Introducing homeopathy by Hilary Dorrian
This is the first hour of Hillery Dorrian’s introduction to homeopathy. You can hear all of her lectures on Course link
Scroll down to the bottom of the page above, you will see the entry into the free course. Please listen and study this transcript.
For more on the basics of homeopathy, click here.
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So welcome everybody, and today to be talking about homeopathic remedies for home prescribing. I know some of you know a fair bit about homeopathy already, and for some of you it may be completely new to you.
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And I guess you're here to maybe you've heard that homeopathy is a very safe and effective alternative treatment and want to be able to use it for your family in the home. Many of you may actually come to homeopathy to study it full time.
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A lot of people do. Once they get an interest in it, once it gets a hold of them, it often doesn't let go. So some of you who are just starting out learning about homeopathy may actually end up practicing to be a homeopath.
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For others, they just want to be able to use homeopathy safely and effectively in their home. And that's what this course is designed to do. This five hour seminar isn't intended to give you the training to deal with serious or complex complaints, but at the end of the day, you should feel comfortable and confident to treat cuts, bruises, bites, stings, burns, colds, coughs quite happily for your friends and family.
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So our introduction today, first of all, we're going to talk a little bit about the theory behind homeopathy and the background to homeopathy. And once we've given you a little understanding of the whys and wherefores and some of the principles of homeopathy, we're going to be starting on the remedies, which is where it gets really interesting.
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So we're going to start off by having a look at what is health. So according to the Webster Dictionary, the meaning of health is freedom from defect, pain or disease. So clearly it defines health as what it isn't rather than what it is.
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As homeopaths. We see health as a positive state of well being. And true health has to be thought of in a positive, dynamic term, not simply as the absence of disease. It doesn't just mean the absence of something.
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It isn't a question of well, you're not ill, so you therefore must be healthy. And that kind of sums up the and orthodox ideas. And this is part of the reason when you see your doctor that you're rarely given any advice on lifestyle or diet or any other beneficial changes you might be making in order to make you more healthy.
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You're not sick, you don't need anything is the view. And health of course, is not just absence of disease, but it's a positive, dynamic state of well being that makes it hard for illness to get a foothold.
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Part of what we do as homeopaths is we try to keep people healthy, try to educate people about their health. And I think that's a very important part of being a homeopath and wanting to keep illness at bay.
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So the homeopathic view of health is actually quite different from the orthodox view of health. And the homeopathic definition of health can be covered in just six words the freedom to adapt, to change.
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A healthy person adapts according to the circumstances. It sounds a little bit strange sometimes that health is all about adapting and yet it's hard to convey how accurate this actually is. Is on a very basic level our body is adapting all the time.
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If we're hot, our body sweats and puts mechanisms in place to attempt to cool us, to adapt to the temperature. If we're cold, we start to shiver. So the little hairs on our body rise up and attempt to conserve some heat and to generate some heat.
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So on an internal level, this process of adapting is going on all the time. When we meet an infection, our immune system is making antibodies. So health really means our body is able to adapt to many adverse circumstance.
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And homeopathy defines health as freedom on a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level, where the entire body operates in an integrated and harmonious way for optimum efficiency, allowing us to respond appropriately not only to the environment, but to anything that comes into our lives.
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The World Health Organization have recently said that their view of health is the ability to adapt and self manage in the face of social, physical and emotional challenges. So it seems that orthodox medicine is perhaps starting to catch up, although I think it will be a long time before it filters down to RGPS.
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So it's about our body adapting and keeping the status quo, but for health we need to be aware of that and to help our body. If we bludgeon our body into submission by eating donuts three times a day, we're going to compromise our body's adapting mechanisms, our blood sugar balance.
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So we have to help our bodies in the adapting processes and not hinder them. So that's Homeopathic view of health that if we are able to adapt to circumstances and the homeostasis is maintained in our body, we will stay healthy.
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So the opposite, what is disease? So disease is defined as a condition of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms.
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We all know that's what disease is really. But to understand the difference between the homeopathic approach and conventional approach, we actually need to understand their different approach to the symptoms that we express when our body is ill.
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So orthodox medicine, it views your symptoms almost as if the symptoms were the disease. The symptoms need to be removed. For example, in a case of arthritis, a patient could be given painkillers or antiinflammatory medicine.
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But suppression of the symptoms does not cure the disease. And modern medicine is pretty much based on the suppression of symptoms. The painkillers or the antiinflammatories that you get, they don't cure the arthritis, although they may help to make you feel better because you're out of quite such strong pain.
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We would call this the law of opposites. We are given antiinflammatories for arthritis, ant acids for gastritis, anti histamines for allergies, antibiotics for infection and anti emetics for sickness.
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So this is kind of the law of opposites that whatever your body is doing, modern medicine tries to oppose. That the law of opposites as opposed to what we're going to come on to with homeopathy, which is the law of similars.
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But the law of opposites, it may apply in certain situations situation if you are dehydrated, you need to rehydrate by drinking more water. If you're too cold and hypothermic, you need to find and conserve heat.
