A patient 'cured' is a happy homeopath! Why I love losing clients - and want them to tell all their friends exactly why they left me!

You've probably all seen this meme - and I will be the first to admit, it is grossly unfair on the man depicted in the white coat as a medical professor or doctor. I'm fairly certain every doctor and medical scientist enters into their career with one goal - to help people and make a difference to humanity. And indeed they do so tirelessly, day in day out, in a struggling NHS with longer waiting lists, sicker patients and short appointment times. The Hippocratic Oath often gets misquoted, and in fact, doctors sign up to a very honourable code of ethics to do their best with tools, medications and bedside manner that they have. And often that means finding a drug that will support someone long term, possibly for the rest of their life, in order to manage their symptoms, extend life, or give them a quality of life they could not otherwise expect.

However, there is another way.

There are big differences between the medical philosophy of conventional western medicine, and traditional, holistic medicines like homeopathy and acupuncture, as well as nutritional therapy.

(Definition: Holistic /həˈlis.tik/ treating the whole of something or someone and not just one part.)

As a homeopath, my aim is to get to view your health as a whole - and not just separate parts that need fixing. I get to the root cause of your symptoms, through a systematic and logical approach, exploring when, why and how your ailments started, how they have come to present as they are now, which systems and organs are at play (beyond the obvious), and which individually selected remedy or remedies to use, in which carefully determined order, that is most suitable to you as an individual. (That was a mouthful!)

The last few words there are really important - because each and every person is completely individual, and so no two diseases, symptoms or experiences are the same for different people.

A simple of example of this is to take the common cold, or a flu virus.

In an office or classroom of 30 people, not all of them will catch the cold. But some will, for different reasons, and to varying extents, with perhaps some similar but some very nuanced symptoms.

Generally speaking, those that are run down are most likely to catch the cold.

But homeopathy doesn't treat the cold itself, that the run down person caught. It treats the run down person, and the root cause of why they were run down - be it stress, grief, a poor diet or an existing condition.

Perhaps one person catches every cold going since they had glandular fever as a child. And another person was out in a cold wind the day before, or their desk is under the air conditioning or next to a draughty door. One person might have had too many late nights lately because they are worried about their finances, while another has been tired for ages for no clear reason - but they obviously caught the cold. But they are still clueless as to why they have been more tired than usual lately. Should we just ignore that, and make the cold go away? Or should we get to the root cause, so that they don't catch the cold at all next time, and their whole health is improved. The bottom line here is that we treat the individual, and their personal root cause of ill health, and we do not just treat 'the cold' or 'the headache' or 'the anxiety'.

Indeed doctors will have a few different medications for each ailment so that not everyone is just treated the same. And this isn't a contest of which is right or wrong. In an ideal world, doctors and homeopaths would work together, bringing their own set of tools and strengths to their shared waiting room of patients. (And did you know, homeopathy was discovered by practicing medical doctors, and many medical doctors to this day are also homeopaths.)

Now, I am hoping, as I write, that this blog will not get put on the naughty step, because as homeopaths, we are not allowed to use the words cure, heal or treat in certain ways. And I am always careful not to do so. After all - who am I to say I can cure something. I'm afraid the only certainty is grey hair and death, and I definitely cannot reverse either of those!

But my aim, as per the Organon of Medicine first published in 1810 by Dr Samuel Hahnemann (and which I still work from on a daily basis), is the complete restoration of health and removal of symptoms, based on a clear set of medical principles. Notice this is not the suppression of symptoms, to make them conveniently and quickly go away, or hide them, or 'stop' them. Stopping symptoms (which are there for a reason!) in their track is very different from supporting the body to express its symptoms safely and without suffering, so that the whole body can recover and be restored to health.

