Naomi Richman

I know I promised to write about remedy potencies and dosing in this blog, but I felt that the “why” of homeopathy might

Naomi Richman

be more important right now than the “how”. Homeopathic treatment clearly involves more time, active participation, and suspension of disbelief than traditional allopathic medicine, not to mention giving up things like drinking coffee and using Tiger Balm because they might interfere with your treatment. So, the question remains, why bother?

To answer, I’ll tell you my story. In the early ‘80s, I went through a few weeks of having no energy, and various other symptoms that I can barely remember. I was diagnosed with the Epstein –Barr virus (like many others during that time), and a friend advised me to see a homeopath. When I was given these little white sugar pills, I did not take them seriously. I did feel better, but then thought that whatever I had been suffering from had run its course. Then I started drinking coffee again, and doing other things that antidoted the remedy. Wow. I felt the way I’d felt before treatment.

Clearly homeopathy didn’t work, and I had just felt better from a placebo effect. My homeopathy told me to redose, and once again. I felt better. This lasted until the next time I antidoted, and with the second relapse and third dose of the remedy, I reluctantly decided that there might be something to this that I didn’t understand, but that worked for me.

A few years later, I had a newborn baby with colic. My pediatrician told me that I would have to live through it and that it would pass. I couldn’t stand hearing her crying and miserable, and nothing I tried seemed to work for more than a few minutes. I called the homeopath, and with the second remedy, the colic was gone. Permanently. After four days. My pediatrician said that it probably hadn’t been true colic.

My cat suffered from a bad reaction to a vaccine. She lay in her own waste products, listless, with cloudy eyes, unable to stand. She was clearly dying. A friend, who was a homeopathic vet, told me to give her the remedy China, 12c. My husband asked – “What’s this supposed to do? Bring her back to life?” I replied that it might stimulate her immune system, give her some appetite (she hadn’t eaten in days), and I didn’t know what else. As I was saying this, I was holding her on my lap and holding her mouth shut with the little pellets inside. She jumped off of my lap and went to the food bowl and began eating. She lived another twelve years.

Now I know that I might have had a placebo effect, and somehow maybe my daughter just got better on her own. But when the cat responded, I knew I had to trust that this homeopathic medicine really could work.

Naomi Richman, MFT, is a psychotherapist and homeopath with offices in Petaluma and Berkeley.

www.naomirichman.com