November/December 2002 Alternative Health
Evolution of a Medical Paradigm:
The Hope and History of Homeopathy
Part Two

by Douglas Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom(NA)

Douglas Brown
A 10 year old girl - let’s call her Cindy - was brought to me by her parents. In addition to eye pain, dizziness, insomnia, and other symptoms, she developed a number of compulsive behaviors, including odd rolling movements of her eyes. Her parents were concerned about the possibility of depression, as after a difficult encounter at school she became extremely upset and said she wanted to kill herself.

An ophthalmologist had diagnosed hysteria. A conventional psychiatric evaluation may well have diagnosed depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and stressed a family history of suicide and depression. Each diagnosis implicitly invokes a model of what is wrong: in the former case, a somatic expression of intra-psychic conflict; in the latter, a biological inheritance of an imbalance of neuro-transmitters in the brain.

Cindy’s distress was upsetting the entire family, and the parents wanted, understandably, to understand their daughter’s difficulties, some way of explaining it. Yet neither promised a satisfactory cure. How could homeopathy help?

After talking with Cindy at length, I learned that although she loved to read, she "loathed" writing. Curious, I asked her to tell me more about that. It seems that even though she was at a Montessori School, which is famous for respecting the individuality of children’s learning styles, she had felt her creativity stymied. "They were crushing my imagination." Her suicidal despair at school occurred after her teacher insisted she keep her writing to the assigned topic. Eye-rolling, saliva-swishing, and other odd, automatic type of behaviors occurred mostly when she felt forced to give up individual, creative expression for the sake of the class.

"What exactly do you feel like," I pressed Cindy, "when you’re forced to abandon your creative expression?" After a contemplative pause, she responded with an image: "Like a parrot in a cage!"

What a fascinating metaphor, I thought. A parrot, after all, is the embodiment of creativity denied. In spite of all its color, it cannot voice anything original, but simply "parrots" back what it is told. I researched what was known about the homeopathic remedy made from parrot feather, known as Macaw. It turns out that this remedy has proven curative in cases where the deepest conflict was between the sense of self and the need for expression, and that these issues came to the surface when the remedy was "proven."

Other aspects of Cindy also corresponded with themes and symptoms that became manifest during the proving of macaw feather. What is a proving? Homeopaths learn about their remedies by taking them themselves. A proving is a detailed, organized group study of a remedy by the careful notation of symptoms, feelings, and dreams that develop while taking a remedy. In Cindy’s case, her dreams of tropical places, dreams of many colors, her deep feeling of being unable to speak (or write) her truth, were things that were recorded by homeopaths who investigated the properties of Macaw by taking the remedy in 1999. After several more conventional homeopathic remedies failed to act, I prescribed a single dose of Macaw.

The results have been dramatic. Two weeks after the dose she announced that she was "considering giving up her aversion to writing." Three months later, her mother reports that her daughter is full of joy, and that "she now identifies herself as a writer!" The eye rolling and other compulsive behaviors have completely stopped. In addition, Cindy no longer is oppositional and difficult about studies, or about getting along with her brother. Cindy reports with joy that she was given a writing journal as a present, "since I was writing so many things they thought I should have a place to write things down."

Cindy’s cure defies all conventional understandings about health and disease. The remedy, after all, had no thing in it. A piece of parrot feather was ground with milk sugar and diluted to the point where not a single molecule of the substance remained. It is clear to me, to the patient, and to her parents, that taking the remedy completely changed the course of Cindy’s life, where two previous remedies (Lauroceraseus and Veratrum) had no lasting positive effect. So what happened?

The cure came when there occurred a resonance between the idea, information, energy, and essence of a remedy and the "place" within the patient where energy was bound up. Remedies are not medicines in a pharmacological sense, but rather aspects of consciousness. Macaw, at essence, turns out to be the consciousness of the dilemma, or polarity, between free expression versus group identification (there are other subtle and varied manifestations of Macaw essence that are also expressed in individuals who may become sick when in a Macaw state).

Cindy’s compulsive behaviors, her loathing of writing, her eye pain, her suicidal despair, were all symptoms of a single, unified state: the Macaw state. When the remedy cured one symptom, all the symptoms were ultimately cured. Symptoms are not isolated manifestations of biochemical or genetic derangements (although certainly these derangements participate in the expression of symptoms). Rather they are expressions of a state of being which has imposed itself upon the soul, psyche, and soma of the embodied human spirit. Homeopathy works when the remedy given is similar to the state of the patient. When the remedy matches the patient, a dynamic healing process is set into motion. When the remedy doesn’t match, healing does not occur, no matter how therapeutic the encounter may feel between homeopath and patient.

How can homeopathy explain itself to patients trying to understand themselves and their symptoms? Psychiatry and medicine offer diagnoses which give people the opportunity to see themselves as members of a group similarly afflicted with a disease which exists apart from them, and therefore helps to take away the responsibility, guilt, or shame for the illness. Good homeopathy, on the other hand, insists upon driving deeply into the core of the problem. Instead of categorizing a person based on what symptoms are found in common with established, defined, diseases, it seeks to perceive what is unique about the patient, and what trouble stirs at the core, in the depths of the soul. Instead of offering medication to suppress symptoms in the name of disease management, it seeks to stimulate a cure by offering a remedy which will resonate with the deepest dilemma of the patient.

We live in a time when a mechanical conception of health and disease still holds sway over much of our thinking. We talk about our parts wearing out, getting a "tune up", and look for a material, genetic basis for faulty metabolic pathways. Yet homeopathy offers a window into a far more complex, subtle, and fascinating reality. That reality relates to consciousness, and promises a radical re-appraisal of our understanding of the relationship of our subjective realities to our physical well-being. In part three, I’ll describe in greater detail my view of the nature of this mind-body relationship through my homeopathic window.

Doug Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom is a nationally-certified classical homeopath specializing in the treatment of chronic emotional, physical, and mental illness in adults and children. He can be reached at (503) 253-6334, or by email at healing@teleport.com