I am on the board of directors for both the American Institute of Homeopathy and the Homeopathic Academy of Naturopathic Physicians – the main associations for medically licensed homeopaths. This has given me the opportunity to ask a lot of medical professionals who practice homeopathy about how they got there. This is something I am super curious about, because I was (and in some ways still am) a skeptic of homeopathy. I always wonder how others who, like me, have a strong background in science, ended up practicing medicine that some people say is unscientific. I have come to understand just how firmly grounded in the scientific method classical homeopathy is, but I was definitely once among those who thought otherwise.
Like the majority of our clients at Resilience Naturopathic, I came to homeopathy out of desperation. I had already found my way to naturopathic medical school, desperate for a solution for the mental health crisis I was seeing unfold around me. I saw it in friends, family, and had my own struggles. I also saw that the medications being offered weren’t reliably helpful. Even when they did provide some relief, it often came at a cost. Big feelings that felt unmanageable turned flat, which itself became unmanageable, or at least intolerable. Side effects made it so that the life you were hoping to regain by taking the meds was no longer really accessible. There had to be a better way.
In my first quarter at naturopathic medical school, we focused primarily on basic biomedical sciences. We spent countless hours studying anatomy, biochemistry, histology, and embryology. The school likely knew that this curriculum that was basically the same as an MD school, including cadaver lab, would need a dose of naturopathic philosophy or introductory therapeutics to keep their future NDs happy. So they included the introduction to homeopathy course.
I had heard the word homeopathy used before, but I had no idea what it was. Like many people, I just assumed it was another word for anything natural. Boy was I wrong.
I will never forget that first class I had where the concept of ultradilution was introduced. I went home feeling a lot of feelings, none of which were positive. I felt like I had been duped. I went into this school understanding it to be on par with medical schools, but the inclusion of homeopathy as part of the required curriculum made me question everything. Nutrition made sense. Food as medicine made sense. Acupuncture and herbs made sense. But little pills with medicine that was so dilute that it went beyond Avogadro’s number, which meant there wasn’t a measurable amount of the initial substance left – that was nonsense. If something so nonsensical was so important to be introduced this early on, I questioned the validity of the entire program.
I’m someone who processes things out loud. My mom gets a daily call and mostly just listens as I get all the things in my brain out so I have room to actually be productive for the day. She is amazing for letting me do that. But sometimes the hardest things end up staying inside. I don’t have a clear memory of processing this with my mom. It is quite possible that I felt a certain amount of shame around having made a decision to upend my life and take on medical school debt, just to have the whole thing called into question right away. Somehow though, I managed to find my way to peace with it. I decided that, just like conventional medicine having really valuable treatments and others that seemed to have as much harm as good, that naturopathic medicine had the good with the bad as well. I decided to focus on the good parts that made sense to me and do what I had to to pass the nonsense homeopathy classes and then promptly forget them.
A few months later, I was talking to a practicing naturopathic doctor who had offered to chat and give me guidance. He asked what I was interested in treating. I shared that mental health is what had drawn me to naturopathic medicine. He was thrilled to hear this, and told me there was a huge need for it in the community, especially for people who were comfortable with more complex cases. He then went on to tell me that I would need to focus my studies in two areas – nutrition and homeopathy.
I remember exactly where I was sitting when this was said because it hit me so hard. Really? Homeopathy?
Once again, I set it aside and tried to focus on the things that made sense to me.
And then… I saw my own doctor. I was getting old enough that I needed to consider whether kids were part of my future. I wasn’t ready for them yet, but I knew that the medication I was taking wasn’t safe to take in pregnancy. So I asked what my options were. My doctor told me I could get electro-convulsive therapy (ECT, also known as shock therapy) or I could adopt. I was floored that there were my only options. So when I went to a conference a few weeks later, I was in a prime state to be open to alternative answers.
Sure enough, there was a presentation being given on homeopathy for my condition that I had been diagnosed with at that time. The case examples shared were remarkable, and the doctor seemed to understand my experience as a patient in a way I had never seen from a medical professional before. It was enough to get me on the phone with him the following week, and a few weeks later, I had my initial intake.
I was still very skeptical, but willing to be wrong. A few months went by and he told me I was responding well to the remedy at our follow ups, but I honestly didn’t see much difference. I was still taking my medication at the time, though after a few months he agreed to reduce the dose. Still, nothing remarkable told me the remedy was doing anything. He insisted that my continued stability was evidence it was working. I insisted that the blood levels of my medication hadn’t declined enough to lose therapeutic function, and that it was the medication keeping me stable.
