Exploring homeopathy

A couple of years into Chris’s crisis, that is to say about nine years ago,  I consulted a homeopath, not really knowing anything at all about what homeopaths do, but desperately wanting an alternative to the prescription drug regime that we were told was absolutely necessary to manage Chris’s ‘illness.” Unfortunately, it was too soon in my learning process to introduce an approach that was radically outside the medical understanding of psychosis. I opted for a different energy medicine approach as an add-on to a conventional medical approach.

Recently, I came across Amy Lansky’s book, Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy, and the light went on in me. Fast forward to October and Chris and I now become clients of a classically trained homeopath. I learned from Impossible Cure the importance of finding a homeopath who would provide remedies in single doses, not blends, hence the need to find a classically trained one. The homeopath treats the person, not the symptom and is therefore part psychiatrist, part shaman, part investigative detective in the quest to know the personality.

I was amazed at what the homeopath saw in Chris after his initial one and a half hour appointment. She sent him home with a prescription for ‘phosophorus.’ She gave him phosphorus because he IS phosphorus, and a homeopath treats ‘like’ with ‘like.” I rummaged around the Internet and found an arcane homeopathic reference to ‘the phosphorus personality.’ The phosphorus personality is ethereal, floating, highly sensitive to their environment, hates to be alone, anxious, a pleaser (therefore liked by many people), a conflict avoider and the list continues. Strikingly red lips at birth is another give-away, but how could this small detail about Chris as a newborn coincide with his personality traits, one wonders?

Last Sunday I went to a presentation given by Natalie Tobert, a medical anthropologist and author of the book, Spiritual Psychiatries: Mental Health Practices in India and UK. I learned something quite interesting about Indian psychiatrists, not all of them, mind you. Some of them practice mainly in the Western tradition. The Indian psychiatrists who she interviewed for her book use conventional drug therapy for their patients, but homeopathic treatment is also a mainstay of their practice. These psychiatrists also rely on astrologers, numerologists, and spiritualists.

I discovered from reading this book that the herb rauwolfia serpentina is suggested for the treatment of schizophrenia. According to Wiki, this herb apparently enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the West from 1954 to 1957 for the treatment of schizophrenia, and Mahatma Gandhi supposedly used it as a tranquilizer. Who knew?

 

 

Prince Charles and the Royal Family

Ten days later after our first visit with the shaman, Chris returned for a checkup. Although this second visit wasn’t strictly necessary, I was beginning to appreciate the journey as a way of preparing for the outcome. As expected, Chris’s assemblage point was whole and had remained where the shaman had repositioned it. Nonetheless, Chris got a top-up of diamond and carnelian on his chest only.

I decided that I would like to have my assemblage point put back into shape the old-fashioned way, using the shaman’s blow and crystal wands. Given my age and the strain I had been under, my assemblage point had predictably traveled up the panic and anxiety line to the right side of my chest. The shaman’s assistant asked me to stand with my back to him, tighten my sphincter, and hold my breath. Then he quickly thumped my right shoulder blade. I was caught off guard. Air was forced reflexively out of my lungs and I emitted a little squeak. So that was the famous shaman’s blow! I then hopped onto the table where I was handed a giant quartz crystal wand that I struggled to keep upright over my assemblage point while the transducer pumped emerald crystal vibrations through my wine soaked liver. I stayed in that ludicrous position for twenty minutes.

A couple of days before, Prince Charles had delivered a keynote address at the World Health Organization about his belief that national health systems should take more account of alternative treatments such as homeopathy and acupuncture. I remarked on this to the shaman, who confided that established Harley Street doctors in London were quite concerned these days because members of the Royal Family were now largely seeing homeopathic doctors and other alternative medical practitioners.

I mentally began adding up the alternative treatments Chris had undergone: colonics; acupuncture; vitamins and supplements; energy medicine, including the magnetic mattress and a magnetic bracelet; Emotional Freedom Technique; and assemblage point shift. On a scale of 1 to 10, if Chris was a 10 when he was first hospitalized, then I would have to say he was now about a 5, a 4 at the most. He just was not visibly normal, meaning that he seemed somewhat nervous, was not comfortable around people in large or small groups and was not able to motivate himself. I attributed a lot of this to the effects of the medications, which I believed kept him in an anxious state, but I didn’t attribute all of it to the medications.

I felt that we were on the right track with all the interventions we had done up until that point, but that there was still a missing X factor that had not been addressed. The good that the vitamins had accomplished this far were undermined by the still heavy doses of meds. I believed that the benefits of the assemblage point shift would reveal themselves over the next few months and hopefully lead to a complete cure. We weren’t there yet. I still had not tried to approach Level 4 of the healing pyramid in a formal way.

As the shaman predicted, Chris gradually began to express his thoughts and convictions more. It was subtle, but it became increasingly apparent in the next few months. He more frequently expressed his preferences and sometimes lingered to talk a bit more. What surprised me is that I also felt that I was becoming more real. I became even more direct and focused.