Homeopathic

Overview of Homeopathic Medicine at Trillium Creek Dermatology

At Trillium Creek Dermatology, we are pleased to offer you a wide range of choices to recover from your skin complaints. Homeopathy is a 200-year-old system of medicine with a history of safety and effectiveness. The principles of homeopathic practice and homeopathic remedies have been the same over this time. Homeopathic medicine can be utilized as either a complementary or an alternative approach to traditional approaches.

• The decision to use homeopathy is the patient’s choice
• An informed choice rests on knowing the possibilities
• Every treatment is specific for each patient
• For further help, consult with your practitioner

Advantages of Homeopathic Remedies

• Homeopathic remedies are gentle and safe, even though they can be quite powerful in removing symptoms. Because of their long track record of safety, the FDA allows the majority of homeopathic remedies to be sold over the counter without a prescription.
• Homeopathic remedies are even safe to use in small infants and pregnant women.
• Compatible with other traditional therapies and allows the use of both at the same time.
• Inexpensive medications.
• Homeopathic treatments may achieve a permanent cure for acute and chronic skin condition. This cure would include where the symptoms no longer are present and treatment is no longer required.

Treating Acute Skin Problems

We expect that our initial success rate in treating acute conditions will be about 75% in finding the correct remedy for your complaint. As further experience with the homeopathic approach is gained, our success rate should improve but some cases will remain where the correct matching remedy cannot be found.

Treating Chronic Skin Diseases

In treating chronic skin diseases, the advantages of treating acute skin diseases apply with a few extra considerations.

Recovery from a chronic skin disease will be gradual and gentle under the homeopathic system. The remedies offer the potential for a curative healing process versus a suppressive process. The length of time to cure the patient’s disease will be proportional to the length of time the disease has existed. In stubborn or long standing cases the healing process can take many months.

Our expectation is that 50% of chronic skin diseases should be permanently curable where ongoing treatment is not needed after all the presenting complaints have been removed. We expect that an additional 25% of patients with chronic skin diseases will have their symptoms controlled with the homeopathic remedy and will require ongoing treatment to maintain this relief. When the correct homeopathic remedy is found for a patient’s symptoms and the symptoms subside, the need for previous suppressive treatments should also be eliminated. The goal, when possible, is to eliminate any treatment being necessary and remove the patient’s exposure to the possibility of side effects from drugs. With further experience, our percentages of successful responses should improve.

Holistic Health Benefits

As an additional advantage, holistic health benefits are commonly seen during homeopathic treatment. In addition to achieving relief of the skin symptoms, other concurrent symptoms in other parts of the body or its functions will also resolve. For example, common complaints that are often seen to improve under homeopathic treatment of skin complaints are asthma, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis or depression.

The major disadvantage of taking a homeopathic approach to treatment occurs when the correct remedy for your individual complaint cannot be found. In this case, there will be no effect from the remedy (either healing or any side effects).

Homeopathic Principles

Overview of Homeopathic Principles

Homeopathic medicine encompasses a very different view of the process of healing and the purpose that disease and symptoms actually serve for you. The principles of homeopathic medicine can be added to the knowledge you already have and remains useful in its own way. Contrasting approaches to healing each have their place. You can be more successful in healing by adding to what you know and being open to a different experience of reality.

What Are Homeopathic Principles?

Homeopathic medicine and homeopathic philosophy are not easily grasped. They are as complex as the human being is. In the homeopathic system, each patient is treated as an individual who has a unique nature and unique life experience.

Being open-minded is helpful in attempting to grasp the unique cause of a disease which is acting in each patient. In the homeopathic approach the emphasis is on the cause of disease as much as the symptoms of the disease. Knowing the cause of your disease is worthwhile because when you treat the cause of a disease instead of just the effects of the disease, the disease can be cured. The essence of being open-minded is being willing to admit that you may only be partially correct in your beliefs and perceptions. Knowing this can lead you to search for and find higher forms of truths than you previously knew. This search can become necessary when you face the reality that disease or suffering exists and a curative treatment is not being offered.

By definition, in a chronic disease, either the symptoms continue to exist despite treatment or an ongoing treatment regimen is necessary to minimize the intensity of symptoms. Both of these situations indicate that that the underlying disease process is not being cured and that the fundamental cause of the disease process is not known or is not being addressed through treatment. In this situation, a new perspective is needed.

The principles which underlie homeopathic medicine will likely present you with a very different reality than you now perceive. You may have to listen to these principles more than once for them to become useful to you.

