You could say I am in love with homoeopathy, and I hope to communicate why this is, why I am so drawn to it as a system of healing people. It's not just a complementary medicine, it's a complete medicine, with a huge well-catalogued remedy chest from which prescriptions are made according to disciplined observation and analysis guided by a highly evolved set of principles. I came to know it layer by layer and in this way it is best revealed...

I consider myself an ordinary person and I thought it would be interesting to trace the path of my conversion to something that, although rapidly gaining acceptability, is still considered way-out by a lot of ordinary as well as medically-trained people, and I'll be introducing these way-out homoeopathic concepts along the way.

I have a rebellious streak I put up with so much, until a day comes when I say no more, and mean it, something has to change. I suffered from asthma as a child continuing right into adulthood, until in my mid-twenties I was told by my doctor I had to be put on an inhaler. That was it, I had a nightmare vision of being on an inhaler for the rest of my life. Acting on intuition more than anything I changed my diet, cutting out red meat . It worked, the symptoms stopped. Another childhood problem I had was otitis media which started when I was 6 or 7 and was constantly treated with antibiotics, recurring each time the antibiotics wore off. When I was 17 I decided I had had enough and stopped taking the antibiotics. Of course the pain came back as usual, but after a while it went away without treatment and never troubled me again. And that gave me the realisation that the body can heal itself.

My experience of disillusionment with proscribed treatments is similar to that of homoeopathy's founder, Samuel Hahnemann. (Quick biography: he was a German doctor, born in 1755, died 1843 aged 88, not bad even for today. I read the other day that homoeopaths live on average 20 years longer than orthodox doctors even though they seem to drink and smoke just as much!)

Hahnemann became disillusioned by the barbaric practises of his day, such as bloodletting and blistering. Apart from the terrible suffering these caused, he observed that people including his own children did not actually get better with such treatments, if anything they made them worse.

Translating a pharmaceutical catalogue, he became interested in the different symptoms poisonous substances produced in people. A true empiricist and stubbornly courageous to boot he started testing some of these on himself, kicking off with Peruvian bark. He found his feet and fingertips grew cold, he became languid and drowsy, developed palpitations where his pulse grew hard and rapid, anxiety tremors, enervation in all his limbs, red cheeks, thirst, dulled senses, stiff joints, and paroxysm every 2 or 3 hours. In fact they were all the classic symptoms of intermittent fever. As soon as he stopped taking the poison the symptoms stopped too. What it did was to initiate in Hahnemann an artificial disease state.

He soon discovered the other side of this coin: that the substance that causing the set of disease symptoms in a healthy person cures those same symptoms when manifested by a sick person. So for example, Sulphur can be used for skin complaints, Lachesis (a snake venom) treats people suffering as if from snake poison (note, as if – the person hasn't actually been bitten by a snake): heart problems, difficult breathing, blue skin, throbbing headaches. Alium Cepa (onion) cures many hayfevers (where symptoms are severe tingling in the nose, streaming eyes etc. the symptoms you get from peeling an onion). It's similar to the vaccine concept, the remedy doesn't attack the disease, it stimulates the body to throw it off, which means encouraging rather than suppressing the expression of symptoms.

This concept which Hahnemann called the Law of Similars, was not entirely new. It's seen throughout history in many different cultures. Hippocrates, often credited as the founder of medicine (doctors still take the hippocratic oath) said in the 4th C. BC: "through the like disease is produced and through the application of the like it is cured." Paracelsus, the 15th century physician and alchemist applied the Law of Similars extensively: "bring together the same anatomy of the herb, and the same anatomy of the illness into one order. The simile gives you understanding of the way in which you shall heal."

Hahnemann's contribution to pharmacology is recognised today in orthodox medical handbooks, because he developed a very systematic testing of drugs. Unlike today's drug companies, however, he always used healthy human subjects, mainly students, and to this day it is healthy people, and especially students, who test new homoeopathic remedies using the placebo-proof double-blind method animals are never used, both because their physiology is different, and remedies can affect the whole being of the person, including mental and emotional states. Also homoeopaths work with the description by the patient in his own words of how he is feeling rather than relying on tests and metabolic measurements. Through hundreds of thousands of human provings, homoeopaths have a huge database of well-confirmed and often highly specific symptoms to indicate appropriate remedies.

