The Holistic Aspects of Homeopathy

Holistic treatment is something of a phenomenon at the moment, with more people seeking it out. However, there is very little depth of understanding of what holism is and that is something I am seeking to address in this piece of writing. I am going to explore the holistic body , and how a dysfunction in one part can affect another part. I want to look at the impact of external factors like stress and nurture, as well as the more internal factors like heredity. Examining the development of pathology shows how non-holistic treatment affects the holistic body, and this can be compared to the effects of holistic homeopathic treatment. I have also included a section on what holistic homeopathy is, and how patients can benefit.

The Holistic Body

Holistic treatment means treating the whole person, and as we know, the whole is always more than the sum of the parts.

You - all of you, your holistic self - are an incredibly complex organism that has evolved over millions of years, strongly affected by your genetic inheritance, but also heavily influenced by your environment from the moment you were conceived. By environment, I mean all that surrounds you, all the things that have affected you in your life - your family culture, your physical surroundings, your relationships and so on.

I use the term organism to describe the holistic body because I feel it encompasses all of these factors. By referring to yourself as an organism, you gain a sense of distance, an ability to see yourself as if from the outside not the inside. An organism is defined as follows:-

1. A form of life composed of mutually interdependent parts that maintain various vital processes.
2. A form of life considered as an entity; an animal, plant, fungus, protistan, or moneran.
3. Any organized body or system conceived of as analogous to a living being:

(“Dictionary.com - The world’s favorite online dictionary!,” n.d.)

Thus an organism is a living entity whose systems are interdependent and organised.

Think about that for a moment. If all your parts, your systems and your processes are mutually interdependent, then a problem in one part is likely to affect, or be affected by, another part. Every part of you depends on all the other parts: for your ankle to move, your brain and circulation and skeleton and muscles and nerves all need to be working and in harmony with each other. If any part fails, then movement isn't possible.

As a holistic therapist, I often meet clients who have a cascade of symptoms that they bring to my table, and my job is to unpick the strands and work out where the cascade starts, how all the different systems affect each other and are related to each other.

I want to look at a simple example here to demonstrate what I mean, by looking at a theoretical patient. This client might come because of their recurrent headaches, coupled with high levels of anxiety, a lack of confidence and a very stressful job. How are all these different systems related? Closer questioning might reveal that this client is the youngest child, and has always felt pretty useless. The anxiety is all about failure, about getting it wrong, about not being up to scratch. The combination of the stressful job and the fear of failure (what I would call 'the driver' - because it's this fear that drives our patient) means that he or she works long hours without a break, constantly giving 200% because the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate. Thus we get this equation:-

The equation of recurrent headaches (Figure 1)

See what I mean? The headache is ostensibly the problem, but why you have the headache might be part of a much bigger picture. You can take an aspirin and a drink of water for the headache, but that won't stop the next headache because the reason for the pathology continues to exist. The recurrent headaches are why you need treatment - but why that headache happens is part of a much bigger dysfunction within the organism. If you take aspirins and drink water you'll get less headaches - but the background dysfunction won't have gone away and will manifest itself in some other uncomfortable symptomatology in the future. What needs treating is the reason why the headache exists. If the confidence is better and the anxiety and fear is reduced, then the driver loses its power - it's as if we have turned off the engine. The patient is no longer in a high gear, trying desperately hard to do well and keep up, giving themselves a headache in the process - instead, they are calmer, have more time to decide on priorities, can focus on just one thing at a time. As one patient said to me recently 'It's as if, instead of work being in my face and all I can think of, it's just become something I do some of the time, and the rest of the time is mine to do what I want with. I feel so much more relaxed and happy.'

The pathology (the disease, the problematic symptom) is the 'what' that the patient wants treating. But in order to treat holistically, we have to find the 'why' - why those symptoms, and why then.

