What Happens When You Take A Remedy?
by Sarah Daniel, BA, DIHom, FBIH
You’ve gone to your homeopath, who has listened to your description of what’s the matter and asked you questions and maybe even more questions—which you’ve answered the best you could—and now you have taken the remedy that was prescribed for you. What next?
How do you tell it’s working? What are you going to experience now? Homeopathy is often described as ‘holistic’, that is ‘concerned with wholes or complete systems rather than analysis or separation or dissection into parts’. Remedies are chosen according to the whole ‘picture’ of what is amiss in the individual. As a ‘subtle energy medicine,’ the homeopathic remedy is designed to boost your immunity as well as your general health on all levels, from the inside. Theoretically, you should be able to throw off just about any illness with this kind of help.
But what does that mean about what you will experience when you’ve had a well chosen remedy that matches your body-mind-spirit system? Remedies are intended to match the individual, and although there are many people who would benefit from any one remedy—that is, several people taking the same remedy—each of them is also a distinct person and will experience their own unique response to the subtle energy boost from the remedy. That means nobody can predict for certain everything you might experience when you have taken your well chosen remedy. There are, however, certain patterns to what happens after a person takes a remedy.
When you initially went to the homeopath, you were concerned about certain symptoms or a particular illness that you want freedom from. So that’s likely what you will be paying attention to after you’ve taken your remedy. Several kinds of things can happen at this point. You may feel immediately better in general, in yourself, and your complaint may ease immediately also. That improvement may continue without interruption, but that is not the only pattern of healing that can take place. Another pattern is that you could feel immediately better in general, in yourself, but your specific complaint could start feeling worse! (Don’t worry this is also a manifestation of healing.) As your body responds to the message of the remedy, it begins to respond more strongly to that symptom; when that happens, the symptom can become temporarily worse. What you will notice is that the ‘worsening’ will be very sharp and intense—but then it will suddenly drop off. You may go through several waves of this kind of experience before you feel better and your symptoms resolve. If this kind of thing goes on and on without resolving, or if you are concerned about what you are experiencing, contact your homeopath and discuss the situation. Your homeopath will be able to figure out if anything needs to be changed about your remedy.
Another thing that can happen is that you may experience a return of old symptoms from illnesses and conditions that happened long ago, that you thought you’d got rid of. This too is a manifestation of healing. Keep a record of what comes up and report it to your homeopath at your next consultation.
What else can happen? Well, even if what you brought to the homeopath was a purely physical symptom, there are always mental, emotional and spiritual parts to any state of physical distress. (It’s a holistic medicine and concerns all aspects of the person.) As the remedy stimulates your system, you may find you have vivid dreams. You may remember incidents and feelings from the past. You may have sudden insights about your life. You may find yourself responding a bit differently to situations in your life. And just as you may have a temporary increase in physical symptoms from time to time, you can also have an uncomfortable mood fall upon you suddenly and intensely, only to have it suddenly disappear. In fact, as all your responses are connected and are part of the same process, at times you can relieve physical distress by looking inside to see if there is an emotion you’re holding onto that you weren’t aware of, and then you can go about expressing it.
What else can help your system harmonise its healing? Any kind of inner work that involves visualisation, meditation, or dream work. Yogic breathing exercises. Stretching the body. Whatever will help you to get in touch with yourself as a whole being, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, socially or spiritually.
This is your great adventure, this life. You’ll be amazed what you can do for yourself with the help of a good homeopathic remedy.
About the Author
Sarah Daniel, BA, DiHom, FBIH, has studied and worked with homeopathy since she took a foundation year at the Burren School in Ireland in 1993-94. She received the DIHom from the British Institute of Homeopathy in 2000. Sarah has studied with Jan Scholten, Jeremy Sherr, Ian Watson, Massimo Mangialavori and others. She works exclusively with psychiatrist/psychotherapist Harvey R. Wasserman, MD, through The Healing Road Clinic in Galway, Ireland, where she designs radionically made potencies for emotional healing to assist in psychotherapy. She can be contacted by email at radipath1@aol.com Sarah is also an artist. You can see one of her paintings, Il Trovatore, here.