"The highest ideal is the rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of health, or removal of the disease in its whole extent, in the shortest, most reliable, and most harmless way, on easily comprehensible principles." Dr Samuel Hahnemann

(Interesting fact - Dr Hahnemann was disowned by his physician counterparts for his outspoken frustration with harsh new medicines and procedures that he felt were causing more harm than good, and that was back in 1790! His rants against the very conventional medicine that he had trained in, are so genius that I will write a separate post about them. He would make a great stand up comedian today, pointing out the painful irony of the meme above, and the money that the pharmaceutical industry make from you being unhealthy. There's a good book about this topic, with more about Dr Sam, called, 'Life is a Game of Consequences: How and why we become ill.' written by British former GP turned Homeopath, Dr Mollie Hunton.

He would make a great stand up comedian today, pointing out the painful irony of the meme above, and the money that the pharmaceutical industry make from you being unhealthy.

And so you can see, that homeopathy works on logical and scientific principles, that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years, and which cover all aspects of medicine, the order of what we treat, the order of what heals, and how we go about it - in order to address the individual root cause of suffering.

There are also tons of placebo controlled, double blind, peer reviewed, published trials (aka gold standard trials) that support the efficacy of homeopathy on the Homeopathy Research Institute website.

Our medicines are not tested on animals, and we don't look at feared diagnoses like cancer or diabetes, and see what we can make to cure it. (I would argue we already know exactly how to do that for a lot of illnesses, or indeed prevent them. Healthy organic food, work life balance, more exercise, fresh air and sun light, less sugar and processed food, less medication, less stress, less screen time and less worrying about things we see and read in the media, but with more care and comparison for our community and environment).

Instead, we look to the thousands of effective, natural remedies that we have to gently and safely get to the root cause. The body is pretty amazing. With the right terrain, the right care and attention, a positive can-heal mindset, and the right catalyst from homeopathy, or another form of holistic medicine or therapy, it can and does heal itself. That is not the homeopathy doing that - it is the human body in all its innate intelligence. It gave you symptoms (a big red warning light and buzzer) to say that something is wrong, you listened, you made changes needed, and the body turns back off the warning light.

Sure, you probably ignored the first buzzer - a bit of tiredness, a cough, occasional headaches, a bit of dry skin. Because intrinsically, we a) assume the body will resolve this stuff, b) usually know that we are run down but too busy to slow down and c) its really not THAT bad. We don't want to all be hypochondriacs that take a sick day over a bit of flaky skin! But sadly, we don't nip these things in the bud. If they get bad, we buy a moisturising lotion with a long list of ingredients, our skin looks better, job done. (Instead of drinking more water and eating healthy fats to replace fluid internally). And so we are still dehydrated, potentially ignoring a shift in hormones for example, and now absorbing the man-made ingredients of our new beauty product or over-the-counter ointment. We buy a sleep medication (even a natural one) but ignore another hormone imbalance - usually a stress hormone indicator.

And so, I probably don't need to say much more to explain why I love losing patients, but just in case it is not clear:

My aim is to get you back on track with you health, feeling better from within, noticing the signs of real, vital health, better energy, brighter eyes, a new passion for life, people noticing that you look much better. And my aim is to do that as promptly and gently as possible.

Noticing the signs of real health, better energy, brighter eyes, a new passion for life, people noticing that you look better.

That doesn't usually look like an overnight cure mind you. Healing is gradual, and bit like bad health! But it is consistent, and always going in the right direction - getting better, and not worse, not needing new medications to help with side effects of others. Not making sacrifices on one health complaint, to better another. The body is a whole system, and it works like a boss when you give it the right catalyst.

So my aim is to find you, help you, and then lose you! And if you could tell all your friends about that, that would be great thanks!

(Ad don't worry - I will be here if you need me again! But first and foremost, I want to get you better - not keep you coming back over and over.)

Want me to lose YOU as a patient? Get in touch, and let's make it happen!

I will leave you with three quotes:

One from medical physician Dr William Ostler 1849 - 1919.

One from Hippocrates 460 - 370 BC.

And one from Desmond Tutu 1931 -2021.

I think they perfectly summarise what this post has been about. Three different quotes, from three different eras, from two medical doctors and Nobel prize winner - all with the same holistically scientific approach to cure.

Lucy Reynolds BSc PDHom Adv

Homeopathic Practitioner

Homeopathy online and in Morpeth, Northumberland, UK