Heroes Not Zombies

I lived in Edinburgh both as a medical student and as a general practitioner for a couple of decades. One of my most favourite places in the world is in Edinburgh – The Royal Botanic Gardens. The gardens are pretty extensive and you can see something different every single time you go. I used to go several times a week when I lived close by. Click here and you’ll see a satellite photo of the gardens to give you an idea of their scale. Whenever I had visitors come to stay for a few days, I’d take them to “the Botanics”.

So one day I took two Dutch doctor friends of mine for a visit to the gardens. Like me, they specialise in homeopathic medicine and as we walked around the gardens they were telling me about a homeopathic medicine prepared from the Diospyros kaki tree which survived the nuclear blast in Nagasaki. They’d had some experience using it in helping patients to recover from severe shocks – specifically patients with either Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or with cancer.

[NB – this is NOT a cure for cancer! Note my colleagues were saying it was of use in helping a patient to recover particularly from a psychological trauma. Homeopathic treatment is not aimed at pathology, the intention is to stimulate the normal repair and recovery processes of a human being, whatever the actual diagnosis. It can be a useful adjunct to treatments designed to deal with any pathologies, but if there is an improvement in the disease, then that improvement is due to the stimulation of self-healing]

Back to my story……….well, I had never heard before that any tree had withstood the blast in Nagasaki but apparently one did. It was a Japanese Persimmon tree (Diospyros kaki), one of the Ebony family of trees. The particular Nagasaki specimen has had cuttings taken and sent all around the world to be planted and nurtured as a “peace tree”. We chatted as we walked over the bridge and into a copse of trees.

What does this Diospyros kaki tree look like I asked my friend. Well, she said, it looks quite like that tree over there and pointed to the nearest tree to where we were standing.

Let’s go and take a closer look I suggested and used my usual technique for identifying trees in the Botanics – I looked at the label!

Well! We were stunned! Of all the trees in the Botanics what on earth were the chances that we’d be standing next to the one example in the gardens of the particular tree we were discussing?!
My Dutch friend said, “I don’t know what you believe about how the world works, Bob, but I’m going to send you a sample of the remedy prepared from the kaki tree.

Before I tell you the next part of the story, have a look at the bark of this tree.

You begin to have an idea why this particular species managed to withstand the nuclear blast. Still, for any tree to withstand it was quite amazing. Diospyros kaki means fruit of the gods and this tree is recognised as highly significant in Japan, the kaki fruits being placed in Shinto shrines. Here’s the fruit at an early stage of development –

My colleague was as good as her word and the following week two vials of the homeopathic remedy arrived for me at the dispensary in Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital.

The following day I had a new patient, a young woman whose recurrent breast cancer disease had recently been described by the oncologists as terminal and who had been told she had very few weeks left to live. She was suffering from nightmares and sleeplessness which none of the sedatives she’d been prescribed had helped and she wanted to try a homeopathic medicine. I’m not going to give any more detail than that here but suffice it to say, I gave her the Diospyros kaki remedy and her sleep immediately returned to normal. In fact, more startling than that, she went on to experience an improvement in her energy and well-being and she went on to live for another couple of years. In those two years she stopped her career, trained in another area altogether, and worked successfully in her new field for a few months before the cancer overwhelmed her and she died.

I’ve used this remedy a few times since in similar circumstances. It’s one of the remedies which really makes me think about our basic concepts of health and healing. It does not cure cancers, but in the right circumstances, in my very small experience with this, it can help a patient cope, and, more than that, even to grow in the presence of severe disease.

[Let me just finish this with a short paragraph about the homeopathic method, because this, I think, is an amazing story. However, I want to make very clear that not only is this not a cure for cancer, but it’s not the relevant medicine for just anyone who has cancer. Every homeopathic prescription is individualised on the basis of the patient’s unique personal story, taking into consideration the disease, the person who has the disease, and the contexts of their life. The patients for whom I’ve prescribed this kaki remedy, and who report that they benefited from it, have all been strikingly remarkable people – pragmatically positive, creative and caring individuals – who share a number of characteristic features]