What to say to your homeopath...

Coming to see a homeopathic practitioner for the first time can be confusing.  Confusing because the practitioner seems to be interested in more than just your main complaint.  Yes, your main complaint is fully investigated, but so is everything else.  Everything else.  All systems of the body need to be reviewed for clues and symptoms that point to your complete state of health.  All medical history and previous illnesses and accidents and emotional hardships and toxic exposures and griefs and life changes.  Everything.  Why does your homeopath need to know all this and more?  What does it matter?

What if your current complaint is just the tip of the iceberg and conventional medicine is just addressing the tip.  Your ship will sink.  What if your current complaint is actually related to everything else in your body and mind and emotions? That is not to say your mind or emotions caused your physical complaints, but rather, that they dance together.  Neurons that fire together wire together.  If something can get tangled up with something else, it will.  And if you are a woman, the entanglement will be more tightly wound than for a man.

So what should you tell your homeopath?  Everything that is important to you.  In your own words.  In your own way.  And tell your homeopath everything unique about you that you might not think is important.  Why?  Because in homeopathy there is no separation between your body, your mind, your emotions, your behaviors, your loves and your hates, your fears, your hobbies, your food desires, your obsessions, your sensations.  Everything is a statement about how you are functioning, how vital you are.  How happy and healthy you are.  That is why your homeopath will ask you some very strange questions that no doctor has ever asked before.

One of the most enduring challenges I meet with, in new clients or even  with existing clients, is when they self edit what they think I should know.  Do not take three years to tell me that you suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder just because you think it has nothing to do with your asthma.  It has as much to do with your asthma as craving green apples or oranges.   We call these kinds of idiosyncratic symptoms: strange, rare, and peculiar symptoms.  They make your situation with asthma  or any other complaint, unique.  They allow the homeopath to differentiate between hundreds of homeopathic remedies that might be used in your main complaint.  Yes,  hundreds of possibilities and your uniqueness is the key.

Here are some examples of unique qualities and symptoms that  resulted in fabulous remedy choices for the folks who were suffering:
eating green bananas
loving salad in a teen-aged boy
collecting teapots
loathing of snakes
loathing of spiders
fear of dogs for no reason
facial grimace of disgust
always laughing
sensation that the eyes were pulled together
sensation that the nipple and the bowel were connected by a string
sticks the feet out of the covers even in winter
white spots in the fingernail beds
scatological language
aversion to the smell of coffee
rapidly brought to rage or tears
dreams of flying
auditory hallucination of ‘being called by name’
burning pains resolved by heat
constipation with cheerfulness
getting the munchies in the evening along with many great ideas
OCD entangled with IBS
herpes of the eye entangled with eczema
sensation that if she passed gas, stool may pass instead
craving stinky cheese
worse from the wind
sudden onset, slow resolution
desires very spicy foods
cannot stand close collars

First published 21 October 2008