Life is never simple and Hahnemann noticed that each person in fact reacted differently to the same substance although the common symptoms of the induced disease state were the same. So we have to recognise that people are unique individuals. Homoeopaths consequently look for what is different about their patient's condition rather than try to fit it to a particular disease profile indeed we don't diagnose disease although it can be helpful to have a doctor's diagnosis. Also, a generalised symptom such as `anxiety' is of little use to a homoeopath, `anxiety with headache' is better, pointing to a much smaller pool of anxiety-associated remedies, while a curiosity such as `anxiety from flatus, better for emission' is the best of all, as it is unique to one remedy (Calc Carb in fact, one of the commonest remedies for children). Similarly homoeopaths take note of details like whether the patient is better or worse for cold, pressure, eating, whether symptoms are related to particular times of the day or even the lunar cycle, and what a pain actually feels like, is it burning, bursting, throbbing, shooting etc. Nothing is dismissed, and it is the patient's own words that are used to find the correct remedy.. It is the total picture of the individual that we're after, which you don't see when you analyse the patient by statistics and specialisms, you miss those patterns that only the whole brain can perceive.

The Law of Similars and this recognition of individuality were a great advance, but there was a problem in that a lot of the substances Hahnemann was using to cure people were in themselves highly toxic, and although effective caused the patient a lot of suffering and were potentially lethal to fragile constitutions: the so-called side-effects that are still a problem with many of today's non-homoeopathic medicines. So he experimented with dosage to see how low he could go and still get a healing response. What he eventually discovered was more amazing than ever: the lower the dose, the more powerful the substance. To be more precise, successive dilution and succusion (vigorous shaking) of the substance magnified its healing properties its energy while minimising the toxic effects. He called it potentisation. Interestingly, dilution or succusion on their own don't potentise, its the two processes acting together.

Common homoeopathic potencies are 6, 30, 200, 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 which refer to the number of times the potentisation process has been carried out. The strength of potency given is partly determined by the strength of constitution of the patient if he is very weak a high potency would stimulate too much healing activity, and this is one area where you have to be careful with remedies. And yet it is precisely these high potencies which are unlikely to contain even a single molecule of the original substance a key point on which very rationalist types of people tend to dismiss the whole of homoeopathy. But it's not really rational to do this, it literally doesn't matter. Potentisation is a phenomenon, like gravity, which whether or not we can explain it, is observed to exist. And the materialist physics upon which our belief systems and medical systems are based is actually dead as a dodo. Modern physics, quantum, tells us that matter and energy are different descriptions of one and the same phenomenon, molecules and atoms are best envisioned not as material specks but as energy fields. If matter can equal energy, then you can explain potentisation: while the homoeopathic pill has no substance pills are actually made from sugar milk it carries the energy imprint of the substance. Similarly I've heard that over a seven year period every cell in our body change, but we retain our identity of self. To use another metaphor: crude drugs are like crude fossil energy, potentised homoeopathic drugs are like nuclear energy. At the homoeopathic level physical size of dose is irrelevant: the leading supplier of homoeopathic remedies to retail outlets lists dosage on its packaging as two tablets for adults, one for children, but it's nonsense one remedy has the same effect as 100!

Anyway, we don't actually need to know exactly how potentisation works in order to make use of potentised remedies. Indeed, one of Hahnemann's great achievements was to turn medicine away from pointless theorising where eminent authorities had great arguments about their conflicting theories which were based on almost pure speculation into a medicine grounded in experience and experiment. His principal principle was "the physician's high and only mission is to restore the sick to health". In other words our role is to be out there helping people.

Well, eight years ago I had just heard the word homoeopathy a few times, vaguely knew it was an alternative medicine. I was a long-suffering social worker and I'd just become pregnant. I was sharing a flat with two abusive young men who wanted me out, made noise all night, even had me evicted, and I had a series of headaches and angry, violent moods, and a real desire to kill. A lighter, but stranger desire I had was to eat the wall of my room. This wasn't really practical and I found chalk satisfied the craving. Towards the end of my pregnancy I was on a packet of five a day.

In desparation, and knowing I shouldn't have drugs while pregnant, I went to see a homoeopath (I have since discovered this is fairly typical. A lot of people first see a homoeopath when they have reached a point where they are desparate about their condition, they may have suffered for years, often having drug treatments which haven't worked, they are willing to try something new because they are desparate. Sometimes they have already tried an alternative therapy such as acupuncture or reflexology which has palliated temporarily relieved their symptoms but not cured.

The homoeopath was naturally interested in all the details of both my emotional state and my peculiar habits, showing no surprise at anything I told her, which was comforting in itself. She cured my headaches with one remedy dose. And I felt much better about my situation, too. Then a week before I gave birth I was offered a Housing Association flat to live in with my boyfriend., which solved my domestic problems at a stroke.

