Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Prescribed medication should not be stopped or varied without conventional medical advice. Please remember that homeopathic remedies and other health measures should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, or if you are pregnant, elderly or on orthodox medications, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.

The arguments for and against homeopathy continue to rage in the media, but patients vote with their feet. Most of our new clients come via word of mouth these days, and it’s not unusual for us to end up seeing entire families – even skeptical family members frequently end up booking in, once they see the improvements their relatives experience.
In my view, the problem for those vehement haters of homeopathy, the self-styled quackbusters, who argue that homeopathic remedies can’t work, is that folk do tend to be able to tell when something is helping them, and when it’s not. It seems to me that if patients feel better, then they feel better.
Another celebrity relies on homeopathy
This week, in a Times Online interview , ex-Who frontman Roger Daltrey explained how he got interested in alternative medicine:
“I had a very, very dramatic experience with my son when he was nine months old. He had gastro difficulties, started throwing up, could not keep any food down and turned into skin and bone. At the hospital, they did every test to him, and in the end they just handed him back to me. My wife and I were in bits. My poor baby. The kid was dying. It was terrifying. I thought, there's got to be something. I'd heard of homoeopathy, so I found a local guy in the Yellow Pages and took my boy there. He gave him some powders. Within two weeks he was putting weight on, keeping the food down. The trouble recurred periodically for a couple of years, but he's now 27, a fit and healthy young man.
“The bizarre thing is that I've got a chiropractor friend in LA whose baby landed up in exactly the same state. He thought he was about to lose him. But I recommended homoeopathic remedies, and he recovered too. That's God's honest truth. Now I bet doctors would say, ‘Oh they'd have got better anyway'. But I can't believe that.
“My experience of alternative medicines is that they all work for certain people. You are unique and you have to find the right thing for you. But, of course, alternative therapy is up against huge vested interests.”
Homeopathy as effective as standard care for eczema, reports GP’s website
This week, too, the GP’s website, Pulse, reports that homeopathy is “as effective” as standard care for eczema, according to a German study of 118 children with eczema . The authors said this trial in primary care provided good evidence for the use of homeopathy for the treatment of eczema and gave a “more realistic picture” of eczema therapy than that seen in a placebo-controlled randomised controlled trial.
In my experience, children tend to respond to homeopathy even better than many adults do, and with orthodox eczema treatments tending to rely on skin-thinning cortisone creams, I’m glad that homeopathic treatment options are being taken seriously, at least in some quarters.
Time for a break
After spending the Easter break moving the clinic to its new home in Hove, it’s time for a proper break, so I’m taking two weeks off, and will be back blogging in late May.

For more information about natural healthcare solutions and homeopathy, visit www.phoenixhomeopathy.com

Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Prescribed medication should not be stopped or varied without conventional medical advice. Please remember that homeopathic remedies and other health measures should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, or if you are pregnant, elderly or on orthodox medications, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing. People with compromised immune systems should not take probiotics without professional advice.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve been banging on for some time about the importance of probiotics in supporting proper immune functioning. Now there’s yet more evidence of how probiotics can help human health, this time as assistance for alcoholics with cirrhosis-related immune problems.

The new research is very exciting, showing that probiotic supplements may help to restore the immune function of white blood cells in alcoholics.

The study was carried out by researchers at University College London, who gave probiotic suppments to patients with alcoholic cirrhosis. At the start of the study, white blood cell (neutrophil phagocyte) capacity was 25 per cent lower in the people with alcoholic cirrhosis compared to the healthy controls, which is what would be expected. However, at the end of the study, this capacity was normalised in the people receiving the probiotics, which is pretty impressive. No improvements were observed in the alcoholic cirrhosis controls, which is strongly suggestive that the difference was indeed caused by the probiotic supplements.

The study results dramatically showed that neutrophil (white blood cell) function was restored after just four weeks of probiotic supplementation. The researchers are reported in the Journal of Hepatology as saying "Patients with alcoholic cirrhosis are susceptible to infections and once infected, they have increased in-hospital mortality, this may relate to a defective innate immune response in conjunction with an inappropriate inflammatory response.”

This new study adds to a growing body of research on probiotics that suggests having a colony of good gut flora may have wide-reaching health benefits.

