Acute prescribing - the highest form of homeopathy?

I ran an online webinar recently, the title of which was “Homeopathy for Acutes: A Practical Guide”. It was well-attended and received (thank you folks), and I might repeat it next year. One of the ideas that I spoke about during the webinar was that many homeopaths consider homeopathy for acute situations to be the “highest form” of homeopathy. Could homeopathy offer sliding doors moments?

I think this idea goes back to the late, great Dr Robin Murphy, MD, who died in November 2021. He compiled the 2 “big burgundy books” as I call them– the Meta-Repertory and Nature’s Materia Medica that I (and most homeopaths) use constantly when practising.

The idea is that if we can give one (or maybe two) well-timed and well-chosen remedies at the moment of an acute health episode, then we might be able to confine it to a one-off thing, to “nip it in the bud” so to speak. I recently listened to a podcast hosted by Lisa Strbac, where she interviewed another great and published homeopath, Ian Watson, who talked about various ideas in homeopathy, including this one (find it on the "What Heals" podcast from wherever you listen to podcasts).

For example, Ian said in the podcast that he has a special phial that he can

attach to his keyring, which contains Arnica pills. He carries this around everywhere he goes, because, who knows, by administering a thoughtful dose of arnica to someone who has just fallen down on the ice, or been involved in a minor road accident, might mean that the incident is “contained”, that there are no psychological and / or physical repercussions from the incident that can potentially spin off into something much more chronic.

When we think about chronic health conditions, it is often possible to trace them back to some kind of physical or emotional trauma, with a bit T or a small t. So someone who is close to me developed rheumatoid arthritis when her father died; I am almost certain there were unresolved issues between her and her father, and the death brought about emotional pain that later, by whatever mysterious mechanisms are played out in the body, became bedded down in the joints. If at that time we could have given a few thoughtful doses of a remedy like ignatia, or one of the many other wonderful remedies for emotional pain, then who knows? The rheumatoid arthritis might never have arisen.

A client of mine went through a very difficult year where she lost her father; a best friend was going through a crisis, one of her children was having a hard time at school. She was exhausted, picked up a gastric infection, which wouldn’t clear. She took various courses of antibiotics which eventually cleared it; after which she got recurring hives on different parts of her body. This was the point at which she came for help – we managed to improve her general health and her gut health and eventually the hives calmed down. But perhaps we would never have got to the hives if the stress of the emotional issues and the gastric infection had been administered to with homeopathy.

There are cases which have gone the other way – where they have been caught in time. When my youngest child was a little boy, he had a bit of eczema, mainly on the top of his foot / front of his ankle and behind his knees, a bit on his wrists. We never did the steroid creams with him; instead, I took him to see the homeopath who gave him remedies over the course of about 3 months – the eczema cleared beautifully, never to return. He doesn’t have allergies, and he never developed asthma. It is an unfortunate fact that a lot (though not all) children who have allergies in their early years go on to develop eczema, and later asthma (it’s called the "atopic march"). Again, I wonder, if we could step in with a well-time remedy, could we put a halt or at least slow down these cases?

I am not at all dismissing modern medicine, I think our emergency services are beyond compare (and as a mother of 2 boys I have had to use them frequently!). Sometimes we absolutely need the painkillers, the antibiotics and the steroids. But there is a mounting recognition that sometimes they are over-prescribed. While they are marvellous and fast acting, they do not address the root cause. Homeopathy is different – it helps your body to recognise what it is that is ailing it and to address it. It is not the remedy that does the “fixing” but you, what we call our “vital force” – homeopathy is just the whisper that sets the healing in motion.

Of course we can never know what might have happened in the alternative future of any of these health situations but I do think that a well administered dose of homeopathy can switch things; it can be a sliding doors moment.

If you are going through an acute, I do a half hour acute prescribing

consultation for £40 (book here). I also helped write the New School of Nutritional Medicine's indispensible guide to acute prescribing, Rapid Relief Homeopathy, which you can buy from their website here.