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In these situations, the law of opposites make sense. Because the law of opposites may help our body to maintain homeostasis. But these adverse conditions where the law of opposites applies, they're not illnesses.
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They may create balance in certain disorders and can certainly be temporarily helpful. And sometimes we do need to replace something that isn't being made in. Maybe somebody isn't making enough thyroid hormone. (thyroxin).
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But the approach does not cure illness. And when you think about when you go to the doctors with arthritis, with migraines, with eczema, basically what the doctors do not in all situations, but in the vast majority of chronic complaints is that they manage your symptoms and they may give you medications that you may be expected to be on for your whole life.
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And of course, those medications have side effects and will cause further problems with your health overall. So it's how we look at the body's symptoms that really brings the divide in between the more orthodox approach and the homeopathic approach.
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And again, that's not to say that the two approaches don't have some crossover points and it's actually possible for them to work together. But the way homeopathy views symptoms they see our symptoms as a way of bringing our attention to disease.
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They say nature's warnings of troubles from within. They're a way for our body to try and reimpose order and balance and they're not the disease itself. So symptoms, even things like sweating when we have a fever, there are bodies way of trying to cool us down.
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An example might be if you had food poisoning. If you eat something that's full of nasty bacteria, the diarrhea and the vomiting come because your body wants to get rid of it as quickly as possible. So your symptoms are actually your body's way of saying I've got to get rid of this.
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They are not the disease itself. The disease is the bacteria that's causing this. But the symptoms are your body's way of trying to help, trying to get rid of it quickly before it can affect you further.
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So we see the symptoms in a very different way, that they are part of the way of trying to balance. And we use them to try and find where the central disturbance is so that the body can actually start to heal itself.
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Sometimes when we suppress a symptom of disease, we may drive it deeper into the body. This doesn't usually happen with acute problems, which is really the focus of our talk today, but it may happen.
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For instance, if people suppress eczema, it may aggravate an underlying asthma. So this is something, as homeopaths, we are very careful about. We believe that especially in acute diseases, the body is always working in its own best interests and that we need to listen to the symptoms, but not just try to suppress them, see them as a roadmap to how we're going to help to get our patient better.
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Founder of homeopathy was Samuel Hanneman. And it was Samuel Hanneman that first coined the term homeopathy and the word homeopathy in Greek means similar to the suffering. And that really says most of what needs to be said about homeopathy, that we are trying to find something that is similar to the suffering.
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It treats the diseases that it seeks to cure by the administration of a minute dose of a remedy that would, in a larger dose produce those very symptoms in a healthy person. We'll examine this a little bit more in detail later.
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The law of similars was actually previously described by many, many old physicians, Hippocrates, Paracelsus. It was utilized by lots of different cultures, including the Mayans, the Chinese, the Greeks, native American Indians.
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But it was Hanneman who actually codified and brought the law of similars into a systematic medical science. What happened way back when this is 200 years ago, Samuel Hanneman was a doctor, and he was a doctor in the times when people were bled to within an inch of their lives for whatever was wrong with them and purged.
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It was what they call heroic medicine. And it didn't have that many answers. But one of the answers it did have and was very successful in was in the treatment of malaria. And malaria was treated back then, 200 years ago, as it's treated now with quinine.
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And this interested Samuel Hanneman, who was a man with a very inquiring mind. And he wondered why quinine cured malaria when many other plagues went without anything to improve their symptoms or get them better or give them any ease of their suffering.
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So he got some quinine for himself, and he started to take some of it every day. And after a period of time of taking quinine every day, he fell ill. And he fell ill with what he thought was malaria.
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And he couldn't understand how he could have malaria when he was already taking quinine, which was known not only to cure malaria but prevent it. So he stopped taking the quinine, and within a few days, his symptoms had abated.
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So he wondered whether the fact that the quinine could produce the symptoms of malaria in him who was healthy, was the reason why it could cure malaria in people who were sick. So he repeated his experiments with his wife, Melanie.
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And he gave Melanie (His wife) Quinine every day until she fell ill. And then he stopped dosing and she got better. And then he tried it on his friends and possibly even his children, until he knew for certain that quinine produced the symptoms of malaria in a healthy person.
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So this was what set him on the road to homeopathy. He knew he needed to find a way of making it less toxic so that people didn't develop the symptoms, which is where the dilution process started. But China, which is the name we give to Quinine, holds a place dear in the heart of many homeopaths, because it was the first homeopathic remedy that Samuel Hanneman used and proved, and it was what provided the spark for the beginnings of homeopathy.
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We're briefly going to talk about the principles of homeopathy before we get on to the remedies themselves. And there are four basic principles of homeopathy we've touched on. The first one, the law of similars, that like cures.
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Like, then we have the single remedy, the minimum dose, and the law of cure. So I'm going to go through these. So the law of similars. Here we can see a lady chopping an onion. What happens when you chop an onion?
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We all know that. I'm sure we've all done chopped an onion at some point. And we know that we may get sore eyes, our eyes might stream and we might get really lots of tears, lacrimation, very stingy eyes.