Worryingly, even though overuse of antibiotics for non-life threatening health problems has led to the serious issue of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria developing, new patients at the Phoenix Homeopathy clinic still sometimes tell me that they’ve been prescribed up to 15- 20 courses of antibiotics in the course of a year.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics can have a ‘scorched earth’ effect in the gut, decimating colonies of good gut flora, allowing unhelpful yeasts and other organisms to overgrow (this is one of the reasons why it’s common to get thrush after antibiotics) and compromising the immune system, so I find it frustrating that people are still being prescribed antibiotics without being advised to follow the drugs with a course of good-quality, stomach-acid resistant, high gut-adherence probiotics.

For more information about natural healthcare solutions and homeopathy, visit www.phoenixhomeopathy.com

For more information about probiotics, visit www.holistic2go.com

Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Prescribed medication should not be stopped or varied without conventional medical advice. Please remember that homeopathic remedies and other health measures should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, or if you are pregnant, elderly or on orthodox medications, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.

I’d like to think I’m quite a practical homeopath, so I use a wide range of tools to help my patients to improve their health and their happiness.

For example, I often get asked for help with skin conditions, including various types of eczema and psoriasis – to a homeopath, these conditions suggest that the body may benefit from an energetic boost to the eliminative organs, especially the kidneys and liver, so I always ask how much water patients are drinking, and find out what they’re eating, too. If the system is lacking water, results from homeopathic remedies can be maximised by encouraging the patient to drink enough water, so this needs to be addressed early on. Similarly, if sluggish liver energy is addressed by limiting intake of toxic substances, psoriasis sufferers often find that their skin starts to improve and that their homeopathic remedies work even better.

Where symptoms suggest that histamine levels may be high (this can result from stress, and symptoms can include hot flushes and sweats that can be mistaken for menopause, and allergic conditions like itchy skin, hayfever and other allergies), I often recommend patients consider taking nettle tincture, or a couple of daily cups of nettle tea, as well as relatively high levels of buffered vitamin C, and that they try meditation, regular rhythmic exercise, or other relaxation methods, to bring their stress levels down.

I developed an anti-smoking programme several years ago, and used it myself to quit smoking: it’s a mixture of homeopathic remedies, flower essences, relaxation techniques and habit-breaking exercises. The homeopathic remedies are individually chosen depending on the case and the patient’s character, but usually include Nux vomica, a remedy with a reputation for helping people addicted to coffee, cigarettes or alcohol, remedies to help stimulate disgust for tobacco and nicotine, and Staphysagria for cravings. Flower essences include Wedding Bush (for commitment to purpose, thought to help us to stick to things), Five Corners (the essence that can help us to conquer self-sabotage) and Bottlebrush (thought to help to sweep away the past for a fresh start). Patients on the programme also get homework: exercises to help them to discover their smoking triggers, and plan how they will resist hour-by-hour temptation. We also look at making the act of smoking more conscious, so that some of the unpleasant physiological effects on the body become more apparent (it’s a pretty powerful disincentive to smoke if every cigarette makes you feel nauseous!).

By doing all I can to provide patients with every possible natural and healthful tool, I am following fundamental principles of homeopathy: Samuel Hahnemann, the doctor who developed homeopathy over 200 years ago, was quite clear in his seminal work The Organon, that homeopaths must give attention to helping our patients to overcome their maintaining causes (those things that make us sick) as well as prescribing correct homeopathic remedies.

For the average modern-day Western homeopath, this can be a tall order: our systems now have to cope with near-malnutrition from food that’s too plentiful but of poor quality (grown in depleted soils, or processed to be full of fat, sugar or fillers) for example, or toxic pollution from the environment around us, gut problems from overuse of antibiotics, thyroid problems from mercury in dental amalgams, digestive problems from overuse of antacids, low-level bacterial problems from root canal work, inflammation from excess sugar consumption, and excess acidity in the system from too much coffee and too few vegetables, and so on. In some cases, these factors muddy the waters and complicate the case so much, that it can be hard to discover the patient’s particular constitutional remedy until clearing-out remedies have been given.

There is good news, though: the human body has developed over millenia to be a self-cleaning and self-repairing system, which means that making small changes now can bring big improvements in our health – and help us to get the best results from carefully-chosen constitutional homeopathic remedies.

For more information about natural healthcare solutions and homeopathy, visit www.phoenixhomeopathy.com

Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Prescribed medication should not be stopped or varied without conventional medical advice. Please remember that homeopathic remedies and other health measures should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, or if you are pregnant, elderly or on orthodox medications, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.