Now I want to look at another patient. This woman came because the big problem for her was mucus. It was pouring from her nose, blocking her ears and making her deaf and she was constantly coughing up thick yellow mucus. Her energy was very flat, particularly in the afternoons, and she was waking all night from hot sweats, even though her periods had stopped as a result of the menopause more than 10 years ago. Her mucus symptoms had all started 5 years ago, when her husband had died suddenly, at the same time as her daughter had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Instead of grieving she had done what she saw as her duty and looked after her daughter's three children for a year, whilst her daughter had her treatment. My patient had been brought up to be good and dutiful (one driver), she had suppressed grief (next driver) and she still had the night sweats from the menopause (the menopause can be a good engine, driving pathology all on its own!) . It transpired that she had bad hot sweats with the menopause and took HRT until 6 years ago, and the sweats returned when she stopped taking it. Thus we have:

How to get sweaty and full of mucus (Figure 2)

So I chose two remedies for my patient, one for the menopause, and a second for the dutiful and suppressed person who sat in front of me. 6 weeks later she was back - with no more thick yellow catarrh, no problem with her hearing, and no cough, and her energy was better and more consistent. She was also only waking once with the sweats every 3-4 days. There is still a way to go in terms of her cure, but identifying her drivers did enable me to choose the right remedies.

This means that taking an aspirin for a headache, an anti-depressant for your mood and some steroid cream for your eczema is not holistic treatment. You are so much more than your headache and your depression and your eczema, and only treating the parts that 'hurt' won't heal the engine that drives your pathology. Symptoms - mental, physical or emotional - are a warning sign of deeper issues, and you ignore or remove them at your peril.

So when treating holistically, the therapist doesn't just treat the 'what?' of the pathology, she or he will also treat the 'why?', the underlying factors that drive the pathology onward.

The holistic body and the development of pathology (Figure 3)

This diagram attempts to demonstrate the relationship between all of the parts of you that constitute your holistic organism. You - the person, the organism - are represented by all of the purple shapes. You grow from your genetic soil, with all the weaknesses and strengths of your ancestors latent within you. These traits are not necessarily uppermost in your current health state, but can mean that you are more inclined towards some diseases than others. For example, for most of my clients that have hay fever and asthma, it is possible to see in their family medical history that their blood relatives also had or have a tendency to suffer from allergic responses to all sorts of things, as well as a high incidence of diseases like pleurisy, bronchitis and tuberculosis.

Your self is seen in this model as having at least four different aspects - the physical level, the emotional level, the mental level and the spiritual level. It may help to think of these aspects as encapsulating and indicating possibilities or tendencies, or directions in which yur pathology might go. All of these aspects are affected by external pressures.

External pressures

External pressures are partly composed of the 'nurture' part of the nature/nurture debate. Nurture is about how you were brought up, your family culture, the expectations and limitations that were placed on you, the environment that surrounded you from conception onwards. To those factors I would add your financial situation, your chosen career, your relationships and your social situation.

Often external pressures have a negative effect on health. Many people are in jobs where the rewards are performance-related, and this external pressure can lead to an unhealthy lifestyle of too much coffee and alcohol, and then too much anxiety and stress.

Peer pressure, affecting how we look, where we live and what we do for a living is a form of external pressure that affects all of us. Pollution and pesticides might be seen as external pressures, and so might poverty and neglect.

'Stress' is a catch-all term for external pressure, but in fact what we each perceive as stressful and how it affects us is completely individual. We all think we understand each other when we say we are stressed, but in fact stress is a very individual reaction to particular situations. It's shorthand, a way of getting our point across, and we feel understood when we say 'I'm stressed' and someone else says either 'Me too' or 'You poor thing'. But in fact some people are anxious when stressed, and some are irritable. Some feel nauseous, some comfort eat. Some get chest pain, and others can't sleep. And of course some people thrive on stress, are even addicted to it.

So what we identify as stressful is particular to us, and how we respond to it is individual too.

The development of pathology

This model is useful because it can incorporate the idea that problems might start on one level within the organism, but then spread to another area. I call this development of pathology a fault line, because it is like a fault line on the earth - a configuration along which an earthquake is likely to occur, a weakness in the structure of the organism.

Fault line A - B (See Figure 3)

This line represents a problem that starts on the emotional level and moves to the physical level. I'm going to use a case from my practice, but first I want to say something about confidentiality.

What is a case? A case is like a picture - it's the client's story, usually in great depth. Of course you know that anything a client says to me is confidential, and I can't talk to other people about the identifiable features of the case. So when I discuss cases in articles like this, I change all the traceable aspects of the person involved; I might change the gender, the job, and the age, for example. But that is all I change. I don't change the symptoms, or the remedy, or the remedy reaction - so all the important stuff stays the same, and only the traceable data is changed, for obvious reasons.

