For the last few years I had been using chiropractic adjustments as an excuse to visit a friend of mine.  One to two times a week I went in to get a tune-up.  I was never really sure if the adjustments were helping but I figured the treatments couldn't hurt, and anyway I enjoyed my friend's company. 

 

One day, two new practitioners set up shop in the clinic he was working out of.  They were a husband and wife team who were focused in the area of alternative medicine.  The husband was a naturopath, specializing in treating people using vitamins and herbs.  The wife was a homeopath, treating people with homeopathic remedies.  They would work in concert with each other to assist people where western medicine would often offer no cure.  My friend told me a little about what they did and I was intrigued.  Perhaps this was the next item on my path to recovery.  I made appointments with them both.  I was a little skeptical after my experience with regular doctors.  I was scared that I would once again be pronounced healthy and sent on my way. 

 

I was a slightly embarrassed to admit that I knew little about either naturopathy or homeopathy.   I had studied much about food and what to eat and what not too.  I understood that to be healthy I needed to take in healthy building blocks to construct my body with.  These two practitioners revealed that there was more to learn.  By this time I was tired of doing it on my own, instead of trying to become an expert on a new subject, I would go to see them both and let the process unfold.

 

Let's back up a little.  For the last six months I was feeling better, not good most of the time, but better.  Through this time I started to notice that I felt improved at some times and poorer at others.   I began asking why?  There must be some variable that was causing it.  Was it internal or external?  Could I notice a pattern?  The times of feeling good and the times of feeling bad were not dramatically different, but they were noticeable.   With only a short time of noticing the fluctuations, I had not put together any real theory of what was going on.  The alternative medicine team would open up an avenue to find out more on these variations.

 

I started by seeing the naturopath.  I told him how thinking was often a challenge.  I said how ideas seemed to start in one place and get blown by a whirlwind and miss their mark.  Where once learning had come easy, it was now a struggle.  I talked about how my vision was always grainy and how I was almost always never fully awake.  The most amazing thing happened on that first visit; where I had experienced only blank stairs and disbelief from heal care professionals, and a lot of other people, he believed every word I spoke.  It was the often spoke of, weight off the shoulders.  Not only did he believe me, he said that he had spoken with people about this sort of thing before.  Oh My God, I was not alone.  He even said that there was a good chance we could correct the issue.  I breathed a sigh of relief and waited with rapt attention as he said what we would do next. 

 

He said that since it had all started with alcohol poising we should work on the liver.  He put me on a regimen of liver cleansing and rebuilding.  He warned me that as things detoxified I would most likely feel worse before I got better.  Sure enough this is what happened, but after a few weeks of feeling a little sick I was again feeling better. 

 

A few days after seeing the naturopath I went to his wife the homeopath.  I walked into her office knowing nothing about homeopathy, but it didn't matter.  Her husband had believed me when I talked about my symptoms and I had faith in her.  The first thing she had me do was fill out a long questionnaire.  It asked about my past health, my relationship with both my parents, my relationship with other people.  It asked about my views on life, love, money, and just about every thing else one could imagine.  I was confused.  I came here to clear up my brain.  Why did she want to know about all of this?  For the next half hour we talked about the questionnaire and lots of other stuff.  At the end of the visit she went to a large filing cabinet and pulled out a small white packet that looked like it contained sugar granules.  She told me to put the contents of the packed under my tongue and let it dissolve.  It tasted like sugar also.  Now I was really confused.  Had I just paid a fair amount of money just to be given a sugar pill, a placebo? Thankfully she sent me home with a book on what homeopathy was and asked me to read it before I came back in two weeks.

 

Homeopathy was like nothing I had encountered before.  It is based on the premise that if you give the body a little of something it will learn how to deal with a lot of it.  It posits that every substance taken into the body will have an effect on it.  This effect is called a Symptom Cluster.  So if a person takes an incredibly small amount of substance X then they will exhibit symptom cluster Y.  The way homeopathic treatments works is, the practitioner will start by finding out what your symptoms are for your particular disease state.  Then they will match your symptoms with a known symptom cluster caused by a certain substance.  Finally they will give you an incredibly small amount of that substance.  The result is that your body will naturally adapt to that substance and symptom cluster, thus causing your body to heal from the disease state causing the same symptoms. 

 

I was skeptical at best when I found out what homeopathy was, but it did seam to be working.  To follow an increasingly common pattern, taking her treatment made me feel worse almost instantly.  The first week or two after seeing them both was rough, but after that things started to make a marked improvement.  After a month of doing what they said I felt noticeably better.  In only three months of working with this husband and wife pair I had experienced more recovery then I had over the last two years.  Things were still not where I remembered them but I was beginning to have days that approached it.  Things were good, but there was still obviously something else going on.

 

Note:

Looking back on it I'm still not sure if homeopathy really did something for me or if it was just an elaborate method for eliciting the placebo response.  To be absolutely honest I still don't care if this answer is ever fully answered for me.  The results were worth every bit of the time, money and effort.  I will be grateful to both of them for years to come.