Best of Health

How come it takes an hour or more?

A homeopathic consultation is like no other.  Homeopathic theory says that every illness is an external sign of the internal disturbance of your vital force, you chi, your life force, whatever you want to call it. What I am doing in a homeopathic consultation with a patient is trying to find the trail that will lead me to the right remedy to start to correct the disturbance in your vital force. All I have to do is find the remedy that matches your symptoms. The easier part of the equation is finding the remedy. The harder part is establishing the symptoms.

What do you mean by that?

Most people are so used to going to the Dr that they abbreviate their symptoms down to the point of a diagnosis. ‘I have Whooping Cough.’ ‘I have Cystitis’. ‘I have period pains.’ Unless you are going to have a one-size-fits-all prescription, this information is inadequate. That is why standard randomised control trials are also inadequate for testing the efficacy of any holistic medicine because they use general symptoms and diagnoses and don’t look at the whole picture

For example

Before Christmas I saw a new patient who came to see me about migraines and recurrent headaches that didn’t respond to painkillers. They had been going on for about twenty years and no treatment so far has changed them. The patient gave me a series of symptoms. Left-sided headache, starting in the occiput, extending to the left eye. Less frequent right sided migraines extending to the whole of the right side of the head. Additionally, a headache like a band across the forehead that is like something tight tied around the head and squeezed.

100 remedies

If I looked these symptoms up I will come up with close to 100 remedies that could help. Well, one approach would be to start giving them one by one and seeing how the patient responds to each. But who’s got that much time if you don’t get lucky until number 99 or 100?

So, I could just look for other symptoms. When do they occur? What makes them worse? What makes them feel better? (The answer is in the early afternoon, moving, particularly stepping, makes them worse, lying still in a dark room makes them feel a little better.) Now we’re down to about 40 remedies.

What happens alongside them? Nausea, flashing lights, everything smells very strongly. 10 remedies and so on.

How do you narrow it down then?

I am trying to find what is the unique experience of each patient. What do you experience at your very core? The fascinating thing is that this core experience is the same whether we are talking about the headaches, your dreams, feelings of frustration, anything. So I ask for more detail:

‘Tell me more about the headaches.’

I don’t expect this information to come out immediately but eventually I heard:

‘I don’t have any warning that they are coming. I’m sitting at work doing something and suddenly, BAM! there it is. And I can’t do anything. I have to sit as still as possible. I might have to lie down on the floor.’

‘Tell me more’

‘… they just defeat me. They exhaust me. I’m so used to them being with me that I have almost given up hope that they might go away.’

Now this person is describing their experience of the headache not the symptoms. In fact, this person experiences a lot of life as outside their control. They are going about their business and then something external to them takes them over. I am not suggesting that they think this is what is going on but that is their experience of the situation. What it feels like to them.

Then what?

Once I think I have your unique experience, and have tested it out in other aspects of your life, for example in your dreams, how you feel about exams or in arguments or relationships, this experience can to be matched to the remedy. That’s easy.  That is what a lot of the studying was all about for all those years at college and that is what the reference books are for.

By the way

For the first time since childhood this patient has not had headaches more days than not.

a voyage of discovery

Homeopathy is like a voyage of discovery. It takes you on a journey to better health, a better understanding of you and your health. Every day in life things affect your vital force, or your chi energy. Some remedies go straight to the heart of the matter and with others each prescription coming out of a homeopathic consultation is like peeling off the layer off an onion; getting closer and closer to the centre of the case.

If you want have a health problem you would like to address with homeopathy

Fill in the booking form, tell me briefly what the problem is and we’ll take it from there.

Ethics 

I am a registered member of the Society of Homeopaths. Click here for more information about them and have a look at their research page.

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