Quick and easy results for optimum patient health
HOMEOPATHY IS A NATURAL FOR CHIROPRACTORS — because it works with innate intelligence. Each tiny pellet of a homeopathic remedy is like a flash drive full of information that “reinstalls the software,” i.e., it reminds the body that “you know how to have a healthy nervous system” or strong and healthy bones or muscles.
A remedy for patient malady
Homeopathic remedies have much to offer your patients:
- Fast-acting: Some patients will actually feel the effects as soon as they ingest the remedy; it works faster than herbs or vitamins
- Easily available in health food stores, some drug stores and online
- Inexpensive: pennies per dose
- No rebound or withdrawal: Your patient can discontinue it without symptoms recurring
- No drug interactions: It can work well alongside meds and supplements
- Safe: Reactions are rare and serious side effects are unknown.1
Practitioners will benefit as well from recommending homeopathy as this unusual modality will set the chiropractor apart and patients will be grateful for the relief they feel. Homeopathy is available as single remedies, plus more unusual ones are also blended into combination formulas which chiropractors may choose to stock in their office, just as they stock nutritional supplement and glandular formulas.
How does it work?
Homeopathy is totally safe because there is nothing in it — not even one molecule of its original starting substance — yet it is powerful and fast-acting. How can we make these contradictory claims? Because it is information technology.
The manufacturing process imprints the healing information onto water like recording onto a flash drive. The process takes the starting substance through many stages of dilution (making it safe) and potentizes or energizes it at each step (making it powerful). Water behaves differently at these very high dilutions, becoming coherent or structured, as explained by the newly emerging field of ultra-high dilution physics. Two Nobel laureates have testified that their studies explain how homeopathy works.2
Now let’s look at some specific remedies.
Hypericum for the nervous system
Hypericum is almost a universal remedy for nerve-related symptoms: tingling and numbness, pain shooting along a nerve, and trauma to nerve-rich areas (like hitting a finger with a hammer or slamming it in a car door):
- Arnica for soft tissue trauma: homeopathy’s best-known remedy, Arnica is good for sore muscles, pulled muscles, sports injuries, sprains and strains, and bruising.
- Symphytum for fractures: This is the well-known herbal remedy comfrey, known traditionally as “knit-bone,” used to speed the healing of fractures and reduce bone pain.
- Bryonia for joints that hurt to move. When your patient is splinting or guarding, think bryonia, for a bruised rib that makes it painful to laugh or cough or sneeze, or knees that hurt from walking that make the patient take cautious steps.
- Rhus tox for “rusty gate” joints: This is for your patient who needs to limber up when first getting out of bed, or who needs to swing their leg a few times to loosen it up before getting up from a chair.
- Ruta grav. for connective tissue, cartilage and joints in general: sprains and strains, cracking joints, torn tendons and ligaments, and fascia. It has a special affinity for the knee, like the knee that goes out from under someone and for Baker’s cysts.
Three homeopathically-energized minerals to strengthen and heal bone need to be given in a special 6x potency and are known as cell salts or tissue salts:
- Calcarea fluorica (Calc. fluor.) 6x to soften and dissolve: This remedy can help dissolve bone spurs and hardened or condensed tissues like cataracts.
- Calcarea phosphorica (Calc. phos.) 6x to deposit minerals in the bones: This provides the template to send calcium and other minerals to bones and not deposit them elsewhere in the body.
- Silicea 6x strengthens bone as well as hair, skin and nails; you know silica as a supplement, and as a homeopathic remedy it provides the instructions for silica the mineral to go where it is needed. However, Silica 30c (full strength) can push foreign objects out of the body and should not be given to patients with a rod or plate and screws.
Here are a few more unusual remedies that are not available in health food stores, targeted at conditions often not considered reversible:
- Aesculus for the SI joint, used for pain and stiffness there and patients who have difficulty getting up from a chair.
- Hekla lava dissolves bone spurs and spinal stenoses, working with Calc. fluor. 6x.
- Helodrilus for vertebral disks, works with Calc. fluor. 6x to strengthen them and address herniation, and for spinal injuries in general.
For DCs
And for the burned-out practitioner? Sepia is a great remedy for people who are exhausted from overwork, often from having many demands made on them, feeling like they have many people tugging at their elbow for help or attention.
Sepia could also be used for a teacher in an overcrowded classroom, a nurse on an understaffed floor, or a single working mother. It can be used for men as well in this overwork/over-responsibility situation. It’s especially good for women because it’s also one of our best hormone-balancing remedies, from menarche to menopause.
Directions for use
The remedies will come with instructions, typically several pellets dissolved in the mouth three times a day. But the label doesn’t have room for certain adjustments.
Homeopathy can be taken more often, even hourly in an emergency. The stronger and more urgent the symptoms, for example right after a car accident, the more often it needs to be taken. Also, some people are relatively nonreactive to homeopathy and will learn from experience that they need extra doses (note that more frequent doses are used to increase strength, rather than additional pellets; remember that each dose is not transferring physical/material substance to the body but rather information, so repeating a dose is like repeating the instructions).
As a general rule, in an acute situation, people need to take enough of the remedy to feel a difference — to feel it kicking in — then let the body’s healing energy take it from there, taking additional doses as needed to keep the healing process happening.
This guidance doesn’t work for a remedy for a chronic condition, though, because people usually don’t feel it working on the spot. When taking Symphytum for a fracture, for example, the patient will follow the basic protocol of three times a day.
Caution for hypersensitives
You probably know who your hypersensitive patients are: They are not just allergic to specific things; they seem to overreact to everything, whether medications, herbs or supplements.
These people are likely to need less than most other people, and to overreact if following the standard instructions on the label. Hypersensitives tend to need more handholding than other patients, so you might want to warn them away from homeopathy in general, unless they can commit to taking remedies very cautiously.
What could possibly go wrong?
Not much — an “overdose” in homeopathy is not harmful in the long run — in fact, too much of a remedy is pushing the patient too fast in the direction of cure and the long-term result can be positive. It can be uncomfortable in the short run, though.
The body can only process so much of the remedy’s information at once, and if the body is presented with more than it can handle, it pushes back in the form of increased symptoms, the same symptoms the remedy was intended to treat. This is called an “aggravation” in homeopathy. It’s often said that “You have to get worse before you get better” in homeopathy and this is absolutely not true as long as mild to moderate doses are used (the typical 30c dose in health food stores) and the patient is told to stop if the remedy starts to feel too intense. When in doubt, it’s always safe to stop the remedy and start again later.
The bottom line
Start by recommending these few remedies and you are likely to get good feedback from your patients. Or consider stocking combination remedies that include even more unusual remedies.
They may give even better results and keep patients coming back to you for more, since they are only available through professionals. And if you’re feeling exhausted beyond repair, try some Sepia for yourself.
BURKE LENNIHAN, RN, CCH, is a Harvard alumna who has been practicing homeopathy for nearly 30 years in the Boston area and is the author of Your Natural Medicine Cabinet. Her book provides practical tips for treating more than 100 home-care-type ailments. She is the former director of a professional training program in homeopathy and can be reached via greenhealing.life.