Homeopathic skin

In our modern society, skin problems cause a disproportionate amount of distress to the people who suffer from them. We live in an age when appearance is everything, where photographs of already talented and successful celebrities are air brushed in order to remove all signs of acne or dry skin or wrinkles. It's almost as if perfect skin and the perfect body are the only real assets that really matter. I have lost count of the number of teenage patients I see who want me to heal their terrible acne- yet sometimes all I can see on their skin is a very mild skin eruption, perhaps a few lumps only visible in the right light at the right angle. And yet getting young men to check their testicles and young women to check their breasts for the early signs of cancer seems to be an uphill struggle. But who is under threat of death, the acne sufferer or the 18 year old with testicular cancer? Our values around appearance and health are topsy-turvy by any standards.

As homeopaths, we see health in a very different way, and it's easier to understand this if you think about your own health over your lifetime, and the health of your family and friends over a long period of time. What you are likely to see is a pattern of deepening disease, interspersed with patches of seeming good health. I say seeming because underneath things are not necessarily as well as they appear. For example, we might have a relative who had eczema as a child. The new miracle steroids might then be applied as a cream, and the eczema disappears. It's not been healed- homeopathically speaking it's been suppressed, driven back into the body. The next disease that might appear is asthma. Now this is a deepening disease- after all, people rarely die from eczema, but frequently die of asthma. The disease has moved from the skin to the lungs- from an outer organ to an inner organ. Again, steroids might be used, probably frequently and for many years. The patient's lungs are likely to get weaker and weaker, and thus there are more coughs after colds, treated with antibiotics and  more steroids, then bronchitis, pneumonia and so on. All this time the disease is going deeper and deeper within the body, putting more and more strain on those vulnerable inner organs like the heart and the liver, until any weak area will just give out..

So that is frequently the pathway of a person's disease- typically the disease starts at a shallow, non-life-threatening level, is suppressed with drugs and emerges again in a new form at a deeper and more life- threatening level. The disease may manifest in a different way, but this pattern of movement from a shallow level to a deeper level is the pattern that tends to emerge for most people when they look at their own medical history.

This model of disease is based on observations of many thousands of patients over hundreds of years, and demonstrates the true science on which homeopathy is based. Homeopaths have examined the human experience of disease over lifetimes, evolved a model of disease progression, and then tested it by observing the way that patients move towards a healthy state. Because surely, if disease when suppressed goes deeper and deeper into the patient's organs, then logically when curing a patient the disease will go into reverse, i.e. it will move from a deeper level to a shallower and less life-threatening level?

This is indeed what happens, and is the sort of remedy reaction which makes a homeopath very happy! If we are treating a patient with serious lung pathology, whose lung symptoms start to improve and whose skin starts to get worse, then we know that cure is going in the right direction and that our patient is getting better. This is because the disease has started to move from the inside to the outside, and from a life-threatening condition to a less life threatening condition. At this point, the homeopath would like to drink a glass of champagne with the patient of course, but some explaining always needs to be done. The patient needs to be reassured that the skin condition will pass with the right treatment, and that in itself it is a very good sign, even though it is unsightly. This is known as 'Hering's Law of Cure' - disease in the process of cure moves from the top of the body to the bottom and from the inside to the outside.

 I am going to repeat myself - people rarely die of acne, or eczema, or even impetigo. As diseases go, skin diseases are more desirable than most!