Posted: Thursday, December 1, 2011 8:15
By Tim Arnold
The apothecaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a rare breed of chemist-pharmacologists who had a wide-sweeping knowledge of medicinals and medicaments and how medical disorders could be treated with these extracts that had been derived from nature's storehouse of herbs and tonics and curative elixirs. Apothecary means storehouse, and these chemists had built a storehouse of knowledge of chemicals and potions over the centuries, having been the preeminent medical practitioners throughout the Middle Ages. Apothecaries are directly descended from the shamans of the ancient world, who used their intensive, metaphysical knowledge of the realms of the spirit in conjunction with a consummate knowledge of nature to create cures for the body, mind and spirit. Apothecaries were closely involved in the lives of the people of the towns and villages where they practiced their curative arts, and they filled the role of both chemist and physician in most of these communities. It was only in the past century that these extraordinarily knowledgeable medical practitioners have faded from memory. Their only claim to having existed lies in their phantasmal reflections in old apothecary bottles of bronze and green to be found in curio shops. They were lost in the black shadows of drug stores and corporate pharmacies. Today, virtually no one understands what the term apothecary means.
In a small shop on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, the art and science of the apothecary is being recreated. Linda West-Conforti, the founder of Nurses For Safer Access, has shown visionary insight in analyzing the conundrums and chaos of modern medicine, which she believes can only be treated through a synthesis of the current and the ancient; through the archaic healer interfacing with modern, medical technocracy. This syncretist medicine will merge the physician with the metaphysician.
Ms. West-Conforti has gained this perspicacity through decades in the nursing profession. She has witnessed the adverse effects of numerous, synthetic drugs, which require the usage of other drugs to mitigate their detrimental side effects and still other drugs to ameliorate the negative effects of the panacea drugs. This drug syndrome can trap a person on an unmerry-go-round of disease. A poignant example of synthetic drug misrepresentation can be traumatically seen in the heroin that was synthesized in the late nineteenth century from the naturally occurring morphine opiate. Heroin was named after hero or heroic because it was believed to cure numerous diseases without having the addictive qualities of morphine. The truth was, of course, that heroin was considerably more addictive than morphine, and myriad addicts were created, blindly believing that they were doing something healthy for themselves. An ultimately horrific aspect of this free-wheeling usage of heroin was the heroin abortion in which numerous, late term infants were born as heroin addicts.
The twenty-first century has witnessed the proliferation of not only the heroin addicted infant but also the methamphetamine addicted, premature infant. Ms. West-Confort's original organization, Angels In Waiting, has focused upon restoring the health of these medically fragile infants and in finding homes in which they can grow to full vitality. Angels In Waiting has relied upon grants and the magnanimity of individuals to gain the funds necessary to care for these infants who have been fated to start life as drug addicts. Reflective of the rampant physical disorders affecting Western Civilization are its synthetically-created, diseased economic systems, and this economic virulence has resulted in the evaporation of funds needed for Angels In Waiting to continue its humanitarian work. In many respects, this situation reflects the destitute children in Dickens' novel, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, who cling to the robes of The Spirit of Christmas Present. When asked if they are his, he replies that they are mankind's but that they cling to him for protection because mankind will not have them.
It is believed by Ms. West Conforti that Nurses For Safer Access will begin to supply the funds so that Angels In Waiting can continue to redeem these drug-addicted infants. NFSA offers intensely potent Amazonian herbs that can successfully treat numerous ailments and reduce the deleterious effects of synthetic pharmaceuticals. Additionally, the aboriginal American, Essiac elixir is being offered in the original decoction that has been effective in arresting cellular mutation and reducing inflammation. An extensive analysis of the client's needs is offered gratis at Nurses For Safer Access. House calls and delivery are also an integral part of the services offered. NFSA is focused upon bringing humanity back into the medical profession, just as the apothecaries of centuries past practiced humanized, individualistic medicine.
While chaotic crisis is at the center of the present medical firmament, that inferior chaos can metamorphose into a superior order. As an ancient Greek philosopher stated: Out of chaos comes a dancing star.
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