Homeopathy

Ignoring a host of health complaints won't heal you but telling them to the sympathetic ears of a homeopath likely will. Among all the healing arts, homeopathy is ideally suited to offer a "one-stop shopping" solution to anyone in search of better health. Unlike Western medicine, which is divided into subspecialties, homeopathy is a self-contained healing system which treats all the systems of the body as one.

To the homeopath, there is only one disease, a disturbance in the "vital force" which needs to be re-tuned. All those symptoms you've been experiencing, from the homeopath's perspective, are simply a message from your body that more attention is needed to restore it to health.

This may be of special interest to women who have been historically made to feel that their symptoms are "all in their heads." Silenced by the approach of conventional medicine, many have felt there is nowhere to turn. Perhaps women only seem to have more symptoms because they are better able to pick up on what their bodies are saying.

Once the body's message has been "decoded" by a trained homeopath and you've taken the remedy he or she has identified, the innate healing capability of the body takes over and starts moving you back to health. This was the experience of a woman in her early 40s who was plagued by heavy night sweats along with sleeplessness, weak joints, a shoulder problem and a range of other symptoms, including chocolate cravings. Frustrated by a lack of solutions from the many medical specialists she consulted, she told her symptoms to a homeopath. During case-taking, even more came out: her concerns about her direction in life and finding her purpose.

This range of physical, mental and emotional symptoms is exactly what the homeopath needs to hear; the more there are, the more straightforward it is to find a remedy. Long-forgotten symptoms may also be of value.

In another case, a 52-year-old woman had become concerned about her weight gain along with nightly sleep interruptions. Her physical symptoms were only the beginning; she soon confided her concerns about the future of the business she had started six years earlier and her fear of poverty. She wasn't sure if she could sustain herself and achieve a comfortable retirement. Then more history came tumbling out: she'd had thyroid problems for many years and a condition known as osteochondroma (benign bone tumours) and had undergone several surgeries since early childhood. She was so used to living with the symptoms from these conditions that she had almost forgotten them.

The homeopath recorded all these details along with her likes and dislikes for food and drink, her bowel and other elimination habits and more; all symptoms were grist to the mill for finding a good remedy match.

Whole Body Healing

Homeopathy uses the principle of "like cures like," known since the time of Hippocrates; homeopathic remedies are tested in what are known as "provings" where healthy volunteers try the remedy and note the symptoms they experience.

The closer the match between a patient's symptoms and those brought out during the proving, the more rapid the recovery. And no symptom is too small nor too strange for matching against those listed in the homeopathic Materia Medica.

In another case, a woman who was experiencing troubling symptoms at her mid-cycle found the answer in homeopathy. Normally an outgoing person who liked company, she found at time of ovulation that she did not want anyone around her. She became irritable and experienced heart palpitations and pain starting in her neck and rising upwards along with a desire for sour-tasting drinks. Her most peculiar symptom was the pain she felt at the roots of her hair, but even this was listed in the Materia Medica under the remedy eventually selected for her.

This reliance on the patient's full range of symptoms allows homeopathy to go where Western medicine cannot. Even if a medical doctor has time to listen to all of a woman's symptoms, pharmaceutical treatments won't work because they are designed to treat a very narrow symptom set. In contrast, the several thousand homeopathic remedies in existence have all demonstrated action on a broad package of symptoms which encompasses the physical, mental and emotional.

If your symptoms are many and your time to juggle appointments with multiple specialists is scarce, the "one-stop shopping" benefits of homeopathy may be for you.