The birth was quick, although the pain was bad enough for me to go for both pethidine and gas. I was torn and stitched up and I remembered to use a remedy my homoeopath had given me to heal. From excruciating pain, not being able to walk to being able to stroll comfortably around the ward took less than 24 hours.

The problem was now not me, but my baby. She developed jaundice within a day, and her bilirubin count kept going up. She was going `under the lights' having phototherapy and that was ok, she seemed to enjoy sunbathing under them, although I missed not being able to hold her. But she was very distressed by having her heel cut all the time for testing the blood count, I remember the blood sample was lost once and she had to have it taken again and that upset me. I thought how can this happen, and then the doctor said they would have to give her a blood transfusion if the count didn't start going down. That sounded risky, AIDs was all over the news and they'd just mislaid some blood. I thought I want to get home and be with my baby in peace, have something decent to eat; the phototherapy isn't working, I want to be able to use homoeopathy (my homoeopath wasn't allowed on the ward).

After five days of slowly going mad I decided to make the break. When I told the doctor I was discharging myself, she was appalled, and warned me my daughter might get brain damage or die, and almost talked me out of it but for one thing. When I said I wanted to use homoeopathy she dismissed it out of hand, it didn't work, it was `quackery'. Well, I couldn't argue against her years of intensive medical training I left school at 16 with a few CSEs but I did know my own experience, and that was I had used homoeopathy twice with dramatic improvement both times. It could have been chance, maybe I would have improved anyway, but ordinary people can't subject their experiences to rigorous scientific validation before deciding what can be learnt from them. Common sense and a feeling in my heart gave me the courage to go against authority and take my baby home.

With support over the telephone from my homoeopath, we cured the jaundice within 5 days of being at home. I don't think I have ever made a more difficult, or more important decision.

As a postscript, years later I read in the newspaper of a study that linked pethidine wtih jaundice. I thought yes, this is obvious: mothers are kept off drugs throughout pregnancy, but then during childbirth, some very powerful drugs are used to stop the pain. The baby's still living off the mother, the drug goes straight through to the baby's vulnerable organs. I am not saying pethidine was the significant factor causing jaundice in my daughter's case. But it does show the dangerous effects crude drugs can have and which can take a long time to discover.

Any material dose can be a toxic dose, it depends on the sensitivity, the level of susceptibility in the person taking it.

For example, vaccination. People sometimes liken vaccination to homoeopathy because it uses a small dose of the disease substance to cure the same disease. But it's not a homoeopathic dose, it's a material amount of the pustulent disease, which is why sensitive children can get very sick or even die from vaccination. There are actually true homoeopathic vaccines which are called nosodes for example, a child who is allergic to cats can be given potentised cat fur.

Now on average 5% of children get a severe reaction from vaccination. They are susceptible to it. No matter what the benefits for the majority, if your child is one of the 5%, it's no comfort. Again it's a matter of treating people as individuals. Another reason homoepaths don't go for vaccinations has to do with our perspective on the disease process: a vaccinated immune system isn't a patch on a naturally strengthened one: I remember reading a few years ago a grotesque report on how American hospitals were importing blood from Haiti, the poorest country in the world but people's blood was the best because their immune systems worked so hard. If only we could have a really healthy immune system without having to go through all the disease and suffering of people in Haiti. With homoeopathy it is possible.

In my case my daughter's second vaccination, for measles, gave her a bad reaction. By that time, I felt strong enough and confident enough in homoeopathy to stop giving her further vaccinations. I was simply not so afraid of disease by that time. If she got measles, why not let it be treated then, with homoeopathy? Why put her through unnecessary suffering? And the vaccine for a more serious disease like whooping cough could cause an even more serious reaction, so I kept a nosode remedy for this in case of an epidemic. But the best defence is in any case a strong immune system. Whether it's malaria or measles, the virus is just one factor in the disease taking hold, susceptibility is the key one. And homoeopathy can be used to bolster the constitution rather than treat any specific condition.

So at its simplest you look at which remedy's symptom picture most closely resembles the child's (note not all the symptoms have to be present as they indicate the fullest range of the remedy from many provings). Supposing she was lying motionless, according to our sketch that could indicate either Gelsemium or Bryonia . How do you choose? Well, if you're an amateur you could simply try one and, if that didn't work, the other, as the wrong remedy will simply not work (remember, no toxic substance!) But a more detailed differentiation would point to the remedy: the Gelsemium child cannot nove because she is too tired, the Bryonia because it hurts too much. So you see, each remedy is a rounded-out picture. Bear in mind, Bryonia may be given to someone else for a totally different illness, say influenza, but the characteristics of the remedy will be there - lying motionless, and so on.

