I have now been a medical doctor for 28 years. I decided to study medicine because I wanted to do a job where I could work with people and be of help to them.
I entered a tough 6 year programme of medical training but found that although I learned a great deal about diseases, they have very little to teach me about people. I learned to fix the body with drugs and surgery but nobody told me how to deal with suffering people.
Even while at medical school I became interested in holistic medicine and took an early interest in juice fasting and eventually homeopathy. This journey led me to graduate as a member of the Faculty of Homeopathy in 1983 and was awarded a Fellowship in 2002.
I believe that Homeopathy is one of many systems of holistic medicine where the aim is to give the patient an holistic stimulus – ie a natural and safe stimulus to the body to heal itself. This is not complicated: The body can heal itself. Sometimes it does so spontaneously and sometimes it gets a bit stuck. When it fails to heal itself doctors have 2 options.
1. Treat with drugs and/or surgery – which obviously entails risks of side effects and complications of surgery.
2. Do something to the whole person to try to stimulate the body to do the job of healing itself – by administering an holistic stimulus.
An holistic stimulus must by necessity be aimed at the whole person. We cannot stimulate a disease to heal itself, but we can stimulate an organism to heal a disease within it.
The beauty of systems of medicine that use holistic stimuli is that they require the doctor to understand the whole person in order to choose the correct holistic stimulus or correct homeopathic remedy in my case.
Of course there are 2 situations where a doctor is obliged to use 2. first.
a)where there is a risk of irreversible damage if one doesn’t operate or give a drug immediately
b)where a holistic stimulus has been tried a reasonable number of times and the patient is still suffering.
So in this sense my conventional medicine training serves me well as it allows me to examine patients and order tests before advising them on what course to take. My patients know that I sit on the fence between holistic and orthodox approaches and try to choose the most appropriate approach for them.
Homeoopaty is my choice of a medicine of the holistic stimulus because it rewards me for understanding my patients really well.
A few years ago I was asked to contribute to a book called:
Passionate Medicine: Making the Transition from Conventional Medicine to Homeopathy.)
Jessica Kingsley Publishers have kindly given me permission to put my contribution on this website and it can be read here. (link)