This is a case that demonstrates the relationship and development of emotional dysfunction that leads to physical pathology. My client had an unusually problematic childhood in that her father dominated the entire family by manipulating and exploiting his children and his wife. He would set them up against each other, moving the parameters all the time so that no member of the family could be sure of who was doing what. Eventually when all three children were in their twenties they realised what was going on and escaped with their mother. It was a traumatic and ugly transition, and my client, the youngest, was the scapegoat and became alienated from all of them during the process. She came to me a few years later with crippling anxiety that was interfering with her sleep. This had been going on for many years, but now on top of the anxiety she had vertigo. This was so bad that she could no longer work, and it confined her to bed. She needed help to get to the toilet, and at the same time she was so weak that she had no energy at all. It felt to me that the anxiety had been fighting a war of attrition within her, and her physical body had collapsed under the weight. It was holding up a flag that said 'Please help me!', because the whole organism was crippled by the emotional dysfunction. The remedy that I gave her that helped was one that didn't only address the vertigo, but it also addressed her feelings of loss, of unjust treatment and of confusion from the terrible events of the preceding years. She didn't only recover from the vertigo, but worried less, felt stronger, less broken, more whole. More remedies were needed, and also some counselling, but she has continued to get better.

Fault line C- D- E

This is a different pathway. Instead of starting with a dysfunction up high in our pyramid that gravitates downwards to the physical level, here we have a problem that starts on the genetic level, causes trouble on the physical level, and ends up with emotional level dysfunction.

This reminds me of another client. This was a man in his forties who had very bad acne, on his face and on his back that he had had since he was 13 years old. It had made him very self conscious, anxious about meeting new people, and had limited his social interactions. As a result of this, he had thrown himself into work, over-achieving dramatically in that area whilst his personal relationships were limited to members of his family. He felt dissatisfied and frustrated with his life but couldn't see any way out of his situation, and his blood pressure was too high and cause for concern.

Eventually he disclosed that his mother's brother had also had acne as an adult. A remedy to treat that genetic tendency reduced the severity of his skin condition, and another remedy that lifted his immune system and increased his energy reduced it still further. As the skin improved, he became more confident and outgoing, and was able to initiate social interactions that enhanced his life and enabled him to develop a healthier relationship with his work. Even his blood pressure reduced to acceptable levels.

These examples are just to get you thinking about the model of the holistic body in Figure 2. It is grossly simplistic, and you might choose to see your own organism in quite a different way - but I can assure you homeopaths are always happy to listen to the way you see yourself and what is happening to you. An example might be that you feel that your previous lives have led to where you are now, that it's what you did in the past - your karma - that makes you who you are. For a homeopath, useful information comes in many forms and your awareness of these past selves and your relationship with them can be just as illuminating as your family medical history.

Tracing the development of pathology

Let's look at what happens when we use drugs that just treat the 'what?'. And don't get me wrong, sometimes the what, i.e. the disease, is life threatening and needs dealing with before we can look at the why.

Tonsillitis can be seen as an example of treating the 'what?'. A kid gets tonsillitis one winter in her fifth year. She gets antibiotics. It comes back the next autumn. Antibiotics. Then in January. Antibiotics. Then in March. Antibiotics. Then in June - and I think you can guess how that's treated! The tonsillitis gets more and more frequent, and she inevitably ends up with an operation to remove the tonsils. The reason why this child keeps getting tonsillitis has never been dealt with, and the removal of the tonsils does not address the 'why?'. Eventually this background dysfunction will cause more problems later in life.

There are many possible reasons for recurrent tonsillitis- it might be an inherited state. Her immune system may be compromised for some reason. It might be that she is very stressed by something at school. Maybe she has a new baby sibling and feels insecure. Perhaps she is being bullied by an older sibling, or a parent. It's possible she is emotionally younger than her age and thus her needs are not being met. These are just some of the possible 'why?' answers, and if you don't want to see a disease keep returning then the 'why?' needs to be addressed.

Eczema is a huge part of my caseload when it comes to children, because steroid cream is the go-to cream for recurrent eczema. Child has flare-up, topical steroids are used, the skin gets better, the steroids are stopped, and the eczema returns. The steroid is just treating the eczema, and thus the problem keeps returning. Call the homeopath! Because there is a 'why?' lurking there somewhere, and that child won't get better until the reason has been eliminated. I have treated eczema holistically for years, and believe me when I say that the reason for it can be surprising. It might be an allergy for example, and in that case I might need to treat the genetic inheritance to remove the susceptibility to the allergen. Eczema can be seen as an irritation of the skin, and sometimes the child's emotional irritation needs to be resolved before the skin will calm down. Remedies might be needed for fright, loss, anxiety or anticipation because any of these stresses might be the causation of the eczema.