After I had my daughter I left social work and decided to become a childminder, and I often used homoeopathy, always with the parent's consent, in first aid situations. Acute conditions are relatively easy for the amateur to prescribe for, and cures are faster and more spectacular, too, which was very encouraging for me. I remember one morning one of my charges had earache and was crying and crying and screaming all morning. I gave her one dose of Aconite because of the sudden onset and severe pain and she was cured immediately I mean literally within a few seconds. Often a child will fall asleep when given the right remedy the body shutting down to heal itself and wake up cured. It was good that this child's cure was so spectacular and that her parents were there at the time and could share my own amazement. And I wondered if I had been treated homoeopathically the first time I had otitis media, rather than had the disease suppressed, whether it might not have cleared up as quickly. It was that sort of experience that after three years led me to decide to pursue my vocation to train as a homoeopathic doctor.

I didn't at that stage appreciate that most disease is much more difficult than the easy come easy go acute conditions I had been practising on. A lot of disease happens because of the baby's genetic baggage of unresolved diseases from the parents, which in turn determine the susceptibility to particular diseases in the child. Which is why homoeopaths ask patients about their parents' and grandparents' medical history. Orthodox medicine has done a lot of research into genetic inheritance on the microscopic level, while homoeopaths' view is macroscopic. We call these unwanted inheritances miasms, broader disease pictures that have manifested through the ages, the first miasm mutating into others due to the misguided suppression of the original disease symptoms. Suppressed diseases don't go away, they go underground and find their way into the genetic code. For example, mastectomy is losing favour as a treatment for breast cancer because the cancer isn't cured but tends to reappear later in another more vital organ. Again, symptoms aren't the disease, they're the expression of the body's attempt to cure itself of the disease.

A brief historical sketch of the miasms: The original miasm we call Psora and refer to colloquially as the itch, because it's principally related to skin disease. The son of Psora is Sycosis and relates to gonorrhoea, discharges due to overproduction, and manipulative personality. This in turn begat the Syphilis miasm related to that disease: discharges due to destruction growths, moles, asthma, bladder infection, cystitis, vaginitis are all syphilitic expressions. All these were noted by Hahnemann. Since his time new miasms have developed as disease has continued to transform itself Tubercular, followed by Cancer, and now AIDs, each miasm more destructive than the last and wreaking a deeper pathology. Its a disturbing perspective. What it means for homoeopaths is that we need to treat people constitutionally with remedies that relate to the miasm or combination of miasms they have.

As well as miasms there is a lot that can happen during the vulnerable period of pregnancy and birth to affect a child. As a baby my daughter had a lot of tantrums for no apparent reason, and this carried forward into childhood as irritable moods which neither she nor I could explain. I eventually connected this seemingly causeless anger with my angry feelings when I was pregnant, and with which she must have been imprinted. Once I made this connection it enabled me to find better remedies for her.

Such hidden layers determine determine underlying constitutional characteristics of the child. For example, often a mother will reject her unborn baby, and this can be the hidden etiology for slow development, difficulty in making friends.

Birth itself is often a very traumatic experience and will often be the etiological basis for a homoeopathic prescription.

A baby may not be breast-feeding because the mother is full of anger which is making the milk taste sour.

Or you think a child may have worms because it has a constant gnawing hunger. Then you can look for other signs: constant boring into the nose, rubbing the eyes, putting a finger into the bottom, itching arms, grinding teeth, restless feet, putting things in the ear; these and many more are good symptoms.

You have to look behind appearances. For example, a child suffering lack of confidence may have had it shattered by falling off a bike when learning to ride. Comparing dates of illnesses and events the objective observer can often make connections not immediately obvious to parents.

Often one needs to delve into the family dynamics to discover the cause of fear, guilt, or lack of confidence in a child, which often has a physical expression too. So, sibling rivalry, a dominating parent, an estranged parent, lack of love, religious fanaticism, often lie at the bottom of asthma or eczema for example and the homoeopath will treat with reference to the underlying cause rather than the symptoms which would be likely to return if treated in isolation. You may come across a child with apparantly model behaviour very responsible, independent, always keeps her room tidy but she can't express any kind of emotion, you may get the feelingshe knows how to talk but won't do it she's shut down because of what happened in the family. Nat Mur, potentised salt, is a likely candidate for a remedy. A confirming factor would be the child craves salt. So everything is looked at together, the emotional, the mental, the physical.

A principle in homoeopathy is that you have to treat whatever has a life of its own. So, for example, you may see a child whose key symptoms are grief and hayfever. The hayfever manifests during the grief state. To cure the hayfever, the remedy you give needs to treat the grief state. If the child is not treated homoeopathically, the hayfever may be suppressed with drugs, and become asthma, existing independently of the grief state. If homoeopathic help is sought at this point the homoeopath would need to treat this acquired asthma layer first before being able to treat the grief state.

