Educational Materials

Advantages of homeopathy

1. The remedies are highly efficacious (as you will witness on the videos in Dr. Sharif’s seminar). The patients often feel better before they even leave the office!
   
   
2. Homeopathy is convenient for the practitioner:
   Constitutional prescribing is very convenient because once you know a person's remedy, and they return to you at any point, complaining of any acute illness or asking you to continue helping them with their chronic illness, all you have to do is to evaluate to see if their constitutional remedy is still "working" or not. If not, you redose their remedy.
   Are they always going to need the same remedy? For the most part, yes. A person's "constitution" might change with time, or they might enter an "acute" state. But, that’s a more advanced topic that we can’t totally address at this point. For the most, the patient’s remedy stays the same whether you continue to treat them for a chronic ailment, or if they come down with an acute illness. Once you learn the overall subject of "how to evaluate whether the remedy is still working or not?", you can do this evaluation for patients literally within minutes, and be done with the visit in a fraction of the time it takes to write down several other supportive naturopathic treatments! You can just redose and send them home. Of course, as a responsible ND (if you are acting as a PCP), you will have to do some physical exam, and do some review of systems, but for all practical purposes, your treatment plan can be very short and efficient.
   
   Constitutional homeopathic prescribing is very convenient for the practitioner as you simply place a few pills in your patient's mouth, and their healing process quickly starts before they even leave the office!
   
   The practitioner often doesn't have to write down a long-drawn out treatment plan for a cold, flu, sinusitis, bladder infection, etc., as the single constitutional remedy can be so potent that can truly save the day without much supportive therapy.
   
   
3. Homeopathy is convenient for the patient, as far as dosing and expense:
   The patients don't have to take some supplement 2-3 times a day, day after day, week after week, month after month. One dose of a remedy can help them more than all your supplements if you were to compare. However, if you can do both (homeopathy and basic naturopathy), that would be wonderful. Give them herbal and nutritional supplements to "feed" their organs/tissues and/or do Drainage for them to cleanse their liver/kidneys, AND offer them their similimum (or constitutional) homeopathic remedy at the same time.
   
   The remedies are inexpensive- No one will turn down the remedies due to financial hardship. Patients are used to buying large grocery bags full of supplements, so once they find that their homeopathic remedy is something they take once a month or so, and it costs $10-15 a dose, they feel extremely liberated and happy.
   
   
4. Children love to suck on those small, sugar pills! And, they often take only ONE dose which lasts for days to weeks, if not months.
   
   A two year old autistic child might only need a remedy every month or two. This is very convenient as opposed to taking tinctures or herbal pills which children (especially autistic children who are typically very picky eaters). Most of the autistic children in my practice will not take regular supplements, but they have no trouble sucking on the sugar pills or drinking water with the remedy dissolved in it!
   
   
5. Patients literally fall in love with homeopathy once they get the hang of it- They come in asking for it because the pills help them feel so good emotionally! Other therapies, they do not necessarily fall in love with- perhaps just like them at the best. They don’t come in excited that they are going to get a bottle of some vitamin or herbal capsules, or worse yet, some alcohol based tincture. This, of course, leads to better compliance.
   
   Sometimes patients enjoy the emotional uplifting effect of the remedies they end up forgetting about their CC.
   
   
6. One homeopathic remedy helps a patient’s acute and chronic illness at the same time.
   
   
7. In management of chronic diseases, only energetic approaches to healing can bring a person out of the depth of disease and ultimately cure them. For the most part, homeopathy is a rather easy energetic tool to learn and practice.
   
   If you don’t practice homeopathy, you will likely not be able to even truly appreciate, comprehend, or embrace this concept fully- In most likelihood, you truly won’t even know what an amazingly healing tool you are missing in your practice because you have probably never witnessed the same deep level of healing in your own patient population in front of your very eyes often within minutes after the person takes their remedy in your office.
   
   Refer to Dr. Herscu’s Map of Hierarchy. In this hierarchy, if a patient is in Phase III or IV, they need a remedy to come out of it, and transition to a healthier Phase (I or II). Patients in Phase III and IV can not be truly helped even with the best herbal and other natural therapies. Only homeopathy can bring them out of these deeper ill states. To further understand this concept, you will have to delve into the ocean of miasms, and further study and practice homeopathy.
   
   
8. There are some conditions that are very difficult to cure with non-homeopathic medicines. An example would be warts. One single dose of a constitutional remedy can cure numerous warts on the body within days to weeks. How would you treat all these warts in a child? The pediatrician basically said that there is no treatment other than cauterization which is not practical in this situation.
   Another example would be autism.
   Another example is suicidal depression.
   
   
9. Homeopathy can result in such a large variety of improvements and positive physiological as well as emotional changes in such as short amount of time. This leads to much higher compliance on the part of the patient because they have most likely never felt so many positive changes in such a short amount of time.
   
   
10. Homeopathy is planet friendly- A diluted, trace amount of a substance can be sufficient for thousands and thousands of patients! You do not need to endanger any herbs as the population of people who like naturopathy/herbal medicine grows. If we use homeopathy more, we will not need to use as much herbs. Of course, we will always need to use herbs, but can cut down on the amount of our consumption. Notice that Drainage therapies (UNDA numbers) are also homeopathic in nature, and this same discussion applies to them- they are planet friendly as well.
    
