Allergies and their Holistic Treatment

Allergies and their Holistic Treatment

By Reimar Banis MD

In our modern society, allergy diseases such as hay fever, asthma and neurodermitis have become increasingly more significant medically. About a fifth of all adults and a third of all children have allergies, and the increasing number of ailing children makes it clear that the number of allergy sufferers is on an inexorable rise. Environmentally conscious critics blame the rising number of toxins – and in fact, it was confirmed in Japan that the allergy count on high-traffic city streets was higher than in rural communities. The culprit turned out to be soot particles, which cling to pollen grains and thus intensify the allergic reactions.

A further proof of the environmental theory of allergy would seem to be that allergies are virtually unknown in primitive societies. The more civilization advances, the more allergies crop up. Many ecologically oriented people place the entire blame for allergies on environmental toxins, which is certainly true to some degree. But the main reason for the rising number of allergies is not environmental pollution, but rather the lack of “dirt” in our modern world, with which the immune system in primitive societies still has to cope with. For instance, virtually all Amazon Indians have a gut full of parasites that keep the immune system so busy that it doesn’t have time for silly things like allergies. Thus, allergies arise not because of too many toxins, but above all due to not enough dirt. Out of curiosity, a Japanese researcher infected himself with tapeworms, whereupon his allergies promptly vanished.

Nowadays, experts recommend that the mothers of allergy-risk babies – i.e. if one (or especially both) of the parents is allergic – nurse their babies for as long as possible, just as primitive societies do. Breast-feeding supplies the developing immune system with maternal protective anti-allergic substances. Also recommended is much exposure to dirt and little hygiene as soon as the child begins to crawl. The ideal would be to grow up in a farmyard, especially for allergy high-risk children. Best of all, of course, would be to nip allergies in the bud by starting with the baby and mother. One simple option is to inoculate the newborn child with eubionts (e.g. Mutaflor suspension daily on the tongue for a few weeks), plus early extinction of psychoenergetic blocks (about which more later). In this manner, allergy outbreaks can in many cases be prevented.

Allergies and the Mind

Many people intuitively relate allergies to psychological hypersensitivity. Experience shows that people with more sensitive nervous systems are also more susceptible to allergies – which I, as a physician, can confirm from decades of experience dealing with countless patients. Allergies also have a direct connection with the mind, which is demonstrated by the fact that asthmatics can suffer an asthma attack just by looking at a picture of a flowering meadow. The mind thus strongly and directly influences allergies.

Yet another example of mental factors are the often overly preoccupied and strict mothers of allergic children with eczema. For a child with neurodermitis, the mother’s barked order to “Stop that scratching right now!” induces mental stress in the youthful eczema sufferer that makes the disease worse. Many children with eczema heal spontaneously as soon as the mother is no longer present during the cure. On the other hand, if the mothers visit on the weekend, the neurodermitis immediately gets worse.

Research in psychoneuroimmunology has been able to show that the mind and the immune system are tightly linked. Numerous studies have confirmed that long-term oppressive and discouraging situations weaken the immune system. Quite logically, therefore, cancer patients with a positive attitude have a higher life expectancy, which is the basis of therapies such as the well-known Simonton Method. What’s more, immunological reactions can be trained and conditioned, so that patients can learn to face the future more optimistically. Up to a point, therefore, one can train one’s defensive functions and establish desirable processes.

Orthodox-medical and Naturopathic Therapeutic Options

Basically, what is recommended is an “allergy holiday”, high in the mountains, say, above 1500 meters, or at the seashore, far away from pollen and household dust. The immune system then partially forgets the allergy, and the patient then has some peace, often for a long time. Modern allergology also prescribes antihistamines, which now have very little in the way of side-effects and yet are highly effective. For especially sensitive patients, I test the necessary allopathics using the REBA test device, and am able to determine, in a reassuringly high percentage of cases, that these are excellent remedies for alleviating symptoms. As a naturopathic physician, I use allopathics infrequently as a matter of principle, but there are times when there’s no getting around them. A dogmatic attitude is especially inappropriate when it comes to children with asthma and neurodermitis, since the children end up suffering needlessly.

Nor can I (after countless treatments with my allergy patients) agree with the oft-repeated objections to desensitization. It is a very beneficial and useful measure that can, for example in juvenile hay-fever sufferers with incipient spastic bronchitis, block the transition to asthma. Preventive desensitization is begun in October and ended in early spring at the latest, when the first early bloomers become active. Bioresonance Therapy has at times also proven astonishingly effective against allergies, although success is, basically, quite variable.

