by Gail Johnson / Georgia Straight - straight.com | Jun 11, 2014
When someone experiencing extreme stress develops an ulcer or someone who’s anxious has heart palpitations, it’s hard to refute the body-mind connection. According to practitioners of Rubimed therapy, sometimes physical symptoms stem from past emotional experiences that were too traumatic to fully process at the time.
Rubimed, a European approach that uses homeopathic remedies to resolve emotional conflicts and thereby improve physical health, got its start in Germany about 20 years ago. A naturopath and conventionally trained medical doctor named Reimar Banis noticed that some of his patients just weren’t making progress despite being treated for chronic disease.
He ended up studying something called “energy medicine”, which was already a rapidly growing field in his native country. Banis, who’ll be speaking at an upcoming public forum in Vancouver, claims he found that when patients’ emotional blocks were removed, their physical condition tended to improve dramatically.
“Every experienced medical doctor knows that emotional issues play an important role in almost all diseases,” Banis says from Switzerland, where he’s now based.
Also known as “psychosomatic energetics”, the therapy is grounded in the concept that energy flows throughout the body. The more and the easier the energy flows, the healthier a person is. However, when that energy is reduced or blocked because of unresolved emotional issues, illness results.
“We all have different emotional stresses that happen in our lifetime,” says local Rubimed practitioner and homeopath Heather Schofield, medical-educational director of Biomed, a naturopathic- and homeopathic-remedy vendor and educator. “In some instances, we’re able to get over that emotional stress…but in other instances, you’re not able to.
“These emotional stresses, which can be called emotional conflicts, end up staying with us and becoming part of the subconscious. This starts to create energy blocks in the body.…Over time, physical symptoms can start to manifest, and negative behavioural patterns can also start to manifest.”
Although many treatments may relieve physical symptoms, Rubimed purports to do this by addressing people’s core emotional issues. Banis, author of New Life Through Energy Healing: The Atlas of Psychosomatic Energetics, determined that there are more than two dozen types of emotional conflicts—such as anger, fear, and hopelessness—that can be stored in the human energy field. Those conflicts affect the corresponding internal energy centres, or chakras. A device called the Reba is used to measure frequencies to determine energy levels. He then developed the corresponding homeopathic treatments to dissolve those conflicts.
The remedies are used in pairs: one to treat chakras, where energy flow may be blocked, and the other to treat underlying emotional issues. People put drops in water and may take the treatment for a few weeks to several months.
“The remedies have been termed ‘psychotherapy in a bottle’,” Schofield says.
Banis claims that therapy can be used to address a range of health conditions, from irritable bowel syndrome to fibromyalgia to chronic pain, as well as psychiatric illnesses including depression and anxiety, and can be used in conjunction with conventional treatments.
There are more than 2,000 Rubimed practitioners in Europe and North America. Schofield sees interest growing in healing methods that are centred on the mind-body connection. “There is a huge body of science and research, and fields such as psychoneuroendocrinology and psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology, that are taking and looking at the whole body-mind medicine and how the immune system, hormones, endocrine system, and nervous system are all very connected,” Scho-field says. “There’s recognition that emotional experiences and stresses affect all of those things and can throw everything out of balance.
“In Europe, the majority of practitioners are medical doctors,” she adds. “Practitioners are looking for solutions for patients on the emotional side. This really fills a gap. This is the piece of the puzzle that’s missing.”