This also illustrates the benefits of using homoeopathy from an early age. With adults, often a lot of time and patience is needed to `peel off' layers, especially because of a lot of drug use. Patients used to a quick fix can become frustrated, especially if old suppressed symptoms return as part of the process of cure. I am actually being treated now for disease layers laid down in a traumatic childhood. It's like you can try to deal with crime by locking people away in prison, but when they come out they just commit more crime, only worse because they are know hardened criminals. Or you can address the underlying causes of crime poverty, poor education, poor parenting this takes longer but is ultimately far more effective. And it needn't be expensive if resources are targetted to allow people to help themselves.

In homoeopathy we believe in minimum intervention. If a patient has lots of different symptoms you need to make a decision as to what actually needs to be cured here, the one thing that will sort out everything else, create a virtuous circle. For example a child has headaches and diarrhoea with anger more than likely I would treat for anger and the other two symptoms would go away automatically.

We work from the basis that vital, glowing health is natural, and if it isn't there then there is an identifiable reason for it. The difficulty is, in a stressful, alienating environment one rarely sees glowing health. Also, homoeopathy cannot work fully where there is what we call a maintaining cause it may be a family relationship, or destitution that is keeping someone ill.

So little did I know what I was letting myself in for when I started my homoeopathic course! It actually included a lot of orthodox training in anatomy and pathology which in my naivetey I hadn't been prepared for but for which I was soon to be thankful for. I come from a big family, so family crises tend to happen more frequently; in the middle of my first year of this amazingly demanding course, my sister took ill with acute hepatitis. I happened to be looking after her the weekend it suddenly came on strong. She was in a stupor, falling over, being silly, she didn't know where where she was, thought the bedroom was the toilet, she wouldn't eat or drink. I gave her a series of remedies, trying to keep pace with her constantly changing picture. I kept in touch with her doctor on the phone. She started bleeding bright red blood, and we decided to take her to hospital, to be looked at .The ward was staffed mainly by agency nurses who had little relationship with the patients, or understanding of medicine. I remember on the first day one was about to give my sister Paracetamol for a headache and I intervened it could have been fatal her liver was so weak, and it's that easy, one careless prescription. From that day I made sure I was around a lot and knew what treatment she was getting.

By the way I'd like to say that although my experience of hospitals sounds overwhelmingly negative, it's not the humans who work there but the dehumanising aspects the size, lack of intimacy, factory-like routines, and especially the painful treatments! I find it's these other people always complain about, too, it's the individuals they praise, the wonderful doctor, the caring nurse. I also find general practises, while often overstretched like hospitals, are more amenable to homoeopathy, perhaps because their scale allows them to work more closely with people and get to know them as people rather than just bodies. Homoeopaths are able to go much further still, spending maybe an hour and a half on a first consultation.

Anyway, my sister's doctor told me she had a 50/50 chance of surviving. That and the fact that there is no curative medical treatment for hepatitis the aim is to keep the patient alive while the disease goes away led me to continue to prescribe homoeopathic remedies for her and secretly bring them into the hospital. My sister recovered very quickly from the brink of death, returning to normal life and work within three months, and amazing the doctors so much she was invited back several times as a star case to be interviewed about it. On the last occasion she decided to tell them about the homoeopathy....they stopped inviting her back after that.

It made me realise how homoeopathy has been hindered in growing by basically being ignored by the establishment. It did in fact become very popular in the 19th century. A quarter of American MDs were homoeopaths by 1900. But politics, the growing drugs industry combining with the medical associations, ensured that homoeopaths and other free-thinking doctors were drummed out of practice. This despite the fact that death records show that homoeopaths were literally hundreds of times more successful in treating patients in the big epidemics of that period.

To my mind, it's a symptom of a diseased world that governments can invest billions of pounds and dollars developing high-tech weapons systems, or even high-tech medical equipment which is too expensive to run, and practically nothing in low-tech healthcare professions like ours that can benefit lots of people and the really sick thing is we continue to vote for these people!

So here's my list of reasons for loving homoeopathy. I believe each of them represents a great benefit in healthcare. But here they all are in a single system! I think humanity and homoeopathy need to give each other a chance which is why I am so pleased to be able to talk to you today, and hopefully encourage your interest.


"The highest ideal of cure is (i) rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of the health, (ii) or removal and annihilation of the disease in its whole extent, (iii) in the shortest, most reliable and most harmless way, on easily comprehensible principles".