We have as an another example a woman with IBS. She's had the Buscopan and the Loperamide, but the side-effects are challenging, and they only work if she takes them all the time. She also takes beta blockers for her racing heart (tachycardia), sleeping tablets for her insomnia, and Citalopram for her anxiety. Is this holistic treatment? No, because although all these medications address different parts of her - her physical problems and her emotional ones - none of them treat this woman who is anxious and sleepless and has tachycardia and now has developed IBS. We are still left with a 'why?' - if the IBS and the racing heart and the insomnia are all related to the anxiety, as seems likely, what caused her to get anxious and hyped up in the first place? This is a real case, and she and I had to work together for a while to work out where her dis-ease started, how it developed, what factors influenced the evolution of her symptoms, before I understood who she was. At this point the right remedies helped to resolve her symptoms and enabled her reduce her drugs. As an added extra the therapeutic relationship helped my client to understand herself better so that she could look after herself more effectively in the future.

The Holistic Body (Figure 3)

This figure represents just some of the areas that are explored during the homeopathic consultation.

Taking the holistic case

So let's look at this woman with IBS - let's call her Jane. She comes into my office and tells me her life story in terms of illnesses, and then in terms of difficult times in her life. Trauma if you like. My job is to make sense of the information, looking at the whats and the whys and the hows and the whens - all of it. An initial consultation takes at least an hour, I write copious notes, and even then I won't necessarily have all the information that I need.

A holistic approach means that I need to take a very big view of the patient. So I need to know about birth and childhood and adulthood, parenting and relationships and habits, appetite and thirst, temperature and sleep. I need to know about moods and worries and fears, about all the things that make my client worse, and all the things that make them better. I like a thorough medical history from infancy, and it's also very helpful to have an idea of what illnesses and chronic conditions my client's blood relatives have suffered, as far back into history as we can go and even concerning nephews and nieces and grandchildren. This isn't always possible for some people for a variety of reasons, but signposts pointing towards the past are present in every case.

This big view is as if I am trying to be an eagle, soaring into the sky above the patient and looking at all this information like a huge map. Homeopaths call this map a 'picture' - a portrait of that client at that moment. And the bigger the picture, the easier it is to identify the themes and the patterns and the big issues, as well as establishing a timeline and seeing the development of the pathology as the client goes through her life (See Figure 2).

So I'm going to summarise Jane's case, because otherwise you might suffocate under the flood of information!

As you know, she is very anxious. She worries constantly that she has got something wrong, said or done the wrong thing. Her sleeplessness is because she is lying there, running through the things she has said and done all day, worrying how she might have upset people or what they think of her. She also worries about tomorrow, what she has to do and whether she will get it right. She gets very cross with herself and hates any sort of reprimand or reproach. She has been like that since she was a little girl, as far back as she can remember. Her mum was always ill and died when Jane was 11, of bowel cancer, and father was rather remote and demanding. Jane hadn't been told mummy was dying, so her death was a complete bombshell. The acceleration in her heart rate happened when her granny died - they were very close and it was another shock. Ever since then when she is stressed her heart has periods of acceleration, she panics and goes to hospital, hence the beta blockers. The IBS started 5 years ago with her first pregnancy, she got very anxious during this time, worrying about being a good mother, being ultra conscientious about what she ate and drank, and experiencing mood swings. All these symptoms have got worse over the last 5 years, and the IBS has triggered a lot of anxiety about getting bowel cancer like her mother and leaving her own child motherless.

The 'what?' is IBS - but the 'why?' is obviously underpinning the disease. The 'why?' causes her lots of stress and anxiety, and the stress and anxiety drive the IBS and the tachycardia. The 'why?' is about grief and shock and loss, and the impact of these factors on a young child with little emotional support. So, holistically, we can see cause and effect - the grief and shock causing anxiety and insomnia, and all of this emotional stress reflecting into the physical body and causing physical problems like IBS and tachycardia.

So how would the right remedy help Jane? Well, I can tell you how she reacted to a single dose of Ignatia 200. She took it last thing at night, and woke the next morning in tears - normally she rarely cries. Over the next few days, she found herself thinking of her mother in a new way, remembering the happy times they had together when she was a small child. She found it easier to go to bed and let the day go, without thinking too much of tomorrow. The cramping pain and diarrhoea diminished, and she worried less about her health.

