THC. And not just listeners but the high-level figures who are better suited to sit down with me than most other hosts And if you can help me with any of these things I can work to bring you better shows which is just a win-win for both us. Informative, entertaining and action packed! It also never hurts to thank a guest you liked if you have the time either we want them to know people are listening so they're willing to come back down the road too Thank YOU for spending some time with me and cheers to a better tomorrow