What to say to your homeopath …

By Lynn Amara, Better Homeopathics 

(Lynn Amara practices in Northern California. She taught my 3rd year class at Pacific Academy of Homeopathic Medicine. She recently taught a day-long class on patients with skin problems.)

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Coming to see a homeopathic practitioner for the first time can be confusing.  Confusing because the practitioner seems to be interested in more than just your main complaint.  Yes, your main complaint is fully investigated, but so is everything else.  Everything else.  All systems of the body need to be reviewed for clues and symptoms that point to your complete state of health.  All medical history and previous illnesses and accidents and emotional hardships and toxic exposures and griefs and life changes.  Everything.  Why does your homeopath need to know all this and more?  What does it matter?

What if your current complaint is just the tip of the iceberg and conventional medicine is just addressing the tip.  Your ship will sink.  What if your current complaint is actually related to everything else in your body and mind and emotions? That is not to say your mind or emotions caused your physical complaints, but rather, that they dance together.  Neurons that fire together wire together.  If something can get tangled up with something else, it will.  And if you are a woman, the entanglement will be more tightly wound than for a man.

So what should you tell your homeopath?  Everything that is important to you.  In your own words.  In your own way.  And tell your homeopath everything unique about you that you might not think is important.  Why?  Because in homeopathy there is no separation between your body, your mind, your emotions, your behaviors, your loves and your hates, your fears, your hobbies, your food desires, your obsessions, your sensations.  Everything is a statement about how you are functioning, how vital you are.  How happy and healthy you are.  That is why your homeopath will ask you some very strange questions that no doctor has ever asked before.

One of the most enduring challenges I meet with, in new clients or even  with existing clients, is when they self edit what they think I should know.  Do not take three years to tell me that you suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder just because you think it has nothing to do with your asthma.  It has as much to do with your asthma as craving green apples or oranges.   We call these kinds of idiosyncratic symptoms: strange, rare, and peculiar symptoms.  They make your situation with asthma  or any other complaint, unique.  They allow the homeopath to differentiate between hundreds of homeopathic remedies that might be used in your main complaint.  Yes,  hundreds of possibilities and your uniqueness is the key.

Here are some examples of unique qualities and symptoms that  resulted in fabulous remedy choices for the folks who were suffering:
eating green bananas
loving salad in a teen-aged boy
collecting teapots
loathing of snakes
loathing of spiders
fear of dogs for no reason
facial grimace of disgust
always laughing
sensation that the eyes were pulled together
sensation that the nipple and the bowel were connected by a string
sticks the feet out of the covers even in winter
white spots in the fingernail beds
scatological language
aversion to the smell of coffee
rapidly brought to rage or tears
dreams of flying
auditory hallucination of ‘being called by name’
burning pains resolved by heat
constipation with cheerfulness
getting the munchies in the evening along with many great ideas
OCD entangled with IBS
herpes of the eye entangled with eczema
sensation that if she passed gas, stool may pass instead
craving stinky cheese
worse from the wind
sudden onset, slow resolution
desires very spicy foods
cannot stand close collars

What is Homeopathy?

 

Here’s an article addressing the same question from Andre Saine, ND. Dr. Saine practices in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and teaches Classical Homeopathy all over the world. 

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Homeopathy claims to be the art and science of therapeutics par excellence. When homeopathy is practiced at its highest standards, it is the treatment of choice to recover one’s health from the great majority of acute and chronic diseases.

What is Homeopathy?

 

Here’s a definition from the The National Center for Homeopathy:

Homeopathy is a system of medicine that is based on the Law of Similars. The truth of this law has been verified experimentally and clinically for the last 200 years.Let’s look at an example: If your child accidentally ingests certain poisons, you may be advised to administer Syrup of Ipecac to induce vomiting. Ipecac is derived from the root of a South American plant called Ipecacuanha. The name, in the native language, means “the plant by the road which makes you throw up.” Eating the plant causes vomiting.

When a group of healthy volunteers took this substance to determine the effects of this drug, they found that the drug induced other symptoms as well. The mouth retained much saliva. The tongue was very clean. There was a cough so severe that it led to gagging and vomiting. There was incessant nausea. While it is expected that vomiting would usually relieve the nausea, this was not the case.

Such an experiment, using healthy volunteers, is called a proving, and it is the homeopath’s source of information about the action of a drug.

Of what use could this plant be? If a person were suffering from a gagging cough after a cold, or a woman were experiencing morning sickness with incessant nausea that is not relieved by vomiting, then Ipecacuanha, administered in a minute dose, especially prepared by a homeopathic pharmacy in accordance with FDA approved guidelines, can allay the “similar” suffering.

Samuel Hahnemann described this principle by using a Latin phrase: Similia Similibus Curentur, which translates: “Let likes cure likes.” It is a principle that has been known for centuries. Hahnemann developed the principle into a system of medicine called homeopathy, and it has been used successfully for the last 200 years.