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