I finally decided I needed to put the remedy to the test. In a move that I strongly discourage my clients from doing, I abruptly stopped my medication. I didn’t tell my doctor. I was fine for a few weeks, and then suddenly, I wasn’t. I felt somewhat vindicated that the medication had been helping me all along when I spoke to him at our next visit. I was clearly unwell with racing thoughts, restlessness, and agitation. He had me dosing only after each visit, so I hadn’t had a dose of my remedy in approximately three or four weeks. He told me that he thought that the abrupt stop to the medication was part of why I was doing so poorly, but that also I likely needed a dose of the remedy. He asked me to try another dose before restarting my medication. He knew the underlying motivation for being off meds, and he reasoned that now that I was off, if I could stabilize with the remedy it would be easier to just keep me off. He reassured me that if I needed to go back on meds again I always could.
I agreed, and took a dose of the remedy. I didn’t expect much, mostly because I didn’t yet understand almost anything about homeopathy. In my mind, if it was working it should have still been working and prevented the backslide I was having.
But then, two hours later, I sat at dinner with friends. Or perhaps I should say I sat still, whereas earlier that day I had been pacing in the back of the classroom. My mind was calm and I was able to focus. That is when I realized there might actually be something to homeopathy.
I wasn’t fully sold yet. It took a few more backslides with a remedy adjustment quickly getting me back on track to see just how powerful homeopathy actually is. From there, I realized I actually had to learn more about this medical modality, even if it didn’t fully make sense to me. I had put it to the test and see for myself how effective it was.
I feel it is worth mentioning here that I do not have a strong placebo response. I am not someone who is ultrasensitive to medications or supplements. Most supplements have not had any noticeable effect for me. Medications either help or they don’t. It is only recently that I have even had some medications that have given me side effects.
I should also mention that I was approaching this as a scientist. I made sure that I was not throwing the kitchen sink at the problem. I was not taking anything aside from the medication and remedy, and once the medication was stopped, I was taking only the remedy. So any change in my state could be traced back to a single change that was made prior to it. I also needed to see the results replicated to trust it wasn’t a coincidence.
So… I dove headlong into studying homeopathy. I learned that this medicine that I had originally believed to have been based on magical thinking was actually quite scientifically sound. The texts around it were written in the late 1700s and early 1800s, so the explanations sounded unscientific to me, but were the most scientific explanations available at the time. I learned about how the founder, Samuel Hahnemann, had painstakingly used the scientific method to understand the actions of medicines and how the medicines impacted the body. I learned that he studied the medicines in humans, both to understand what they could treat and to verify that it was in fact effective. He did all of this before he wrote his first ever essay outlining his “principle for a new cure.”
I also spent a significant amount of time in extra clinic rotations and in offices with practicing homeopaths to see the system applied in real life. When the principles outlined by Samuel Hahnemann were applied consistently, people got better. It was a stark contrast when I started my other, general naturopathic rotations. People weren’t given consistent recommendations. What one attending physician would do was different than another for very similar cases. And the results were similarly inconsistent. People did improve, but not nearly as much. The healing I saw on homeopathy rotations was profound. What I saw on other rotations felt a lot more like palliating, and I didn’t see how using supplements was much better than using medications.
I also started to notice that the toughest cases on the general naturopathic shifts were either referred to a homeopathy shift, or the students that were known to be “homeonerds” like me were assigned as their student doctor, hoping a remedy would be recommended.
I finally got to the place where I couldn’t deny what I was seeing. I couldn’t explain the mechanism of action, but I chose to let that go and focus on learning how to use the medicines well.
I won’t lie, I was thrilled when research came out shortly after I graduated that found nanoparticles in homeopathic medicines. I was even more excited when researchers found that the nanoparticles bind at the cellular level and cause adaptive changes. We haven’t gotten much further than that at explaining exactly what happens with remedies, and there are very smart scientists in medicine and physics who are working on answering this question that sometimes disagree with how homeopathy works. I have stayed very curious about these studies and debates, and am hopeful that we will know the mechanism of action in my lifetime. And if we don’t, I have made my peace with it.
I still feel the skepticism creep in sometimes. I hear it in conversations with my team as we study homeopathic texts. Most we are able to tackle and understand by getting old text into modern language, some I have to remind myself to let go and focus on the practice. But now, when the skeptic starts chattering away in my brain, I have nearly two decades and thousands of people (and a few family dogs) as evidence that even if I don’t fully understand the molecular mechanism of action, homeopathy works.