I’m just back from three days at the Society of Homeopaths’ annual conference, held at Leicester University: I’d been invited to speak to trainee homeopaths and qualified practitioners - which was a huge honour - but despite my past experience as a solicitor and law lecturer, and more recent experience teaching at the South East College of Homeopathy, I was pretty nervous beforehand.

We see quite a few musicians, singers and actors in the clinic, as well as business executives, so I’m quite often asked to help with anxiety issues, including performance nerves. Generally speaking, whether the ordeal is a driving test, a visit to the doctor’s or dentist, a presentation or other public speaking event, a gig or stage performance, a wedding or an exam, it’s not too tricky to find a homeopathic remedy to help to settle pre-event nerves.

Unless there’s an underlying chronic state of anxiety, treating a simple and short-lived episode of acute anticipatory anxiety is usually fairly straightforward. This is because it’s usually quite easy for a patient to describe how their acute anxiety is making them feel, making the homeopath’s job much easier. For example, before my talk, I had wobbly legs, a shaky voice and felt as though I had trembling hands. I also felt weak with my anticipatory anxiety, so I took a dose of Gelsemium 30c from my kit – this remedy can help with all these symptoms, and I know from past treatment by my own homeopath that it suits me well (it’s one of the remedies I was prescribed to help me recover from near-paralysis by MS). I wasn’t sure whether the remedy was going to work, because I didn’t take it until just before my talk, but, thankfully, by the time the audience filed in, the shakiness had gone, I was feeling calmer, and I was able to start speaking confidently.

Gelsemium is also known as a remedy that can, in suitable cases, help with adrenal burn-out (from prolonged stress), and with ailments from bad news or shock. Because the homeopathic remedy picture is that of weakness, exhaustion, shakiness and collapse, it can be indicated to help with flu, too: in fact, in the 1918-19 Spanish (bird) flu epidemic, Gelsemium was one of the main remedies used by homeopaths and homeopathic hospitals of the time to achieve their famously low mortality rates.

According to Julian Winston (reported in The New England Journal of Homeopathy, 1998, Vol 7, Issue 1) the following was written by American doctors at the time:
“In a plant of 8,000 workers we had only one death. The patients were not drugged to death. Gelsemium was practically the only remedy used. We used no aspirin and no vaccines.” Frank Wieland MD, Chicago.
“Fifteen hundred cases were reported at the Homeopathic Medical Society of the District of Columbia with but fifteen deaths. Recoveries in the National Homeopathic Hospital were 100%.” E. F. Sappington MD, Philadelphia.
“I have treated 1,000 cases of influenza. I have the records to show my work. I have no losses. Please give all credit to homeopathy …” T. A. McCann MD, Dayton, Ohio.
“One physician in a Pittsburgh hospital asked a nurse if she knew anything better than what he was doing, because he was losing many cases. ‘Yes, Doctor, stop aspirin and go down to a homeopathic pharmacy, and get homeopathic remedies.’ The Doctor replied: ‘But that is homeopathy.’ ‘I know it, but the homeopathic doctors for whom I have nursed have not lost a single case.’” W. F. Edmundson MD, Pittsburgh.
After several years as a homeopath, it still amazes me how versatile homeopathic remedies can be, and how wonderful it is that a straightforward homeopathic remedy can be used for such a wide range of ailments and states, as long as the characteristics of the illness in the patient match the chosen remedy. Facing the audience at the conference on Friday, I was very glad indeed that this is the case!

For more information about natural healthcare solutions and homeopathy, visit www.phoenixhomeopathy.com

Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Prescribed medication should not be stopped or varied without conventional medical advice. Please remember that homeopathic remedies and other health measures should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, or if you are pregnant, elderly or on orthodox medications, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.

The Phoenix Homeopathy clinic re-opened last week, from new premises that are brighter, fresher and more spacious than our last home. Contrary to what some critics of homeopathy seem to believe, professional homeopathy is a tremendously rewarding but not at all lucrative career, so our extra space was bought at the cost of being in a cheaper area, a little further from the centre of Brighton and Hove, but we hope that it will suit us and our patients very well.