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And then our nose might start to run and our throat might be affected and we have to go away from the onion, wash our hands, open the windows. There are so many things of old wives, tales of how to stop an onion stinging your eyes, put a spoon between your teeth, do.
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It while the tap's running. There's loads of them because chopping onions, strong onions, can be really quite uncomfortable. So that's the symptom that a raw onion can produce. So when we see somebody with those symptoms, possibly they have a cold or hay fever and their eyes are running, their nose is dripping like a tap, they may sneeze, they may have a slightly sore throat.
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We know that the remedy Allium cepa, which is prepared from an onion, will be the remedy that will cure them in a homeopathic prescription. So what we're looking at, there are thousands of homeopathic remedies in day to day use.
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Each of those substance has had a proving which we're going to talk a little bit about later on. So we know what symptoms they produce in a healthy person. So we know what symptoms they are going to be able to cure in a sick person.
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The second thing, which is very similar, we said the law of similars. The second thing on that list was like, cures like. There's not very much difference between the law of similars and like, cures like.
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But just to explain a little bit further, this is an example of like, cures like. Arsenic is a poison, it's a deadly poison. If somebody ingests a crude dose of arsenic, they are going to have the following symptoms.
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They are going to feel dreadfully ill, they're going to have horrible and very profuse vomiting. They're going to have diarrhea, watery diarrhea with a lot of stomach cramps. They're going to feel weak, weak as if they just have no energy and they really need to lie down.
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They're going to feel cold, bone, hold, and eventually they're going to collapse. That's what happens if somebody is poisoned with arsenic. So we use arsenic and homeopathic remedies are prepared and we're going to go through this as well in a very dilute form, so they have no toxic effects left.
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But what we know is that those symptoms that will be caused in a healthy person will be the symptoms that we can use Arsenecum to cure in a sick person. In other words, if we have a member of our family who gets struck down by Norovirus or eats a dodgy bit of chicken and gets food poisoning, if their symptoms are vomiting, diarrhea, which is very watery, they feel very weak, they feel very, very cold, and they feel close to collapse.
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We know that if we give them our Arsenicum album from our first aid kit, that is going to set them right in a short period of time. So this similar to the suffering like cures like is telling us that on being given a dose of something whose effects resemble our original symptoms, our body will redouble its efforts to throw off the disease.
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So this is the central principle of homeopathy like cures like. It's what homeopathy means, similar to the suffering. Does that make sense for everybody? As well as that very basic aspect of the law of similars?
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We require the remedy to be very similar. Not broadly similar, but as similar as we can make it. So when two people are ill, an example of this might be two people have the same name condition. They both go to their doctor because they've both got really severe bronchitis.
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The chances are that their doctor will give them the very same thing. He'll give them an antibiotic to try and helped clear their chest. So if they come to see a homeopath and they say, I've got terrible bronchitis, we don't have the one remedy that is similar to bronchitis, because what we're looking at is the expression of the symptoms of the patient.
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So if two people here have bronchitis, um. You might be very cold and chilly. You might be very hot and feverish. You might be coughing up yellow, you might be coughing up green. You might be much worse at night, can't sleep at all.
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You might sleep fine at night. Not cough at night, but be coughing all day. You might be better if the windows open, the air is cool. You might cough more as soon as the air gets cold. So you can see that although two people have bronchitis, their experience of it is very individual.
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That means that they would be given different remedies, each of them, because what we're looking at are the symptoms they express. And this is what we do all the way through with everything, with all of the complaints that we're talking about today, we're going to see that there are many remedies that can be used for that complaint, depending on the symptom picture that develops in the person.
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So the individuality of the symptoms that the person is experiencing are really, really important. And so we're going to talk a little bit about how we take a case and how we ascertain what those symptoms are so that we can match them really closely to the most similar remedy, to the remedy that is most similar to the suffering of the patient.
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Does that also make sense? We tend to use one remedy at a time. This is very what they call classical homeopathy. It's one of the tenets of homeopathy, the single remedy. It's important to remember that the remedy itself doesn't cure it's.
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Our own body that actually cures. Our body has an innate ability to heal. If we cut ourselves, it heals. If we have a cough or a cold, usually we get better. Sometimes we feel a little bit overwhelmed by our symptoms, as if we're really going to succumb to something and we need something to help us.
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But that's what the remedies do. They help us. To recover. They help our immune system, they help our body's own healing responses to make us better. The remedy is the catalyst. It isn't a drug. We tend to give a single dose and wait and see.
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We're going to talk a little bit more about this later on as well. The single remedy is slightly contentious. As in modern homeopathy, many people utilize combination remedies or alternation of remedies.
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But I guess classically, if we can see very clearly, as in that situation of diarrhea a remedy that matches really closely, we don't need another remedy. Our Sepia/Silica? will cure that person of their diarrhea and they will soon be feeling much, much better.
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So by and large, we're looking for the single remedy, but we don't need to be hidebound by it only being the single remedy. There are times where we may decide, I really can't tell between these two remedies and I'm going to alternate them and see if we get some good results.
