Patients with chronic pain describe relief from homeopathic remedies after struggling with drug side effects. A doctor explains why some patients turn to homeopathy as an alternative, while practitioners describe how individualized diluted substances work similarly to immunotherapy.
Growing up in France, I've been very open to homeopathy since my early 20s. I was already taking homeopathic remedies. I was reading about homeopathy. I always found it quite fascinating. So today I heard that there is actually class that MDs and some naturopaths and some pharmacists are taking on homeopathy right here, downtown Vancouver. So I thought would be a good idea to go and see what's going on and maybe ask some of the practitioners why they are here and whether or not they think that homeopathy could actually be very helpful for people with chronic conditions. So I'm just going to go in and see. Okay.
I'm young, but I've had chronic pain since I was about 19, so about eight years now. And I know I've seen over 23 physicians. I had a lot of physicians say that they could help and then they couldn't. And then they told me they couldn't do anything more and then I would go out to another physician. So being in this field has been really interesting and being able to heal myself has been really exciting.
I didn't know anything about homeopathy when I went to homeopath, but I had developed a very odd acute illness and no one could help me at all. I went through all of the classic medical tests. My medical colleagues were quite happy to tell me that there was nothing wrong with me, but I was acutely ill. In fact, I was so bad that I have four children and I could not really stand up for most of the day. And so at that point I had to make a decision. Either to accept what my medical colleagues were telling me or to open up my mind and try and find some sort of a sol to my problem.
I'm a medical doctor and right now I'm doing mind body energy medicine in a pain center in Seattle. I see many patients on many drugs. They don't like the side effects, they don't like the fogginess it causes in their brain. They're always looking for something else because there's very few drugs without side effects. And so homeopathy is something that offers a treatment without side effects.
Our professor basically gave me the homeopathic you felt was most appropriate. And I got more movement than I'd gotten with any other massage chiropractor. Like, I had more relief for longer than I ever had. So I fell in love with homeopathy even though I fought it from the beginning. But yeah, that's why I'm here.
It works.
We try to find in our materia medica a substance, a natural substance that will create in its original symptoms that our patient is actually presenting with. And that's why we say homeopathic medications are very specific to the individual.
You're treating the acute symptom, plus you're treating the constitution of the patient, which is not addressed in allopathic medicine at all.
The basic principle of homeopathy is giving diluted natural substances to the individual so that the body can have a specific response to this diluted natural substance. The example of it now we use in medicine is called immunotherapy. If someone has cat allergy, we give them small and diluted amounts of cat dander so that slowly their immune system, their lymphatic system, and the rest of the systems in the body work so that they don't have such an amazing reaction to cat dander. Homeopathy works with the same concepts. We give small amounts of certain natural substance to an individual so that we can create a change in their body.
At Body of Harmony, your health journey is never one-size-fits-all, it’s deeply personal.