A very successful juvenile therapy is the homeopathic potentiation of autologous blood (general), autologous urine (asthma) or mother’s milk (for milk crust). A few drops are put in a 30ml dropper bottle with 30% alcohol (available inexpensively at a pharmacy; first remove the stopper, blood drops in, then replace stopper). The bottle is then rapped against a hardcover book 100 times, and you then have a C1 Korsakov potentiation. From this C1 bottle, a few drops are taken and put into a second 30ml bottle with alcohol, which is then rapped as before (C2). The process is repeated until, with the 6th bottle, a C6 potentiation has been reached. The child now gets 6 drops daily of C6 for 3 weeks, then C5 in the same manner and so on down to the C1 bottle.

When the hay fever has already broken out, I have had the best results with Colibiogen injections. One IM injection weekly can get a grip on the great majority of symptoms. A number of companies also have good compound preparations, such as DHU hay-fever remedy/Luffa comp (from Omida). The homeopathic physician Wiesenauer recommends, for household dust allergy, Sabadilla D6, 3 globuli 5x daily for 3 weeks, 1 week break, then repeat. Snake venom is also quite efficacious (Horvitrigon Reintoxin forte, 10 drops 2x daily) prophylactically, presumably because it activates suppressor cells and promotes immune-moderating components. By the way, Sanum therapy is based on similar effects, as the immune system is to some extent distracted from the allergy.

Finally, I’d like to touch on foci and intestinal flora disorders that, as the most significant hidden causes, can both provoke and maintain allergies. For neurodermitis sufferers, nothing works if the intestines are not cleansed (ofttimes fungi and anaerobes!) – just as asthmatics quite often have a sinusitis focus. One of my most striking cases came at the beginning of my professional career, in which I diagnosed a tonsillar focus in a young lady with severe neurodermitis. Even though the tonsils didn’t look abnormal and the patient had no tonsil symptoms, my ENT colleague was nevertheless persuaded by the gravity of the clinical picture to remove the seemingly healthy tonsils. The patient reported that, during the operation, the pus spurted up to the ceiling, and a day later, her neurodermitis had disappeared!

All together, foci, disturbed bowels and psychoenergetic blocks (which I will come to next) make up the most important (often hidden) causes of allergies, as the following illustration makes clear:

Just as most of an iceberg is submerged and thus not visible, the most important causes of an allergy are hidden out of sight. However, with the right methods, it is possible to ferret out these causes and treat them. These include bioenergetic test methods such as EAV, Vegatest or (my testing preference) the REBA device. Additional information can be obtained from a detailed anamnesis, thorough physical examination and pathophysiognomical indications. Thus, for example, periodontosis, an oily coating in the tongue, halitosis, unclean skin, many forms of irregular stool and a profoundly pressure-sensitive caecal root all very reliably indicate poor intestinal flora.

From the above picture of the important and the more trivial allergy causes, one can also realize that the trivial causes tend strongly to be overvalued, if only because patients so often first get allergic symptoms when they appear. Patients and therapists alike then erroneously believe that they are dealing with the actual causes of the allergy. The causes that in my experience prove to be rather secondary include heavy-metal burdens and food allergies. Theories came out of the USA in the eighties that puffed up food allergies and gluten, milk and wheat intolerance into the true causes of allergies. Among thousands of patients, I have thus far only seen a couple of cases in which these causes actually had any long-term significance. In these rare cases, I usually also found conspicuous cross reactions in the Prick Test, e.g. in a hay fever case clearly traceable allergy to strawberries and nuts, or Gliadin antibodies and a positive oxygen breath test in a case of lactose intolerance.

The overwhelming majority of presumed food allergies originate, in my experience, from people with severe intestinal flora dysbiosis. This makes the intestinal mucosa extremely hypersensitive, as when sunburn makes wearing a shirt nearly intolerable. Once the intestinal flora improve and the churned-up immune system subsides – which is, often enough, irritated by foci and geopathies, as well as psychoenergetic conflicts – the supposed intolerance vanishes almost every time! Very similar processes also lead to alleged heavy-metal burdens (amalgam), as the already severely disturbed metabolism fully decompensates when heavy metal is introduced as well. It is therefore urgent to normalize the disturbed metabolism, after which heavy metals can also be tolerated better.

Psychoenergetic Factors

My experience is that subconscious psychoenergetic blocks play a major role in allergy cases. Because the emotional content of such blocks are almost always deeply subconscious, one cannot accuse the allergy sufferer of deliberately making himself sick for some reason or other: as a rule, the conflicts involved are buried too deeply in the subconscious. These emotional blocks constantly irritate the immune system and thereby generate a vegetatively labile situation that markedly aggravates allergies. If the psychoenergetic conflicts are eliminated, the allergic symptomatology often disappears as well.