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It's a possibility that you can do, but if we see the clear picture, then the single remedy is always preferable the minimum dose. Hahnneman when he realized that the quinine was causing malaria symptoms in patients, not malaria itself, but symptoms that mimicked malaria, he realized that if he wanted to use quinine, it would be easier, better, safer, more pleasant if he could get rid of the side effects.
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So he began by diluting and seeing how low he could go with dilutions before the cure became ineffective. And he developed a system of diluting and shaking, which is actually banging the remedy as it's diluted against a firm surface, often a book or a hand.
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And. And the section process seems to be what actually shifts the energetics in the prescription. One C equals the C stands for centessimal. So that's one drop in 99 parts of alcohol. We use the X potencies as well, and that would be one drop in nine parts of alcohol.
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But one drop in 99 parts is the centissimal, which is the commonest scale. And then you take one more drop and drop it into another 99 parts of alcohol and then that's the two C. This is the reason homeopathy is very often open to criticism.
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Basically, by the time you reach something like a 200 C potency, the equivalent is dropping one drop into the oceans of the world. As a homeopath of 35 years with a very busy practice and some outstanding results, even I think that's unlikely.
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So I can understand how people go, I'll get away. It does sound quite incredible. It's understandable that we get criticized for this because a lot of our modern drugs are they're chemicals and orthodox science often tries to understand homeopathy by the same model, by the chemical model.
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And actually I believe that homeopathy is being understood now, but it's being understood by quantum physicists and it hasn't yet filtered down into the mainstream because what we are, we are, we are diluting beyond Avogadro's number.
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And Avogadro's number is the point in a solution where there is no longer possible for a single molecule to exist. So the quack busters, if you like, or. The sense about science. The skeptics, they say, this is rubbish.
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This doesn't contain a single molecule. How can it possibly work? And the answer is that it doesn't work by the system. You're trying to explain it by a way that makes some sense to me in helping to understand why homeopathy works.
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And clearly it does work. Between 200 and 300 million people throughout the world use homeopathy daily. So despite the best efforts of the skeptics, it's growing in popularity for no other reason than it works.
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And to me, it's a little bit like having a CD and giving it to a chemist and saying, tell me what you find, analyze it, tell me what's in there. And they will analyze it. And they'll say, well, there's vinyls, there's metals, there's plastics, there's hydrocarbons of this or that type.
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And you say, but did you find the Mozart? And they'll say, what do you mean? Well, there was music on there. Well, no, well, the music is in the physics of it. The music isn't in the chemistry of the CD.
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So you can analyze it however you like. Chemically, you will never find the Mozart. And it's a little bit like that with homeopathy. I think we are still an idea ahead of its time. And when you think how long ago I mean, homeopathy is not a new age system of medicine.
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Hanneman discovered homeopathy 200 years ago. So we're not looking at a new age hippie type of medicine. We're looking at a medicine that has a long and actually a really illustrious history of ah, there have been homeopathy is still available on the NHS.
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And again, that's despite the best efforts of these people who want to see homeopathy squashed out of existence. But as homeopaths and people who have used homeopathy, there's no doubt that it works.
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Patients come back time and time and time again, but it's this dilution and sucussion that is the, is the, the thing that makes homeopathy really different. It's the thing that makes homeopathy open to criticism because it's not understood.
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But it's the thing that makes homeopathy incredibly safe and incredibly effective. Potency Selection when we have a patient that we want to give a remedy to to help to make them better, we sometimes have to decide what potency to give.
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The lower potencies, the X or the decimal potencies, six X to up to six C are considered low potencies, medium potencies, 30 C or 200 C and high potencies, one M and above. But over-the-counter remedies and the remedies that we are going to use for our acutes will usually be in the low to medium potency.
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Mostly we're going to use them in the 30s or perhaps the 200s, occasionally 60s. So those three potencies are the main potency six 3200. The remedy choice is far more important than the potency selection.
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That's the fine tuning on a prescription. By and large. If the picture is really clear, if the symptoms are very strong, we might go higher to a 200. If the symptoms are less clear, if the patient is really weak, we might stay slightly lower with a 30.
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But it doesn't really matter that much. In acute, I always say, what have you got? When a patient rings me up and they have a child, maybe sick with a fever, and I say, Give them Belladonna. And they'll say, oh, I've only got a 6c, that's all you've got.
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That's what you're going to give. Give it quite frequently. So the remedy will work. Whatever the potency, but it's fine tuning. There are sometimes a little bit some of them are sometimes a little bit preferential, but mostly you're going to be using from first aid kits or over the counter remedies that you're going to buy from health food shops.
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And you're going to be using 30 c potency. Mostly. The 30s are a good choice for home prescribers who may have some familiarity with homeopathy. Certainly, hopefully after this course. And these can be given every four to 6 hours until the symptoms are relieved.
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If you only have a six, you might want to dose a little bit more frequently, perhaps every two to 4 hours. We're going to come over this again. You don't have to remember this in its entirety. You'll also be able to review this when the film is released.
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We'll touch on all of these things again through the course of the day. The last one on that list of the principles was The Law of Cure. The Law of Cure says that when we are helping to make someone better, this doesn't really matter so much for the acute prescribing that we are going to be doing today.