It's not a miracle cure. Jane will always be Jane - fastidious, careful, determined to get it right. But that first remedy showed both of us that my analysis was right and that over time there was hope for her condition. She's had many repeats of that Ignatia since, as well as some other remedies, and now she takes no other medication at all apart from occasional homeopathy, because she no longer needs it.

Modern medicine and homeopathy

I don't want you to think I am against modern medicine, because I am not. Doctors do an incredible job saving lives, diagnosing disease, treating life-threatening illness and so on. As a homeopath, I am not able to give an orthodox diagnosis of your disease, but that is something your doctor can do. You might feel happy to have a diagnosis, to have an idea of what the problem is, but in terms of your homeopathic treatment a conventional diagnosis is of limited use. It might give me some useful analysis of the disease process, but is not necessarily of primary importance when working out the right therapeutic approach. This really comes back to my idea of the fault line as previously discussed, where treating the background - the origin of the disease - is part of the holistic focus. Good holistic treatment works deeply within the organism, stimulating the re-alignment of the fundamental building blocks that form us all.

Most of my clients use orthodox doctors for diagnosis and have tests on a regular basis to see what is happening. This can be very useful for me as not only do I have the client's feedback on remedy reaction, but I also have additional insight from the test results. I remember a client of mine with a fibroid the size of a 16 week foetus, according to a recent scan. I prescribed some Sabina for her, particularly for her heavy and prolonged periods which were leaving her weak and anaemic. Her symptoms improved dramatically and I was very pleased with her remedy reaction, but when this was confirmed by a scan three months later which showed that she had no fibroids at all we were both very happy!

In summary, it is best for most of us to only take drugs when absolutely necessary for as short a time as possible, and we all need to take more responsibility for establishing and maintaining our own equilibrium.

What happens with holistic homeopathic treatment

The observations that follow are the result of years of talking to patients about their reactions to remedies.

Homeopathic remedies are gentle and non-toxic, so can be used for children, the aged, the terminally ill, animals and anyone who needs them. However, there are three circumstances where an individual remedy can make you worse:-

• If you take too much of it.
• If the dose is too strong.
• If you are ultra-sensitive.

Taking too much of a remedy is what a homeopath would call a proving . It doesn't happen in my clients because I give clear instructions and encourage feedback at every opportunity, so I can monitor your remedy reaction and react appropriately. My clients know that if they are not getting a good response to the remedy they can contact me and I will respond quickly, and usually without charging.

Giving a dose that is too strong causes a reaction that we call 'worse before better'. This means that you respond to the dose by an increase of the symptoms that you wanted treating, which then die away and may even disappear altogether. So you feel worse for a few days and then better for ages - and some of my clients actually want that! They would rather suffer short term pain for long term gain. But most of my clients want something more gentle, so I have learned over the years to be very careful to choose the appropriate potency for that client and not to make them feel worse initially. It's all part of treating the individual as far as I am concerned.

Some people are very sensitive and can react strongly to remedies. For that reason, the first remedy I give to any client is a low potency one, just to test the waters. Usually the client knows that they are sensitive because they have had bad reactions to all sorts of things in the past.

Added Insight

In order to prescribe, I have to have some sort of analysis of what is going on for my client, an analysis that encompasses the what and the why and past and the present. I will check that analysis with my client before choosing a remedy, just to make sure that my ideas are in the right ball park. If the client doesn't get better on that initial remedy, then my analysis isn't quite right, and needs more work. If however the remedy does work, then that tells us that the analysis is right and gives my client additional information on who she is, what she reacts to and how she tends to react.

This can be very illuminating, because knowing what rattles your cage can be really helpful in life. That awareness can enable you to recognise and manage your responses, reducing stress and bringing more calm into your life.

A better perspective

An increase in insight and awareness brought about by feedback from someone observing you closely gives you a sense of distance from yourself, enabling you to stand back and see what is going on in your life, what you need to change and how that needs to happen. It empowers you to make good decisions, to plan ahead and create a life for yourself that suits your skills and talents.