The goal of this section is to open you up to an additional way of thinking and believing which can bring you a new experience of perception and of healing. This goal certainly represents a large undertaking but the magnitude of the suffering and disease that we now experience or might yet experience in the future is the motivation for our study of why diseases exist and alternative ways to heal them.

The most important concept for you to grasp is the reality that what you believe is what determines what you will perceive. Several examples are provided to illustrate the validity of this principle using the sense perceptions of sight, hearing, taste and what we generally might term “knowing”.

How Beliefs Determine Perception

Example 1

The first example which demonstrates that your beliefs determine your perception relates to how you actually perceive what you see. We all see the same things, but we will see them differently based on those beliefs we hold to be true.

To illustrate this principle, we will use a mild example of the typical presentation of a patient with anorexia. Whereas, this patient will be seen by most of us as being quite thin, almost underweight, this is not her perception. When this young woman sees herself in a mirror, she perceives herself as fat. No matter what another person might say or even what many people say, she will continue to see herself as fat, until her belief that she is fat is changed.

What she believes to be true creates her perception of reality. What everyone else sees as their true perception of reality is not as powerful for her as what she believes to be true. This example illustrates how powerful your belief system is in determining what you see.

Example 2

For our second example of believing creates perceiving, the television show American Idol offers an opportunity to view the reality of how what one hears is determined more strongly by what is believed than the reality that is collectively accepted by the majority of people.

In the initial tryouts for the singing competition, many people come to compete and to be discovered as the next American Idol. When the judges and the public listen to them perform, in many cases the contestant obviously does not have the talent to become a successful singer. Despite the collective view of the professional judges and the watching public, the contestant is truly shocked when they hear that they have been rejected. The performance the contestant heard was not perceived the same as what the rest of us perceived. What they heard was the next American Idol. When the contestant heard themselves sing, they heard a great performance just waiting to be discovered. That is because they believed this to be the case, and this belief created a personal reality for them. So, our belief system can easily create a strong enough filter to our perception that it determines either what we see or hear as our view of reality.

Example 3

A third example of believing is perceiving is to be found in the book Mindless Eating. The author relates an experiment done for the military to presumably taste test strawberry yogurt. To insure the test would only evaluate the taste of the strawberry yogurt, 19 soldiers were blindfolded before given the yogurt to evaluate. 14 of the 19 soldiers rated this variety of strawberry yogurt as good and recommended that it be included in military rations. One soldier rated it as an exceptionally good variety of strawberry yogurt, which happened to be one of her favorite snacks.

Interestingly, in the experiment all of the soldiers were actually given chocolate yogurt. In this experiment, their expectation or belief that they were taste testing strawberry yogurt created a stronger perception than their actual sense of taste or smell in evaluating the yogurt. Clearly, what we believe to be true can be a strong influence on how we perceive our world.

Example 4

As our last example, the Flat Earth Society still exists today and presents an interesting, historical example of how our beliefs influence both our perceptions and our behaviors. We seem to strongly cling to a belief even once it can be proven to be false.

Interestingly, examining what our beliefs are and how our beliefs have come to be, can be quite useful in addressing the cause of our current state of health.

It seems that familiarity with a belief provides some stability or comfort that causes it to be strongly cherished and defended despite what the reasoning mind is able to discern. Historically, those who were the first to expand science and the knowledge that the Earth is round were strongly persecuted. Similarly, today there is a strong resistance to homeopathic practice and philosophy among medical practitioners. To those who are invested in the physical-chemical system of medicine, the dynamic or energetic forms of medicine such as homeopathic medicine or traditional Chinese medicine are seen with great skepticism.

Just be aware of this natural, human tendency to be closed minded or to protect a belief system that you are using to filter your experience of living in this world.

Conclusion: The Principles of Homeopathic Medicine

The point in reviewing the principles of homeopathic medicine that follow will be to focus on yourself as a patient who is looking to recover from an ailment. Don’t bother trying to convert or impress those who have yet to have a need for an answer to a difficult situation, or those who do not yet know the possibility of a cure exists.

We are currently in a flat earth medical frame of mind where symptoms and disease are only seen as bad things to be attacked. The study of the principles of homeopathic medicine will introduce you to the usefulness of symptoms in the process of healing. The homeopathic approach to healing is different from the pharmaceutical, herbal, or supplement based approaches to healing. The homeopathic medicine in both the diagnostic emphasis and the response to treatment are holistic.