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But it's useful to understand this, that as your body heals, things move from inside to outside, from above to down, from the center to the periphery and in reverse order of the original appearance of symptoms.
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If somebody is coming to a homeopath for a more chronic disease and they're seeing a home path, and maybe they have severe asthma and their health history is that they had Eczema as a child, they've used steroids for years.
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The Eczema is pretty much gone now, but they have bad asthma. And they want to come and have some treatment for their asthma. What we might find is that as we treat their asthma, they'll say, well, my peak flow measure is actually getting better and I'm feeling a lot better, but you know, I've got this eczema that I had when I was five.
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I haven't had it really for the last seven, eight, nine years even, and it's just started to come back. That's part of the law of cure. We know we are moving the patient on in the right direction. So these are the things that we look at to ascertain if our remedies are working well and they're one of our immutable laws of homeopathy.
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So prescribing remedies, we are going to talk a little bit about how to take a patient's case. So we're going to just spend a little bit of time on that. But we need to know what our patient's symptoms are in order for us to match that with the best remedy that we can find for them.
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And usually if we feel that we've made a pretty good match, we're going to take a single dose of that remedy and then we are going to wait and see how the patient feels. This gets slightly complex here because healing is a process.
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Homeopathy isn't magic. Healing is a process that takes time. If you supposing, you cut your arm really badly and it needed maybe twelve stitches. And we were to give you a remedy we're going to talk about later.
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Calendula, you're not going to say, oh my God, there was a big cut there a minute ago. Look at that. I say we're homeopaths, we're not Harry Potter. So it's a process of healing. A big cut like that, the sides have to move together, there has to be granulation as the.
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Tissues knit together and scab forms and then the scab will come off and then there'll be a scar and the scar will fade. That's how healing happens, gently and steadily. So we can make sure that healing takes place and we can help it to take place a little quicker, but it still has to take place.
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So if you are treating somebody for flu, say you're not going to give them a remedy and they're going to say, great, I'm off down the pub. That was brilliant. What they may say is actually, I feel a little bit less hot or I feel a little bit less achy.
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We're looking for signs that there may be some improvement. We may have to give them a few of our selected remedies. And then if we're starting after they've had two or three, if they're saying, yeah, I don't feel quite as wretched as I did, or I haven't blown my nose every 2 seconds, it's slowing down a little.
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We know we're on the right tracks. We can keep prescribing until they feel really much better and then we stop. There are situations like a teething baby, a baby screaming is really in discomfort. He won't be put down.
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We give a dose of chamomile and that is like Harry Potter world. The baby goes and falls asleep and people go, did that really happen? It happens all the time. It's a fantastic remedy and we're going to talk about it, but occasionally we get the symptom that just stops.
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If the symptom stops, we don't need to repeat the remedy, we don't need to give it again. We can say, okay, that symptom is no longer there, there's nothing to prescribe on. So we'll wait. But if the bay falls asleep and wakes up and gets really, really cranky again and can't be soothed, you can give another one.
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So basically when we start to feel better, we stop or slow down with the dosing. Stop. If it's completely better. Slow down if there's good improvement, but keep going until we feel really we're over it now and we just need another day's rest to feel better.
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It's very much in contrast to the typical stay the course pharmaceutical approach, and it reflects the idea of Hannaman to find the minimum effective dose that allows your body to heal itself. It's the reason why we don't have to keep on dozing indefinitely.
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Once that process has started, we can slow down and perhaps stop and only repeat if the symptoms return. This is based on the belief that too much medication of any sort, chemical or homeopathic, is just going to get in the way once the body has actually started the process.
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Sometimes patients say to me, is this all I'm getting? You're only giving me three pills, one a week for three weeks for my arthritis, and I'm not going to come and see you for another six weeks, so I'm going to be three weeks with nothing, is that right?
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And we say, yes, that's correct. But don't worry about that. The remedy will stay active in your system for a while because it's actually making your body do the work. And I liken it sometimes to pushing a swing.
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Once you give the swing a push, you don't need to keep pushing it. In fact, if you push a swing that's got good momentum, you might disturb its momentum. So you push the swing and you let it swing for a while.
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And when it's obvious that it's slowing down, then you give it another push. And that's how it is with homeopathy. So we don't have to keep on dozing. And people are often surprised when they come back.
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They say, I'm amazed that those three little pills have done so much. I have to say I was a little bit skeptical when you gave me those three little pills, but wow. And that's often the. And ons that we get from patients when they first discover homeopathy and discover how amazing the effects from just a few very tiny pills are.
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And it's simply because it's not the pills themselves, it's what they do in your body. It's about stimulating your body's own ability to heal itself. What are remedies made from? Sometimes people ask, and the answer to that is actually almost anything.
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Mostly the remedies are they come from one of the three kingdoms of nature plants, animals or minerals. But there are more homeopathic remedies being proved for use all the time. So our catalog of remedies increases, I guess, in accordance with changes in the modern world.
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The remedies may, as in our Arsenicum, may be made from toxic, dangerous substances in the first place which are rendered safe by the homeopathic dilution processes. But some of them are fairly innocuous in the first place, such as salt.
