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Dr. Nel’s Mystery

Sky DMAX showed a programme about a young man who had been hit by a truck while riding his bike in Springs, South Africa, in 1994. The case was mentioned in the IHM - The Homoeopathic Review, Autumn 2006 issue.

For five years he’d been in a coma, unable to move voluntarily or make any sound. A nurse and his mother became worried because he had been pulling at the foam of his mattress with uncoordinated movements of his one hand. To relax his hand movements, the busy doctor casually suggested that she give him a sleeping pill that he had prescribed previously for her insomnia. She did so.

What happened next astonished them. After twenty five minutes the young man woke up for the first time since his accident.

“For years I sat by his bed and prayed to hear him speak again," his mother said. "Then that night I heard a noise that sounded like 'ugh'… then I noticed the expression in L's eyes change… Then came the words: Hello Mummy....”

The startling improvement lasted for eight hours and then he fell asleep again. Dr. Nel continued with this treatment. L got his sleeping pill, zolpadem, (called stilnox in South Africa) crushed up in a little fruit juice twice daily.

The nurse noted that after getting the pill, “The grey pallor disappears and his face flushes. He starts smiling and laughing. After ten minutes he starts asking questions and his arm becomes more relaxed and his facial drooping lessens”.

Dr. Wally Nel, a kindly, approachable GP, is obviously moved. He says, “Something strange and wonderful is happening.”

What a paradox - a sleeping pill responsible for the 'miracle' of waking up a comatose patient.

Scans showed a marked 54 per cent improvement in brain function in the first seven years since L woke up. Parts of his brain which were dormant became active - areas concerned with motor function, speech, sight and hearing. He can now have conversations, move his arms and legs, and it seems that gradually his brain continues to heal.

Dr. Nel had several patients in this condition being treated with the same sleeping pill. There have been varying improvements in 60 per cent of the cases, and tests continue to be run.

In this case it has been demonstrated that a sleeping drug, that usually depresses brain function, can work differently. A medicine, which should put someone to sleep, woke him up out of a profound coma.

"I've been in this game for over 40 years and have never seen anything like this. This is medical history”, says Dr. Nel.
                                               
Conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical establishment is interested, but puzzled.  To them it is a mystery.

Homoeopathy can shed light on the mystery. It is simply the result of working with an identifiable law of Nature which governs health and disease. In the case of L this happened unintentionally.

Hippocrates, the father of western medicine, wrote, “By similar things are the sick made healthy.” Historically, physicians have noted the curious fact that when medicine is used in accordance with this law, a curative process is the result.

In 1790 Dr. Samuel Hahnemann began systematic testing of various medical drugs, first on himself, and then on other healthy volunteers of both sexes. He found that the symptoms that a drug produces in a healthy person can, with careful prescribing, cure the same type of symptoms in a sick person. He dubbed this interesting natural phenomenon of healing, The Law of Similars.

In the first tests that Dr. Hahnemann conducted he used material substances. It was later on, in his efforts to minimise the uncomfortable effects of some medicines which were dangerous in their material form, that he started diluting, and then later still, adding succussion (kinetic energy) to his prepared medicines. He called this process, potentiation. He found, with great interest, that the potentised medicines still cured, provided he applied The Law of Similars to his prescribing. In fact they were a gentler cure than they would have been if they were used in their original material form. Remember many of the medicines in use then were poisonous substances, like belladonna (deadly nightshade), aconite, arsenic, mercury, etc. and even a small material amount would have had a toxic effect.

The “strange and wonderful” cure of Dr. Nel’s is nothing more than conventional medicine stumbling over one of the basic principles of healing, an example of crude homoeopathy at work.
 
Wonderful things can happen when medicine is used homoeopathically. People who understand what happens when The Law of Similars is employed are able to depend on this law. Whether the remedy is in the dynamic potentised form or in the material form, when it is prescribed according to this natural law of healing, a curative process is initiated.

It is curious that conventional mainstream medicine hasn’t examined this process.  The question of working within the defined Law of Similars deserves further scrutiny.