I’d like to illustrate this with a typical case from my general practice:

Jonas is a lively 8-year-old who has had pronounced neurodermitis since he was a baby. Despite his above-average body size, Jonas is clearly undernourished, because, according to his mother, he is supposedly milk and wheat intolerant (based on kinesiological testing performed by a prior therapist). Thanks to the ostensible food allergy, he has had to eat a special diet for years, and this has apparently led to his clearly evident undernourishment. Like starving third-world children, Jonas’ individual ribs can be seen, and he has an unhealthy pale facial coloration.

The REBA test measurement turns up a very low emotional value of 30%, which fits in with a sub-depressive state. For children, with their innately sunny disposition, the impact of low emotional values is usually in the form of disturbed immune function (allergies, susceptibility to infection), as well as fidgetiness and a short attention span. Underlying all this in Jonas is a gigantic psychoenergetic conflict with the theme Wrong thinking in the 7th Chakra. My experience tells me that this conflict will have been present since early infancy, and that it was an important trigger factor for neurodermitis, which the mother said had been present since early infancy.

The cause of the conflict can be found in intrauterine stress situations and, with regard to content, plays no role in resolving it through Psychosomatic Energetics, because the conflict can be eliminated in a matter of months with certain homeopathics (emotional remedy Emvita). In this manner, the subconscious emotional problem is resolved, e.g. through vivid dreams, without having to address the conflict’s content. Thus one need not, as in psychotherapy, discuss the conflict theme, but rather simply melt away the conflict with homeopathics – which of course turns out to be a big plus when dealing with children.

Jonas also has disturbed intestinal flora, detectable using the Colon test ampoule (Organ Test Kit from Rubimed). First, a considerable candidiasis needs to be treated (with Nystatin and oral Amphotericin lozenges for 4 weeks). Besides the typically bright red tongue of the fungal patient, with a whitish oily rear third of the tongue (colon reflex field), Jonas has a sore anus and an extreme sweet tooth. All this points to fungal infestation of the intestines, and this is confirmed by a stool examination (culture medium for fungi). Next, the intestinal flora are built up with eubionts (Mutaflor or Colibiogen, plus bifidus bacteria and Hylak drops) and the intestinal milieu acidified with Kanne Brottrunk (available in health food stores; 2 shot glasses per day mixed with apple juice). Additionally, after-bath skin embrocations with Kanne Brottrunk. I also prescribe Gamma-linoleic acid in capsule and salve form. After this, Jonas’ neurodermitis healed up completely, apart from small residues on the hands and feet that itch when he is stressed, but which quickly disappear when treated with antibiotically active oil of St. John’s wort and with Cardiospermum salve. Happily, Jonas can now eat anything (even the supposed dietary allergens); he gains weight and his facial coloration freshens up. What’s more, his grades improve and his mother reports that he is no longer so fidgety and distracted.

Outlook and General Recommendations

Naturopathic therapy of allergies represents an important enrichment and adjunct to conventional medical treatment. Uncovering psychoenergetic blocks, cleansing foci and normalizing metabolic dysfunctions fixes the overall hyperacidification and slagging of the organism (which are significant causes of allergic episodes) and the enormous autonomic neural stress abates (which is detectable at the beginning in every allergy patient).

Naturopathic and energy-medicinal diagnostics enable one to grasp the deep-seated active factors of an allergy, and this also permits a much more causal approach that addresses the root causes of the disease. Therapeutic success is much longer lasting and stronger than with conventional medical therapy. In the severe cases, one will sensibly combine naturopathy and orthodox medicine – but it needs to be clear that, in the final analysis, allergies are incurable, since they are the innate over-reactions of an immune system that functions all too well, and which will break out when there are energy blocks and metabolic dysfunctions (hyperacidity) and generate allergy symptoms. Therefore, even after an apparent cure, allergy patients need to be told that they have to be prepared for a recurrence of their ailment and should therefore lead an especially healthy biological lifestyle. This includes a harmonious, balanced life with a lot of physical activity, vacations in allergen-free regions (alpine, coastal) and learning relaxation and well-being exercises (Yoga, Autogenic Training, etc.) with which they can harmonize themselves psychovegetatively when too much stress accumulates.

Reference sources:

Anxiovita natural remedy for anxiety

Paravita natural remedy for energy

Simvita natural remedy for sleeplessness

Geovita natural remedy for geopathic stress

Neurovita natural remedy for nervous tension