    
11. There are situations where the patient cannot take herbal or nutritional medicines, and homeopathy can be of great help. For example, if a person is in comma, you can place a homeopathic pill in their mouth, or dissolve it in water and place a small amount of this water on their body. It will most likely get into their body through the skin. Remember, homeopathy is energy medicine and the medicines can affect a person’s energy field without going through their blood.
    
    
12. Homeopathy helps your practice grow. How? Once you treat a complicated case, your patients will refer every ill person they know to you. For example, my autistic child’s mother told her neighbor who has Lugaric’s disease that I was able to treat her daughter’s autism and that I might be able to help Lugaric’s. So, I ended up seeing him as well.
    
    
13. When patients experience the deep healing power of homeopathy in their body, they realize "Oh, I guess there is much more to natural medicine than OTC nutritional supplements." They will come in to see you again and again for deeper and deeper levels of healing on a physical and mental/emotional level, and they will not forget about their experience or the experience of their loves ones whom you have also been treating.
    
    
14. Homeopathic remedies are the deepest acting medicines and can bring about cure. Herbal medicine and nutritional medicine are much more palliative, although homeopathy can also be used in a palliative fashion. Of course, constitutional homeopathy is not palliative- it is ultimately curative if you learn how to handle chronic cases.
    
    
15. Unlike OTC herbal and nutritional supplements, patients cannot get the prescription strength (200C, 1M or higher) homeopathic remedies on their own, and therefore they will return to your office for follow up. This will assure that they will not treat themselves, and you can monitor their progress month by month by month. Taking a hyoscyamus patient from Phase IV to Phase I over a period of a few years does take some knowhow and experience with medicine/healing. At this point in the evolution of humankind (in year 2008), patients (and their parents, in case your patient is a child) are by no means equipped to travel the path towards complete healing on their own. They appear to need a guide.
    
    
16. Homeopathy is a wonderful alternative to those who cannot take drugs, or even herbs. For example, if a person with CC of depression cannot take anti-depressant drugs or even herbs (such as St. John’s wort), or nutritional supplements (such as 5-HTP), you can very effectively treat them using homeopathy.
    
    

Advantages of combining naturopathic medicine and homeopathy?

As a naturopathic physician, you can also do physical exam on your patients, provide lab tests, order diagnostic imaging, prescribe nutritional supplements and herbs, and other natural therapies, and in some cases even pharmaceutical drugs if absolutely needed. As a homeopath, you cannot do much if any of the above. Therefore, your service will be very limited as a homeopath if you did not practice naturopathy.

If you practice naturopathic medicine and homeopathy concurrently, you will gain deeper insights into the human condition, health and healing that you would not if you practice one without the other. Healing a person is often not a straight forward subject. You will find that it’s not often sufficient to just give a homeopathic remedy to someone - they often need other naturopathic and even allopathic treatments. Therefore, the larger your scope of practice, the more you will be involved in the care of your patients, and the more you will learn and understand all the intricacies of healing. I can share numerous examples from my own practice. In fact, most of my patients belong to this category.

For example, if a person comes in with fibromyalgia, you will most likely not be able to cure them with homeopathy alone. They need lifestyle recommendations, nutritional advice, and often very deep organ and cellular cleansing. If you were a pure homeopath, you would give a remedy (and at the best some nutritional advice) to such a patient, and send them out the door. Hopefully, you would be wise and refer them to a ND who would take on the rest of the program. However, there are a number of problems that can arise if the ND starts to detox such a person. Detoxifying the liver of some people (especially a fibromyalgia patient) can potentially antidote their homeopathic remedy, whether you use UNDA numbers, herbal medicines or even castor oil packs to do it. If you oversee the care of their remedy as well as the other ND treatments at the same time, you will not only develop a deeper understanding of what happens to such a patient(s), you will also be able support the patient more appropriately once they call you and say something like "I drank dandelion root tea the other day, and I have not felt as good since then. All my bodily aches and pains have returned, and I have also noticed I am more grumpy at work." Clearly, their homeopathic remedy has been antidoted by an herbal medicine. It’s very important that you develop such insights so that you can then navigate such a patient(s) through the maze of healing. I find that pure homeopaths that do not offer deeper ND treatments (such as herbal and detoxification medicines) are often too idealistic, and truly do not possess sufficient knowledge to truly cure patients. Such practitioners, at the very best, offer lifestyle and nutritional advice, and might even genuinely (and if my say, naively) believe that such suggestions are sufficient as a complementary modalities to homeopathy. What they are missing in their protocol is botanicals and other ND treatments (such as UNDA numbers) that target organ and cellular regeneration which is absolutely critical in many of the cases that you will see in your naturopathic practice. Detoxification and organ repair and regeneration is not a bonus, it is often truly critical to offer it to patients. As a practicing ND and homeopath both, you can offer all these therapies and truly aid your patients in the complex maze towards optimal healing.