Despite all our advance planning (Phoenix’s practice manager used to work in logistics, so the move was arranged with military precision) we did think, rather optimistically as it turned out, that we’d get a bit of a break during the time we were shut for the move. In fact, the arrangements for moving phone lines, broadband, card payment systems, furniture, files and stock, as well making sure that all our patients and suppliers knew where we are, and sorting out things like door entryphone systems and signs at the new clinic, took up more time than we expected, and we soon realised that a proper break just wasn’t going to happen. Of course, the best-laid plans can go awry, and luckily the whole team ajusted their expectations and just got on with the job in hand.

As a result – thanks, team, for being so adaptable – we managed to keep a skeleton service going during the whole period, and we re-opened bang on schedule at 10am last Monday.

One of the very first lectures when I was studying to be a homeopath concerned adaptibility, and I’ve never forgotten how important this quality is to good health. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that adaptibility is key to health: after all, through the mechanism of homeostasis, a healthy organism achieves a stable metabolic state, despite changes in the environment and other disruptions. Our bodies need to be kept within fairly narrow limits: for example, our pH (or acid-alkali balance) needs to be kept fairly stable for us to survive, so internal feedback mechanisms constantly ensure that this homeostatic balance is maintained.

The same thing should happen with emotional changes: if something goes badly wrong, it’s perfectly normal to have a bit of a wobble emotionally, and even lose our equilibrium for a time, but we can usually get ourselves back on an even keel in due course. It’s only when we stay out of balance that we may need help, whether from a good chat with a friend, a game of footie and a pint with the lads, going for a run, antidepressants, counselling or a good prescription of a homeopathic remedy for bad news (like Ignatia or Gelsemium).

As tends to happen with any project, there were one or two slightly frantic moments during our move of premises, when a couple of things went wrong: at one particularly fraught moment (involving an IT guy, a phone engineer, our lovely landlord Arthur and a stubborn door entryphone system), the receptionist and I were sent out shopping to Habitat to get us out of the way, which was, frankly, a genius move by the practice manager. Neverthleless, we all adapted, and managed to keep our cool, and all we needed at the end of the move was a good laugh together over a delicious curry and a glass of wine, before we were ready to start a new week.

For more information about natural healthcare solutions and homeopathy, visit www.phoenixhomeopathy.com

Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Prescribed medication should not be stopped or varied without conventional medical advice. Please remember that homeopathic remedies and other health measures should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, or if you are pregnant, elderly or on orthodox medications, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.

Like anyone who works in a helping or caring environment, the team at Phoenix recognise the value of taking regular breaks, so at the end of this week, Phoenix Homeopathy is closing for some annual leave. We’ll then be busy relocating to brighter and more spacious new premises in Hove, so this will be my last blog until 7th April.

The search for a new Brighton and Hove home for the practice has been a bit of a saga: suitable commercial premises in the city are scarce, and square footage is pricey as a result. The search hasn’t been helped by the fact that, before training as a homeopath, I was a commercial litigation solicitor, with experience in commercial property litigation. You might think that this would be an advantage in dealing with commercial agents and landlords – far from it! Where others with less legal experience would have signed on the dotted line, I tended to spot potential problems with repairing obligations or badly drafted clauses in leases, which led to a few stalled negotiations during our search.

I’m a big fan of clear contracts – in life, in law, and definitely in my homeopathic practice. In fact, this is one of the subjects I teach during business skills classes at the South East College of Homeopathy, and I insist on the Phoenix Homeopathy mission statement being posted up on our website. We also provide a copy of our policies & procedures to patients, to make sure that patients know what we expect of them, and what they can expect of us. During the course of a homeopathic consultation, wellbeing issues invariably come up, and I might even suggest negotiating an individual wellbeing pledge from a patient to support their healing: for example, drink more water (you know who you are!).

Although the premises search was long and at times frustrating, with false starts and disappointments along the way, when we finally found our new premises, it all went through incredibly quickly and smoothly: almost as if it was meant to be. This made me think of the fact that sometimes timing is all: if we’d managed to rent first, second or third premises that we liked, we wouldn’t have gained the useful extra therapy room that comes with the premises we finally chose.

The self-healing journey can be a bit like this, too: there can be stops and starts, disappointments and triumphs, but often the end result is better than expected, as in the case of a patient seeking homeopathic help for eczema who found that their lifelong low self-esteem vanished at the same time as their skin cleared up.

For more information about natural healthcare solutions and homeopathy, visit www.phoenixhomeopathy.com/testimonials.php