In North America, most individuals come to homeopaths after failure of conventional medicine as nothing else has helped and view homeopathy as their last resort. Classical homeopathy, properly practiced, can restore health in a gentle way even in a very chronic case.
Of course, I ask for a minimum three months of commitment where the work done together using homeopathy will show some beneficial results with some improvements. In chronic cases, one can get amelioration i.e. a decreased frequency of discomfort and a lesser dependence on medication. One has to remember that to reach a state of chronic ill health, it takes a long time and so it will be unfortunate to expect homeopathy to work overnight and get a cure. Chronic conditions that are untreatable by conventional doctors often respond beautifully to homeopathic treatment. Some such conditions ranges from depression to arthritis, asthma, migraines, ADD, skin problems, sinusitis, sleep disorders, allergies, digestive problems, neurological disorders – just to name a few that can be addressed successfully by homeopathy.
In acute infection homeopathy can do as well if not better than conventionally medicines with no adverse side effects. Antibiotics help them every time they get sick, but then the ear infection or a sinus infection comes back. Homeopathy addresses the core imbalance in the body that leads to various recurrent diseases and works on the psycho-neuro-immuno-endocrinological set-up of the individual being in bringing about a rebalance.
There is an increasing awareness of homeopathy and thus it attracts this very well informed group who live a healthy life style and want medicines also to be natural and gentle. These groups are a joy to work with as success is easier due to their generally higher levels of health.
The central dogma in homeopathy, if one may say so, is the holistic approach to an individual being treated of which the disease and the imbalance is seen as a part of this complete picture. The remedy is arrived after what is called the repertorisation process using the laws of similar as opposed to the principles of contraria contraris – the mainstay of conventional medicine. The advantage of such a process is in reposing faith in the ability of the body to heal itself, provided the right stimulus with the right similimum remedy is given. The similimum remedy is thus a ‘SIMILAR’ to the constellation of symptoms and individual characteristics of THIS PARTICULAR PERSON. A diagnosis, although very important, does not influence the success of treatment as much as ability of the homeopath to find the perfect match. Of course certain conditions (for example, hereditary or genetically predetermined illnesses) and late stages of chronic diseases are irreversible. There is no magic trick that would allow curing a person with the end-stage chronic illness where only palliation by way of a reduction of severity of symptoms can be achieved. The response to the stimulus of the similimum largely depends on the level of the vital force of the individual.
