The Focus

Definition

A focus is a harmful influence which interferes with the body's system of self-regulation, especially with the control of stimuli that disturb the body's order.

Obstacle to Healing

The definition above already includes the essential features of focal activity. The body normally endures and tolerates a wide range of stimuli that temporarily disturb its order: the knocked knee, the strained shoulder, the common cold in the family, noxious substances (pollutants) in food and the environment. Although the duration of an illness correlates with the intensity of the stimulus, the processes of healing and defense start on day one. Once the body has overcome the negative stimulus, a state of equilibrium sets in. However, if a focus is present in the body, the healing process is hampered or, in serious cases, even prevented.

Based on the observation that bacterial inflammation can have a disseminating effect and can affect other organ systems of the body, classic somatic medicine coined the term "focus" many years ago (e. g., a focus in the tonsils, teeth, or appendix).

Overload of the Feedback System

In view of today's knowledge, the idea that bacterial dissemination or the release of toxins is the sole cause of a focus has become untenable. Today, we define a focus as a disturbed site anywhere in the body. Through nonphysiological tissue changes and abnormal reactions, a focus subjects the complex feedback mechanism to stress by overstimulation and induces disturbances of remote structures that are already under stress.

The terms "field of disturbance," "focal disturbance," and "focus" are synonyms. They apply to all inflammatory changes (i. e., foci in the original sense) as well as disturbing scars and an overload of the body by substances and toxins.

An acute inflammatory process can usually be diagnosed by the conventional imaging techniques or laboratory tests and, hence, can be treated. The following discussion will deal primarily with those foci that cannot be easily discovered with the common diagnostic tools. These foci, in particular, may be responsible for the fact that a disease does not respond to therapy or has become chronic, just because the underlying foci cannot be discovered by the usual methods. In many cases, the detection and treatment of such foci may lead to long-term healing or relief, especially in disorders that cannot be treated at all or only symptomatically, such as migraine.

In conventional medicine, the search for foci usually begins when there are already symptoms of mostly unknown origin. Once and again, our focus diagnosis (the diagnosis of fields of disturbance, according to Bahr) is an eye-opener; an altered body structure is often already a focus before it causes noticeable symptoms for the patient. Complaints often begin with a disturbed state of health and in such a small area that a person is not yet declared ill. Hence, a focal disturbance that goes unnoticed is like a smoldering fire which threatens to flare up with the next gust of wind.

First Strike, Second Strike

The fire analogy nicely illustrates the theory of neural therapists of the first strike (this may be a focus of any kind that has been discussed here), where there are no symptoms or none can be detected and where the body still copes well with the blow. The second strike-an unfavorable, weaker influence (wind, cold, accident, dietary error, mental trauma, repeat surgery)-leads to activation of the dormant focus, and the illness triggered through the weakening influence (common cold, injury, etc.) does not heal.

Hence, the body only falls ill when it is no longer able to ward off a chronic focal activity or when a second blow strikes.

In my practice, I like to explain this relationship to my patients by using the example of a shopping bag that already contains a heavy weight (a focus). By adding bread, butter, and vegetables (normal daily stress) during the shopping trip, the weight of the bag becomes a burden. If another heavy item is then added on top of that, the bag might become too heavy to be carried (any additional strain to the body, e.g., an injury or the common cold, may cause disease).

Another way of explaining this is the image of a bucket that is slowly filling up. Genetic predisposition, environmental factors, foci, substance sensitivity, and psychological stress can be compensated individually by the body's innate potential to heal. It is the sum of all loads that causes the bucket to overflow; the result is disease.

Resistance to Treatment

A focus may render the body largely unresponsive to regulatory therapies like acupuncture, homeopathy, or neural therapy. Thus, when repeated chiropractic treatments remain unsuccessful or neural therapy treatments bring only a few hours of relief, it must be assumed that the blocked vertebral joint or the irritated rotator cuff of the shoulder is not the primary impairment itself, but that these conditions are the result of a primary impairment, which is in most cases a focus.

It clearly follows from the above statement that focus diagnosis and therapy can be worthwhile also in a clinically healthy, symptom-free person. Treatment may free the organism from the strain of a potentially existing focus so that it can respond with full strength to new stimuli.

Clinical Implications

It is certainly not a matter of chance which organ is negatively affected by the primary disturbance (focal process). We rather must assume that the organ affected by disturbance or malfunction just happened to show some weakness during the period in which the disease developed. Such a weakness may have a genetic basis (check the family history regarding lungs, liver, stomach, spinal column), but it may also be caused by overload (e. g., heavy lifting, physical overexertion, stress, climatic changes, malnutrition, infection).

Chronicity of Symptoms

In an otherwise healthy person (without foci), an organ showing signs of weakness usually means a short period of illness. The patient goes through an acute phase and reaches the stage of healing, usually without any aftereffect. However, if the patient is under the influence of a chronic focus, the disturbing stimulus of the focus will affect the currently weakened organ, causing chronicity or worsening of symptoms in most cases. The source of disturbance has usually been present in the body before the patient noticed the illness (e. g., symptom-free chronic inflammation of the paranasal sinuses). Or it may have been acquired after the onset of the illness (e. g., a scar from injury) and now interferes with the healing process which has so far been normal.

Preferred Target Organs

In principle, whether preexisting or acquired later, a focus is able to interfere everywhere, that is, wherever there happens to be a weak spot in the body. Depending on their location, however, some foci have preferred target organs. A good example is teeth where the target direction is more or less known for each tooth. For example, experience has shown that the front teeth often target the urogenital system if they harbor a focus. Women then suffer from an irritable bladder that is resistant to treatment, while men have prostate problems.

An Example from My Practice

Devitalized Tooth - Irritable Bladder

In one of my courses, I demonstrated this on a colleague who had volunteered to be a patient because she suffered from an irritable bladder. I was able to identify a devitalized frontal tooth as the disturbing focus. As I was going to explain to the other course participants that, in such a case, one often finds an episode of pyelonephritis in the patient's history, my colleague lifted her hand and informed us that she had, indeed, suffered from pyelonephritis on several(!) occasions. Because of the irritable bladder, she had also undergone hysterectomy several years ago, without any improvement in her symptoms (such scars, of course, may themselves turn into additional fields of disturbance).

Focal Activity-Some Basics

The body normally responds to structural damages with a nonspecific mesenchyme reaction which runs a typical course. The initial release of enzymes is followed by a histiocytic period, during which macrophages degrade and remove damaged tissue, and a temporary involvement of glycosaminoglycans (acid mucopolysaccharides) in the repair process. This creates a cell-rich granulation tissue in which numerous collagen fibers are embedded. The various stages of healing should take no more than six weeks. If inflammatory, traumatic, metabolic, or iatrogenic harmful factors interfere with this normal sequence of events and nondegradable material remains in the tissue, a series of abnormal regulatory processes are triggered which finally lead to abnormal function.

Role of the Connective Tissue

Pischinger was the first to recognize the overwhelming importance of the connective tissue for the human body (12). For a long time, anatomically oriented conventional medicine regarded the entire connective tissue of the organism as a kind of glue, the only function of which was to hold the organs together. The tissue does, however, play a vital role by acting as a "transit system" which facilitates the many functions of the cells in the body. Every molecule that needs to be transferred to a cell, the specific unit of the body's functions, must pass through the connective...