The different effects achieved in homeopathic medicine are because homeopathic remedies do not have a physical-chemical action on the body. They have a “dynamic” or energetic influence on the patient and therefore differ significantly from a traditional, Western approach that affects the patient through a physical or chemical means. The influence on health from a homeopathic remedy is an energetic influence.

Both homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine differ greatly from Western medicine in their understanding of the physiology of human health and disease. Yet, in any system of medicine, the healing process is experienced or measured as a physical or chemical change in the body. In the energetic systems, the healing is the result of a dynamic intervention rather than a physical or chemical intervention.

Five useful principles will be presented that have been part of the homeopathic philosophy of medicine for the last 200 years. These principles form the basis for understanding and implementing this time-tested system of healing.

Homeopathic Prescription

Overview of Homeopathic Perscription

The homeopathic prescription is always individualized according to each patient’s symptoms, sensitivity and vitality. There is no one remedy for any one disease.

The prescription will be individualized in three ways:

• The remedy is matched to the patient’s symptoms
• The potency of the remedy is matched to the patient’s sensitivity and vitality, which represents a general measure of your natural rate of healing
• The time interval between doses is individualized according to the patient’s response

Your First Prescription

When one of the skin experts at Trillium Creek Dermatology has chosen a homeopathic remedy for your symptoms, you will receive printed instructions on how to take your remedy. The first prescription will be based on an estimate of your sensitivity and the severity of your symptoms.

The first prescription represents a starting point and changes will be made to the prescription according to your response to the remedy. It is important that you notice changes in the intensity of any of your current symptoms as well as when they occur in relation to starting to take the remedy. This information will help us adjust the prescription to bring it into alignment with your sensitivity and your vitality.

To be cautious, we will generally start with a low potency of your remedy and increase the dose according to your response. In general, you will be provided with your remedy diluted in water. The remedy does not need to be refrigerated. Alcohol has been added to the water to act as a preservative.

Storing the Remedy

Because the curative powers of a homeopathic remedy are an energetic influence on the body, they should be kept away from sources of high energy that might destroy their ability to act. Keep them away from microwaves and electric motors. Also, keep them from freezing and away from very hot temperatures (140 degrees and above). It is probably also best to not store them with things that have strong odors, such as in a spice cabinet, around aerosols, or aromatherapy.

How to Take the Remedy

Homeopathic remedies are prepared by a process of dilution plus succussion. Prior to taking each dose of the remedy, you should succus the bottle the number of times indicated on your prescription.

A dose of the remedy is a few drops of the liquid. This can be anywhere from two to five drops as a routine. That amount covers about 3/8ths of an inch on the glass dropper. When not administering a dose, keep the cap on the bottle.

Try not to contaminate the liquid remedy by touching the dropper to the tongue or touching the glass portion with your hands. The liquid should stay clear in the bottle. If it becomes cloudy at all, you will need to get a replacement. The remedy should easily maintain a shelf life for more than five years.

The drops of the remedy can be placed anywhere in the mouth. For parents treating small infants, just place the drops in the open mouth or on the lips.

Do not eat or drink anything besides water for fifteen minute before or after taking your dose of the remedy.

The remedy can be taken any time of the day. Morning is slightly preferable. It is more important that you keep the time interval between doses approximately the same.

Homeopathic Responses

The question of whether your remedy response is curative or palliative relates to how long treatment will be necessary and whether the remedy chosen is a good match for just your skin condition or the remedy fits a more holistic picture of you.

When a remedy matches the symptoms of your skin condition quite well but not all of your other symptoms or traits, it is likely to palliate or just control the skin symptoms. In this case, the treatment may need to be continued as long as the underlying cause of your symptoms is still present or while the aggravating factors that bring out your symptoms are still acting.

You will find out if your remedy is palliative or curative when you stop taking the remedy after the original symptoms subside.

If the remedy is only palliative in its actions, the symptoms may return after stopping the remedy. If the remedy seems to be palliative, it would be recommended to look for another remedy that better matches your totality of symptoms.

If your remedy is curative and your skin symptoms have been removed, stopping the remedy should not result in the symptoms returning.

A remedy that is more curative will tend to have very broad effects. In addition to removing the skin complaint, it is often associated with additional benefits such as better energy, better sleep, more balanced moods, better memory and other general characteristics of good health.

After the skin symptoms have cleared using a curative remedy, it is more likely that the remedy can be stopped and the general benefits will remain. This will be the case unless you experience a significant increase in the level of stress that caused the skin symptoms in the first place. In this case, resuming use of the same homeopathic remedy in a higher potency will likely clear the symptoms again.