Homeopathic remedies are widely available in different forms: dilutions, mother tincture, tablets, or as speciality products. They are safe for home use.
The question is how to choose and use the right remedy, in the right potency, for a given problem. Yet another issue is whether or not to use the many combinations, or homeopathic speciality remedies, sold over-the-counter [OTC].
A little tutoring about the use of homeopathic remedies can go a long way. What’s more, there are a host of educational opportunities available online and in books on homeopathy. However, this should only be treated as a useful first step. In order to treat any condition, it is imperative to properly diagnose it. This is where it becomes necessary to seek the guidance of a professional homeopath as surface symptoms should not be confused for an illness that may be latent, or difficult to detect.
Diagnosis
Homeopathic diagnosis is a unique and critical part of clinical practice. It includes a physical examination — evaluating, analysing and distilling the presenting symptoms, such as body ache, or fever — the existing emotional, or psychological, state — viz., stress, anxiety and agitation as well as the person’s temperament, or constitution. A person’s constitution includes qualities related to originality, enterprise, persistence, concentration, physical sensitivities, and emotional strength, or flaw.
The right remedy for a condition will take all of these aspects into account, so each diagnosis and its remedy are specific to the individual in question. This again means that two people with fever would need two different prescriptions matching their individual presenting symptoms –– except in the case of an epidemic where a single homeopathic remedy may be employed as the Genus epidemicus.
Your first visit to the homeopath can take 1-2 hours. This is because professional homeopathic doctors treat the person rather than the illness; they will interview you at length, asking several questions and observing your personality traits as well as unique behavioural and physical symptoms. A physical examination, followed by laboratory and other tests, is also a part of the treatment process.
Two Of A Kind
We live in ‘a pill for every ill’ society. Today, most people have been coached through print and other media to accept the idea that pharmaceutical, or conventional, drugs are the best or, perhaps, the only answer to most medical problems.
Our drug-inclined society has also been taught to ‘take something’ in order to prevent the body’s natural symptoms, and control them, which, in effect, means suppressing any distressing sensations, such as a runny nose, sinus congestion, headache, hyperacidity, gas, diarrhoea and so on, the moment they appear. It may actually seem harmless to pop a conventional OTC pill when, in fact, it is not. The problem is that people neither know nor care to know what a ‘symptom’ actually is, or what it is saying.
Let’s take fever, for example. Raised temperature, along with a cold, cough, and body ache, are the body’s response to an offending organism — bacteria, or virus. The intruding organism did not ‘make’ the fever, although it is part of the process. It is actually the body that produces certain subtle changes to fight the bacteria, or virus, and flush them out of the system.
Gulping an anti-flu OTC conventional medication, for instance, does not treat the reaction but suppresses the body’s natural defence against the virus. When one continues to use a conventional pill for every ailment, one may actually be impeding the body’s own natural ability to surmounting the problem. Would you know that conventional drugs, following years of suppressed symptoms, can actually prevent the body’s immune system from responding rapidly and also effectively on its own? This leads to drug-resistance, or what is referred to as iatrogenic disorders, or drug-induced illnesses.
From the homeopathic standpoint, symptoms are the outward manifestation of the illness and not just the cause of it. From the homeopathic perspective, therefore, a specific remedy appropriate to the illness is needed to trigger the body’s own natural response to that disease, or illness, process and treat it from within.
Homeopathy is a safe, gentle, and holistic form of complementary and alternative medicine [CAM].
Homeopathic Treatment
- Respects the body’s own healing processes
- Avoids needless medication
- Recognises that every individual is unique
- Perceives the illness, or disease not as a foe, but as an opportunity for change and growth.
Homeopathy suggests that the body is self-regulating, and that disease occurs when this self-regulatory process becomes disrupted. In contemporary terms, we speak of them as feedback loops. When such feedback mechanisms get jammed, or disrupted, due to any deviation in health and wellness, imbalance and dissonance crop up. We call this, ‘sickness’ in the mind-body context. Homeopathic treatment aims to help our mind-body return to harmonious, dynamic [re]alignment — safely and effectively sans side-effects.
