Tuesday 6 September 2011

Homeopathy is not glamorous

Have you ever heard about the kid who wanted to be a homeopath?

No? Nor have I!  If you want to know what are the currently most glamorised professions, ask a 6 year what they want to be when they grow up, and you will get a fairly good idea… footballer, prime minister, chef, medical doctor, fireman, celebrity, and vet, all rank pretty well. Homeopath sadly doesn’t even make it to the top 50. You might say it’s just because their parents don’t know how to spell it. Well that might had been the case up until four or five years ago, but it is no longer.

Several years ago, every time I told people that I was studying homeopathy, they would look at me with that strange expression and ask: homeowhat? But these days thanks to the concerted attack of the media on a weekly basis, homeopathy has finally started to become more popular. Now when I say that I am a homeopath, people don’t look at me as if I’m coming out of the closet, or if I’m confessing to be part of a strange religious cult, instead they look at me with interest and ask, Oh! Are you?

But even now we cannot claim that to become a homeopath is the ambition of a child. In fact we cannot even claim it to be the realistic job option once we grow up and are forced to settle for a less glamorous job in order to pay the bills.


The average homeopathy college is full of chicks

and very few blokes, but if you are a young dude in need of ideas on how to pull chicks I suggest you re-set your browser and navigate quickly away from this site, before you embark on a lengthy and expensive course and end up getting more than you bargained for!
Lets face it, we are not glamorous at all as a group, salve few exceptions.  Your average homeopathic college is filled up with middle age overweight frumpy ladies in jeans, with pony tails and facial hair, plus the occasional bloke, normally a retired hippy.

You shouldn’t feel sorry for the odd guy among the homeopathic group, as he will normally end up becoming part of the next generation of teachers. They might be the minority but somehow they always end up becoming famous homeopaths and teachers.

The females, although some will become teachers as well, mostly tend to stick to healing their families and close friends, and to take other jobs to pay their bills, with only a small percentage making it into the very competitive complementary medicine market.


Even for the few of us who become famous, fame is very relative.

We are not talking about Big Brother celebrity fame.

You might ask why would someone want to do it, graduating in homeopathy I mean, not the Big Brother thingy which is quite obviously the way to go in terms of fame and recognition.

But homeopathy… being bashed around by the media on a weekly basis, not making enough money to pay the bills, having to dwell on the patients’ cases for hours looking for that illusive clue to what their simillum remedy might be… personally, I guess my best chance of fame will be if the quackmeter website people decide to nominate me in their wall of shame and to publish a link to this blog, so if any of you is reading this, I’m not asking for any favours, but a little publicity wouldn’t go a miss…

Hard to explain why someone would want to become a homeopath...

For most people the transition between allopathy, conventional medicine that is, and homeopathy is a painful journey. I sometimes tell my patients that most people who have never tried homeopathic treatment before, would feel embarrassed to admit it, but secretly they put a great faith in homeopathy.

They go on for years, filling themselves up with toxins from the way they eat, the air they breath, the medicines they take, allowing themselves to be bombard with radiation from mobile phones, WiFi, eating microwaved and irradiated food, and so on… they put themselves under enormous pressure and stress, and every time they become sick they ask their doctors to turn off our alarm signals and to ply them with some more drugs so that they can numb the pain, suppress the symptoms and just live to fight another day. We all know fully well that there are no magic medicines: our bodies weren’t built to be suppressed and if an illness is suppressed the pathology will just move into another organ.

It is in fact so predictable where the next ailment will manifest that I normally tell my patients, to go and read the side effects of the drug they are currently taking if they want to know what they are going to suffer from next.

And then, and just then, once all the doors have been closed, and they are told that whatever health problem they have, cannot be cured, that they must stick to your medication for life, or that it’s just old age, and so on, then, and only then, they have an inspiration…

Let’s try homeopathy!

This is in no way a criticism, this is the way most of us homeopaths first became aware of this complementary medicine system too, either from experiencing first hand suffering or by observing someone close, normally one of our children suffer from chronic problems that conventional medicine just aggravated instead of healing.

Coming into homeopathy involves often a certain degree of physical and psychological suffering

that tends to drag on for years until we finally realised that the more conventional options of treatment were failing us.  Wrestling with our scepticism about our own healing ability, and finally understanding that we too could study homeopathy and become healers saving others the painful journey we have been through.

The process begins: studying homeopathy is lengthy and it never really ends...


Part of the homeopathic philosophy is that every patient is unique, and that detailed analysis of an individual, getting to know his personal history both medical and psychological is necessary to foment their healing ability.

This process involves taking a person’s case in minute detail to get the complete picture of their various symptoms and how these can be affected for better and for worst, and then matching all of this to one of the almost five thousand homeopathic remedies available. And this is only the first appointment!

Because of our life style most of us will have too many layers of blockages or obstacles to cure

although most people have some improvement after their first appointment, they in general require subsequent appointments in order to complete their self-healing process. On following appointments we look at what had changed in their symptoms picture since their last prescription, and re-define their homeopathic portrait and match this again to the correct remedy.


I see myself as a health detective:

In my view every little sensation counts, this is what makes you different from everyone else, and if I want to boost and stimulate your immune system in order to help you to heal yourself,

You and me must get familiar with all those little symptoms!

If you are new to Homeopathy and are just wondering how does it work, don’t even go there! Sorry if I’m sounding a bit wary, but it’s just that sooner or later that insidious question seems to prop up into everyone’s mind! Have you ever tried to ask your GP how medicine works? Go on, do it next time just to see their face…I'm only joking, you mustn’t waste your doctor’s time.

I repeat: YOU MUST NOT WASTE YOUR DOCTOR’S TIME! And you shouldn’t waste mine either!

The same way that it might be interesting to analyse medicine in detail as a health system and try to understand all the biochemical processes of any possible drug prescribed to you and how they work, but your doctor’s surgery is not the place to do this: he or she is not necessarily the best equipped person to tell you about it; it is not my place either, as a homeopath, to explain how homeopathy works and why does it work, be contented that I can select from a vast range of remedies the right one to treat you, that is my job.

If you want to know how it works, I suggest you study quantum physic, of all the scientific branches seems to be the one that comes closer to explainning the homeopathic healing phenomenon.

Just in case that young dude of earlier on is still reading:

study as you may, you are more likely to unravel the secrets of the universe with it than to pull any chicks, but hey, what do I know? I’m just a homeopath…

And now, if you will excuse me I've got to go pluck my chin.

 
Meet you next week, same time, same place!
 


By the Undercover Homeopath