Reducing and eliminating medication

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I'm not against modern medicine, it's useful stuff. My caveat would be 'Just don't overdo it.' A few years ago I treated a boy who was about two years old. He had very bad asthma, and had been hospitalised many times by the time he came for homeopathic treatment. Each time he was hospitalised he was given oral steroids, and each time he left he was given larger and larger doses of steroids to take preventatively. He was going to hospital more and more frequently, and taking larger and larger doses of steroids, and his parents brought him to me because they were getting desperate. They were very concerned that a point would come where the emergency steroids that he was given in hospital would no longer work as effectively, because of the high daily doses he was taking, and also worried about the long term side effects.

When I took his case, it was possible to see why he was so reactive, and why his lungs were the focus of his pathology, because there was lung and allergy pathology in both of his parents family medical history. It was imperative that there should be no 'worse before better' reactions in such a tiny poorly chap, so the treatment had to be gentle and repeated frequently, and thus took a bit of time. However, last time I saw him he was no longer needing to take the daily preventative steroids, and they were managing very well with the occasional use of a salbutamol inhaler if he was a bit wheezy. His parents were hugely relieved, because the side effects of daily steroid use were no longer an issue, and because if he did need emergency treatment then he wouldn't need the huge doses of steroids that he had taken before.

Sometimes then, good treatment can result in the elimination of drugs, and sometimes it results in a reduction of medication. That depends on the pathology, and it also depends on the patient.

How can we use homeopathy holistically?

Treating the disease.

Treating the what, the pathology, is a relatively simple process. You have a headache, you take a painkiller. You have eczema, you rub on a hydrocortisone cream. You have pneumonia, you take antibiotics. As long as you have a diagnosis for your condition, then generally the orthodox medical paradigm has something to offer you. If I have the same condition as you, I will be offered a broadly similar range of treatments for it, because what is being treated is the disease, not the person with the disease. This works particularly well when the disease is sudden, and life limiting. If you have a heart attack, go to A & E, because those trained doctors and nurses know how to repair the damage and get you back on your feet again.

However, this approach does not stop the recurrence of the disease. An aspirin taken today for your headache will not stop it returning in the future. Hydrocortisone cream rubbed onto a patch of eczema is likely to work, but the eczema is likely to return with a vengeance when you stop applying the cream. These drugs also have side-effects, and used repeatedly can have a toxic effect that is as hard to live with as the original complaint.

Treating the individual

Treating the person is a whole other story. It is true that sometimes one has to just treat the complaint, the what, because the situation is too difficult for the client to live with at that moment. If your child falls and bangs their head, then it makes sense to give homeopathic Arnica - it's a great remedy for shock. That's an example where every child that bangs their head would get Arnica as a first remedy. But that is a rare situation for most homeopaths, because in general practice, on a day-by-day basis, we are treating the person with the pathology, not the pathology who just happens to have a person attached to it.

This means of course that there is no easy and immediate response to a diagnosis for a homeopath. Every case of PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) that walks into my consulting room is different. Firstly, the physical symptoms will be different. There will always be a certain amount of menstrual difficulties, acne, facial hair and pelvic pain because these are the common symptoms of PCOS that facilitate the diagnosis. However, how these manifest varies from individual to individual. Let's look at the periods. These might be:

• Irregular - Too close together, too far apart, or simply all over the place, lasting too long, or only there for a few days.
• Heavy - From the start, on the second day or subsequent days, flooding, clotted, dark, watery or bright red.
• Painful - Cramping, stabbing, sore, in the lower pelvis, in the lumbar region, extending down the thighs, better for exercise, worse for exercise, worse the day before, worse at the onset, worse at night, and so on.

The acne might be:

• On the face, shoulders, chest and/or back.
• Painful or painless.
• With or without heads - black or white or yellow.
• Red, or lumpy or nodular or with cysts.
• Worse before the period, during the period or afterwards.

Bear in mind that we are only looking at the individual physical symptoms of PCOS here. We haven't even started to ask the client for their medical history, when the PCOS first began, the family medical history, about their physical, emotional and mental symptoms, or their external stressors. This means that every PCOS client that I see gets an individualised prescription, one that is designed to treat the whole person and all their PCOS symptoms.

Thus even where patients have a disease diagnosis in common, the remedy or series of remedies they need will be different. This is where homeopathy differs so markedly from conventional medicine, and why the clinical drug trial model just doesn't work for us. We treat the person not the disease, and the drug trial is focussed solely on the disease.

I hope that this piece has helped you to understand more about the holistic body, and about the effects of holistic homeopathic treatment.