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But we all know that salt can kill people if we overdo it. So there's very few things that can't cause harm if we are very indiscriminate with them. The remedies that come from the animal kingdom we will be talking about two of them, I think, today.
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One of them is Apis mel, which is made from the venom of a honeybee. Some people don't like to use animal remedies and I completely understand that in homeopathy's defense for people who are vegans
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What I would say is that usually the homeopathy has resulted in the death of perhaps one honeybee to treat hundreds of thousands of patients. So. It's not like we have to kill colonies of honeybees. Probably the bee that we still use today for our source of Apis may have been killed 50 or 60 years ago.
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So it's actually very cruelty-free. Apart from that single source, homeopathic remedies aren't tested on animals and in fact, they're also used there are veterinary homeopaths who use them to heal animals.
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So it gives back a little bit too, I like to think. But some people still say I don't want to be given any remedies from the animal kingdom. There aren't that many of them. I would say the majority of our remedies come from the plant kingdom and quite a few come from the kingdom of minerals like arsenicum and like salt.
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We use many minerals as well, but we do use a few of the remedies from the animal kingdom and when they are needed, they are incredibly useful. So, as I said, remedies aren't tested on animals, they're environmentally friendly.
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But we are developing remedies all the time because we find that people are affected by things. We might have a remedy made from organophosphates, for instance, from people who've been made ill by exposure to pesticides.
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So although we have a stock of well tried and tested remedies that have provings and clinical provings and we're going to come back to that word in a minute, over the years, we also add in new remedies into the pharmacopia of homeopathic remedies.
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What is approving? Well, if you remember Hanneman's experiments with Quinine that we talked about, that he took a substance until he develops symptoms, and this is what we do with provings. A group of people will take a potentized dose of the remedy.
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Every day until they develop symptoms. For some people, that may be after ten days. For some, they'll be taking it for a month before they notice anything. But then once they start to notice a shift in their symptoms, they make very, very careful notes of their symptoms and then it's kind of done a bit double-blind.
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They don't know what they're taking and the person who collates all the information doesn't know what the remedy is, so that there's no bias, it creeps in, then everything is collated and all the symptoms.
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If all of the provers have one symptom and that everybody has it very strongly, then it's known as a black-type symptom. It's a very strong symptom of that remedy. And if only a few provers have had a symptom and it was fairly mild, then it's downgraded to a less important symptom.
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But this is how all of our remedies have originally been proved. And then, of course, we have what we call clinical provings. Clinical experience with remedies over the years adds more information onto the back of that original proving.
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That just says what I've just said. But basically, when a clear symptom picture emerges, then that remedy is ready to be put into the service of suffering humanity. So today we're going to be talking about acute problems and as I said, we're not going to be treating chronic diseases.
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Treating chronic ill health is something that you need to do a lot of studying with. Homeopathy for most courses are around four years, and so we can't possibly hope to do that in a day, but certainly a day is enough to wet your appetite and give you some interest in the subject and perhaps you will want to study it further.
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But the definition of an acute disease. Is that it's self limiting. It usually an acute disease will have a quick onset, it will follow a very typical pattern and it will come to a very clear end which will either result in complete recovery or death.
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Mostly recovery, I'm thankful to say. Examples might be coughs, colds, mumps, tonsillitis. So mostly people who get acute illnesses are ill for a short time. Maybe a flu might take up to two weeks for them to recover, maybe three weeks if it was a really bad one.
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A cold might take four or five days. But mostly people who have acute illnesses are ill for a short time. With homeopathy. We aim to make them more comfortable whilst they're ill and to shorten the duration of their illness and make sure that their body can throw off the illness with as much speed and force as is possible for them to recover their health quickly.
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Hanneman believed that acute were easier to treat, as sometimes, not always. There's a very specific remedy for a specific condition. This is not foolproof, but for instance, rustox is often said to be the main remedy for chickenpox.
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You would say that it probably will help eight out of ten cases of chickenpox. There may be people who have slightly different symptoms and who need a slightly different remedy if the rustox isn't working.
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But for some illnesses there are very specific remedies that require a little bit less of the individualization simply because the symptoms are pretty much identical. Another one, Homio Pathy, won its laurels with epidemic diseases in the turn of the century.
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One of them was scarlet fever and. And homeopathy had great success with scarlet fever at the time when scarlet fever was a really serious disease, not scarletina as it is nowadays, but there were big contagion.
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Hospitals and children used to die of scarlet fever, and homeopathy really won its laurels in the treatment of scarlet fever. And yet this is one of the diseases that has a very specific remedy, Belladonna, because the symptoms of scarlet fever are very strong and everybody has the same.
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They develop a rash very, very red, but they have a circumoral pallor, which means the rash doesn't extend to the area around their mouth. Their tongue is very, very red, but has white dots on it so it looks like a white strawberry.
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They have a high temperature, so everybody has those symptoms. So the chances are they're going to need the same remedy. So acute can be easier for that reason. But as we learned when we talked about bronchitis, there are other acutes that require careful examination of the symptoms in order for us to find the very specific remedy.
