Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Please remember that homeopathic remedies should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.

The question I’m asked most often is “can homeopathy help my ailment?” There’s a long, and a short, answer to this question: if the person asking wants the short answer, I simply tell them “I don’t know”.

The long answer is that there is substantial anecdotal evidence that homeopathy often works well, even for conditions that orthodox medicine has failed to cure, and several trials have shown that homeopathy works better than a placebo. But we still don’t have an accepted explanation for how it works. The recent US medical school two-hour debate on homeopathy demonstrated that opinion is as divided as ever (you can watch the debate online at mediasite.uchc.edu .

Day in, day out, patients tell me that homeopathy works, and delighted patients often email me testimonials to be posted on the Phoenix website. Generally speaking, homeopathy may assist the sort of healing that the body has evolved to be able to do: it wouldn’t help a patient to re-grow an amputated limb, for example, although it might help to speed healing and promote healthy granulation of the amputation wound, and it might also help to reduce ‘phantom’ pain in the missing limb. Nevertheless, homeopathic approaches differ, patients are all entirely individual, and the blocks to their self-healing can be multiple and varied, so it’s just not possible to guarantee that homeopathy will work for every person who tries it.

Mind you, this is true of many conventional treatments, too: how many people have little success with repeated courses of antibiotics, for bacterial chest infections after viral illnesses, for cystitis or (in the case of children) for glue ear, for example? Only this weekend, a UK national newspaper announced that the very doctor who developed the flu vaccine says that you can’t rely on the jab doing any good.

A huge range of ailments may be suitable for homeopathy: over the last weeks, patients have turned to the Phoenix clinic for help with complaints as diverse as depression, menopausal symptoms, PMS, painful periods, persistent swollen glands, migraine, water retention, infertility, morning sickness and tiredness in early pregnancy, eczema, psoriasis, anxiety, apathy and lack of motivation, acne rosacea, itchy skin, digestive problems including IBS, arthritis, MS, grief, panic attacks, ME, allergies, infections, cystitis, coughs, colds, sore throats, and failure to thrive. Of course, all unexplained symptoms need to first be properly investigated and diagnosed by a conventional doctor, but, generally-speaking, by the time many new patients think of trying homeopathy, they’ve already tried everything else!

For more information about homeopathy, visit www.phoenixhomeopathy.com/testimonials.php and to find out if your condition is suitable for homeopathic help, contact a reputable homeopath.