Vive la Difference…

so many colours…

Individuality is being outlawed.

Many people don’t enjoy birthdays. Many people go to parties and don’t enjoy themselves, or don’t go at all. Many people attend activities which others think enjoyable, but they don’t agree. When the mob comes out in favour of certain films, certain books, specific celebrities – not everyone falls into line.

Many people are unhappy at some stage in their lives.
Many people prefer to be alone than with others.
Many people don’t make friends easily.
Many people have opinions which go against “conventional wisdom”.

Is any of this pathological? In Western kindergartens, a child who does not make friends easily may find himself on track for psychological surveillance from the tender age of four or five. In homoeopathic usage, this only becomes relevant if it is something that has changed. And even then we must explore why it has changed and how, before accepting it as a prescribing symptom.

In common conventional usage – it is not socially acceptable to be different, to behave differently, especially in the area of being happy or contented on demand. A “different” child is the label hammered onto a child who does not fit the norm, physically or socially. And with all this our society praises originality – in a form which is really just as original and norm defying as wearing jeans…

One of the most common forms of drugging we see today are anti-depressants and other psychiatric drugs. Misery of any form is not to be tolerated, even momentarily. It is not “normal”.

What’s the point? You may ask. I’m getting there.

I work a lot in my clinic with patients experiencing anxiety which interferes with function. Some are already taking psychiatric medications and wish to stop, and some have been told they have to start taking such medications and don’t wish to start.   Homoeopathy works wonders with such cases.

However, invariably I receive calls and texts along the lines of “the anxiety came back today! Should I redose?” Sometimes the tone is calm – “I’m waiting for your instructions and am confident…” But often, especially at the beginning of treatment, the tone is anxious verging on hysterical. “It’s coming back! Nothing helps! I have to take medicine!”

It is a central challenge for the homoeopath, one that has been written about in the literature since Hahnemann’s time, to prescribe based on proper case management rather than on pressure from the patient or his/her family. Those hysterical or furious complaints have driven all of us, at some time or another, to prescribe based on patient prompting in a way that we have not been happy with.

We see this in mental/emotional cases just as we do in physical cases. And I really don’t blame the patients for their reaction – it is instilled in all of us from the moment we become aware of ourselves. The body is treated as if it were a car, a simple mechanism, without the ability to heal itself. More and more medicines are developed to take over activities the organism should be doing, and the negative feedback loop that occurs when it senses the need has already been filled by an external drug means the organism stops producing oestrogen, stops taking care of its own thyroid hormone production, stops producing its own defences against common diseases – . On a mental and emotional level, we stop dealing with our issues, preferring to resort to drugs to do the job. As with muscles – what doesn’t get used atrophies over time.

In cases where norms are defined regarding how human nature should be; where no actual self-harm or harm to the public is involved; where we are merely dealing with a child or an adult who makes others around him or her feel uncomfortable – the nature of the drugging that is becoming almost mandatory in our society has already gone far beyond the science fiction novels I read in the seventies. And if the trend continues in seeing physical, mental and emotional health in adults as something that must be fixed from the outside, where the human being is seen as lacking in an inherent “self-fixing” program, truth will soon outstrip fiction, if it hasn’t done so already.

If a patient is experiencing a symptom again, whether mental or physical, the first response should be to see if their own vital force can handle it now it has been made more aware by the previous remedy. Often symptoms come and go during treatment – especially where physical symptoms are triggered during emotional drama. We cannot remove our patients from their lives, from abusive family members, from humiliating work experiences – but we can work with the nature of their response to that drama. We can help them become stronger, less debilitated by that response.

Really the yardstick is time and intensity. If a patient is upset that they are feeling something of their previous depression, or experiences echoes of previous disassociation, anger, panic attacks or more, it is important to know how intense it was. Whether it was the same as before. How long did it last. Our patients are literally programmed by modern medicine to assume every reappearance of a symptom requires drugging. It is at least part of our job, I believe, to help them realize that they do not have to conform to some kind of happiness norm in order to be healthy, and that they possess innate remarkable abilities of self-healing in physical, mental and emotional ailments, and that those abilities can be nurtured and strengthened through treatment with homoeopathy.

Our natural world in its healthy state presents us with immeasurable hues of colour. Not liking a colour does not mean something is unhealthy about a plant or flower. By the same token, not liking someone’s behaviour does not make it pathological…