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So an acute remedy is a remedy which acute remedy? Acute remedy is a remedy for acute ailments. But acute ailments are self limiting diseases as opposed to a chronic disease. Some people say, oh, it was really chronic, as if something means chronic equals bad.
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That's not actually what chronic means. Chronic means that it is a long term disease. It's probably not going to kill you, but you're going to have to live with it for a long time. They will be symptoms that don't clear up.
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They may change somewhat in nature, but they last a long time. Arthritis is an example of that. People say, oh, I've had it for the last 30 years, and I this now and that now and there's no there. It's very rare that it will spontaneously clear up.
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So the chronic will come on slowly. It will last sometimes forever. And will rarely result in death, although there are a few that do. Whereas acute are short and usually result in spontaneous recovery.
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The acute, as I say, are where homeopathy really became best known at the turn of the century speed. It was an amazing remedy for treating a Spanish flu. I think in 1919, at the war, at the end of the First World War, there was a deadly outbreak of Spanish flu.
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Millions of people died and homeopathy really came into its own in that sort of situation. And in the book Chronic Diseases, Hahnneman wrote that he used Bryonia or Rhus-tox as specific remedies during an epidemic of acute typhoid that broke out in London.
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He treated 180 cases and only lost two patients in a cholera epidemic. In England, the mortality rate at the London Homeopathic Hospital was 9%, whilst in the allopathic hospitals it was 59%. So these are indisputable figures.
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These aren't made up, these are clearly researchable and verifiable. And when we see how homeopathy works in epidemic diseases, the statistics are really compelling. So treating acute has been something that homeopathy has always been very well known for.
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So we're nearly, nearly time to move on to the remedies themselves. I'm sure that's what you're looking forward to, but just some terms that we'll be using when we're talking about. Remedies and case taking.
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So one of the words we're going to use is modalities. A modality are the things that make a symptom feel better or worse. So if somebody has a sore throat and you say, is there anything that makes it feel better?
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They might say, yes, if I have a warm drink, my throat will feel better for that. That's a modality. Or they might say, oh, I've got splitting headache. And you say, what makes it worse? If I move my head at all, if I stay completely still, it's about three out of ten.
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If I move slightly, it goes up to ten out of ten. That's a modality they're written for. When we say better for, we use the mathematical increasing sign that means better for. And if we use the mathematical decreasing sign, that means worse for.
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You don't necessarily have to know that shorthand, but if you ever see it written down in a book, that's what that means. So we're going to ask our patient for their modalities. Also, another word that we see written in a lot of first aid books is concomitant.
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This is a secondary symptom which might seem unrelated to the first symptom, but it comes along at the same time. For instance, it might be somebody who's got joint pain accompanied by nausea. There doesn't seem to be a relationship between the two, but they say whenever that comes, I feel nauseous.
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They come at the same time. That's concomitant etiology. We want to know what was the causative factor? That's what etiology means. If somebody said, Well, I have a sore throat, but I was singing in the choir over the weekend and I think I've strained my voice, that is the etiology for their sore throat.
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It might be that somebody said, well, I got a terrible fright. My son fell down the stairs and I thought he'd hit his head really badly. He actually was okay. But an hour later I started with this headache.
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So that might be the etiology ailments from a fright. So if we can see an Etiology that's useful when we are taking the case of one of our family, perhaps we need to take quite a lot of information so that we can differentiate between the remedies that we might think of choosing for them.
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And we use the word CLAMS as an abbreviation for questions that we need to ask. When somebody says, I have a sore throat, we're going to go through the C.L.A.M.S. CLAMS stands for Concomitant, Location, Etiology, Modalities and Sensation.
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So I'm going to give you some examples of this. So perhaps your family have all gone down with a sore throat and you're the only one that's not got a sore throat. So they're all queuing up for you to say, mum, give me a remedy to make me better, or, dad, give us a remedy to make us feel better.
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So if we have one of the family, perhaps the son, he has a sore throat and you say, Is there anything else going on? At the same time? He may say, yeah, I've got a bit of a headache, a bit of my head hurts a bit at the front.
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The location might be, is it worse on your left side or your right side, or is it in the center of your throat? Whereabouts exactly do you feel the pain? So you might say it's on the right side. Is there something that seemed to set it off?
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Yeah, I ate a peach and I'm slightly allergic to peaches and my tongue started tingling and then my throat started to get sore and I think it's possibly an allergic reaction to the peach. So there you have an etiology too.
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You might say anything that's making it better or worse, and they say, well, actually, if I suck ice or drink something really cold. It feels nice. It feels like it gets rid of some of the swelling and the sensation.
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Well, it's stinging. It's like a stinging pain. When we go through throats or throats, we'll see that this would fit the picture of APIs. All of these things, the concomitant, the location, the etiology, the modality and the sensation, they fit that remedy.
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And they might be very different to taking the case, perhaps, of the mum or the dad who has the sore throat. Who says that they've got a sore throat. You say is there a concomitant? No, nothing else going on, just the throat and whereabouts in your throat?
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Is it right or left? No, it's right in the middle, right in the center and what was the Etiology? The singing in the choir? I sang we had rehearsals on Friday, we had rehearsals all day Saturday and we had a performance on Sunday and now I really can't speak what makes it feel better if I suck a sweet or drink something warm?
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Sometimes gargling with a warm drink, and the sensation is raw. So in this situation, we might be looking at the remedy rough tox for overuse of the voice. And it's quite different in its symptoms to the other sore throat that we've just seen, that the son had.
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And then the doctor saying, I've got a sore throat too. And you might say, Is there anything else going on other than your sore throat? Yeah, I'm freezing I'm actually really cold I've got the heating on, I've got three jumpers on I've got a blanket around me I still feel cold so the concomitant might be the chill is it your right or your left side?
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It's my left side it's distinctly the. Left side it really, really hurts was there an Etiology? Well, I think it was because got a chill yesterday. It was subzero temperatures. I had to wait 3 hours for a bus.
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I didn't have warm enough clothes on. There was a really, really cold wind. My throat started to get sore and this has come on. So maybe the etiology (cause) was being out in the cold wind or getting a chill.
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Anything that makes it better or worse. Any, any cold makes it worse. Cold air, cold drinks. A warm drink might be quite soothing. And what's the sensation? Like a fishbone stuck in my throat. So here we have the clear symptoms of a remedy called Hepar sulp.
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I'm going to go over some of these remedies when we do sore throats. So you can see there that in that little demonstration of three acute sore throats, that although they're all sore throats, that they are different sore throats.
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And our way of finding out how different are they is by getting the clams. So that's just a little aid into case taking and getting the information we need. The case taking for an acute disease is very different from the case taking for a chronic disease.
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If you have a chronic disease like migraines or arthritis or something that isn't going and you consult a homeopath, that process will take an hour to an hour and a half and it will include your previous health history, your family health history, your appetite navarsions???, your sleep patterns, your body temperature and your character.
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So we need an awful lot of information when we are treating somebody for a chronic disease. But for an acute disease, we don't need to know what happened before, we just need to know what's different since you've been ill, what symptoms are different since you've been ill, and that's what we base them on.
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And asking these clams gives us just a framework for getting the information we need so that we can then apply the correct remedy. So we are now going to go on to looking at the remedies themselves. Hurrah.
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I hear you say before we do that, that's quite a lot of information that we've just been through. Albeit just a taster of the information. That kind of philosophical part of homeopathy is actually there's a lot to it.
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It's quite deep and it's quite complex. And if you study homeopathy, that forms quite a lot, especially in your first year of your course. But is there anything anybody particularly wants to ask about that before we move on to the next section?
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Yeah, I just want to ask even this cancer regulated under acute or chronic illness, a cancer or definitely chronic? Yes, cancer. Some chronics have said, most chronics you're not going to die of, but there are some chronic things that you might die of.
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And cancer kind of is slightly different. But cancer is something which has been a part of a chronic process. Chronic toxicity, chronic ill health, possible chronic suppression. It's taken a long time for your body to get into that position, and it may take a long time for your body to begin to recover.
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As homeopaths, we never say we treat a disease. We always say we treat the patient, and we treat them to try and help them to deal with whatever their health problem is. But cancer is definitely not an acute problem.
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It's a big question. It's hard to say, is cancer curable? Because we don't actually treat the cancer. We treat the patient. And some patients are curable of whatever they've got wrong with them. And some patients, maybe they're very sick, maybe they're very weak, maybe they just don't have a lot of healing resources.
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Some people die from common cold, you know, so we don't like to say that homeopathy can cure this. What we can say is we treat people and we treat people with all manner of diseases, I mean, really all manner of diseases, and we get really good results.
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But the treatment of anything other than acute diseases. Has to be seen by a professional homeopath. These acute things we're going to be talking about today, as long as you adhere to we've got the information from St John's Ambulance for what you should do in an acute situation, and as long as you adhere to those guidelines, it's perfectly safe to treat acute remedies at home.
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With these remedies, you can't possibly do any harm, you can only do good. And the more you get really good results with the remedies, the more your confidence grows in the prescribing of them. But we're strictly talking about acute any other questions?
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Like, what about children? When they can explain actually the result of the sensation? They can't explain that's very good question, Valentina. Thank you. That's a very good question, because that does happen with children.
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But sometimes mums, maybe they have a small child, they still can tell some of the information why they think it came on the Etiology. He's cutting a teeth, cutting a tooth. They may still know the Etiology, they may say it says left side, because it's all red on the left.
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So we may still often more observation is used. But mum will also be able to often tell you whether they're cranky, whether they're tearful, whether they you know, it is more observational, but it doesn't mean we can't get a case.
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Yeah, it does require slightly different skills. We're not asking so many questions because the baby can't answer us, but we may be asking the mum of the baby, or the mum may be looking and trying to ascertain as much information as possible if it's a baby.
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So it's a good question. It's slightly different, isn't it? Because we can't say to them what makes it feel better, but we can observe sometimes what makes them feel better, what they refuse, what they're welcoming, whether they seem to want to be uncovered or covered up, whether they want to be held or left alone, whether they're hot and red.