Homeopathy – potency and dose and how to prescribe homeopathy at home.

I get lots of questions about homeopathic potency and dose. What homeopathic potency to use? What is the dose? How many pills to take?
Well, let’s have a look together and see if we can understand more about this subject.

What is homeopathic potency?

Potency is an indication of how many times the homeopathic remedy was diluted and potentized.

Dilution depending on the scale used might be 1:10 for X (D) potency and 1:100 for C potency.

Potentising is done after each dilution and each dilution changes the potency by 1, meaning if you want to achieve potency 6C you need six steps from the Mother tincture (extract of the original substance) to make it. At each step, you are potentizing the remedy by banging it on the resilient surface. You can watch the video on What is homeopathic potency here?

Common centesimal and decimal potencies are:
Low: 3X, 6X, 12X, 30X, 5C or 6C, 9C, 12C or 15C
Medium: 30C, 200C
High: 1M and higher like 10M, 50M. Also LM potency.

Potency discussion

Potency is best described by comparison. If you can compare potency to a stone thrown into the water well.
The lower potencies are like smaller stones which will give a shorter and weaker sound when reaching the water’s surface. They have a short effect and therefore need to be repeated.
Continuing this comparison high potencies is like bigger stones that have a more significant and longer sound when reaching the water’s surface. This creates a longer effect and no need for a quick repetition.

How deep we want to get into the patient’s symptoms also determines potency choice. If we treat more physical symptoms we want to use lower potencies. How low? It all depends on how long the symptoms present and if try to support them on the organ level.

In the case of emotional and mental symptoms, we want to go higher in the potency, especially if the trauma which caused the symptoms happened a while back.

Other things to take into consideration are the energy of a patient, and how intense are the symptoms presented by the patient. If they penetrate the physical body or emotional state too? Maybe the patient has dreams associated with trauma which indicates that symptoms went deep into unconsciousness and quite high potency is needed to penetrate them.

Homeopathic dose

What’s a dose in homeopathy? A dose is one pill, one tablet, or 1-2 drops of liquid remedy at a time. That’s when you buy remedies in a homeopathic pharmacy because the remedies have potency manually put on.

Other manufacturers often use something called a spraying technique. That means some of the pellets/tablets may not have potency on their surface so it’s better to follow whatever the manufacturer recommends.

Home prescribing

So, what potency to choose when you prescribe at home?
It is safe to say that 30C or lower is good potency to start from. There is a rule in homeopathy that you can always increase the potency if that’s needed. Most of the homeopathic essential kits come in 30C potency. It’s worth having some remedies in 200C too.

A great example is when you have an acute accident. In case it happens that your finger got caught between the doors and you feel like screaming from pain then definitely taking 200C potency is very appropriate. An acute accident produces a lot of energy and to match this energy it’s important to choose the potency which resonates the closest.

Another example is where remedies in 200C potency are recommended is to support child delivery and newborns. Newborns present with the high energy of vital force so higher potencies often resonate better.

Frequency of dose

In an acute state, remedies are given quite often. If an accident with a finger between the doors just happened, you want to give remedy even every 15 minutes for 3-4 doses.
Then you reduce the frequency according to the intensity of the symptoms. In acute states frequency of 3-4 times is often needed. You can watch the video How to take homeopathic remedies here.

Homeopathy to the rescue.

If you tried home prescribing and the symptoms do not change or improve after 24-48 hours is worth changing a remedy or seeking advice from a homeopath who can look at the symptoms from a different angle. You can read a blog about what to tell a homeopath here.

In acute state symptoms often change quickly and remedies also may need to be changed. The chronic states are deeper and slower in resolution, and they require time to see improvement. You may low and high potencies in chronic conditions while working with a homeopath who can support a fine-tuning of your vital force. You can find a blog about homeopathy in different states here.
How do you feel now about helping balance your health with homeopathy?
Let’s talk about homeopathy!

Hello autumn!

The northern hemisphere entered a bit of chilly weather, and colds and flu have started to occur. Are you prepared with some useful remedies on hand?
Homeopathy has some useful remedies in case your colds or coughs start kicking in!

Homeopathic solutions

Merc Sol:

Sore throat with burning pain with swelling of glands (every time the patient takes cold).
Aggravation from heat and cold. Heat and shuddering alternately. Thirsty, desire for cold drinks.
Fluent, profuse nasal discharge, excessive saliva, especially at night. Generally worse at night.

Phosphorus:

Oppressive breathing, worse for the least motion.
Hard, dry, tight-racking cough or easy sputum, salty, sour, sweetish, cold, bloody. A desire for ice-cold drinks, popsicles, or ice cream.
Worse: cold air, exertion, talking, laughing, lying flat or on the left side.
Better: sitting, lying on the right side, cold drinks. Wants a company, to support her. Excitable.

Aconite:

Sudden onset- first signs of colds.
Worse from dry, cold wind. Great thirst, usually for cold drinks.
The main remedy for the early stages of croup. Worse around midnight. Restlessness.

Kali Bich:

Sinus infection. Nasal discharge or post-nasal drip is thick, stringy, and often yellow.
Productive cough with thick or green stringy sputum in bronchitis or asthma. Croup. Chilly and worse from the cold. Desire warm drinks.

Hepar Sulph:

It is a very useful remedy for treating swollen glands and frequent infections.
Painful ear infections in children who can’t bear cold air drafts. Slight exposure to cold brings on a painful and hoarse dry cough that’s worsened by drinking cold drinks.
The cough is usually loose with rattling and wheezing sounds. Difficult to cough up any mucus.

How to find the right remedy?

Finding the most indicated homeopathic remedy can be tricky at the times. It requires observation of your symptoms, sensations, and symptoms’ modalities (what makes the symptoms better or worse). You can read more about what to take into consideration when looking for a remedy  here.

How are you supporting your health with homeopathy?

Let’s talk about homeopathy!

Let’s talk about homeopathy…

In my last blog, I described my journey to homeopathy and some homeopathic theories. (you can read it here) I would like to continue sharing some thoughts about homeopathy.

After the theory of ‘soil’, another mainstream theory that has a different interpretation within homeopathic treatment is the chemical theory. In the mainstream approach, medicines are used to work against blood readings which means if something is too low, they induce it or if the blood marker is too high, they try to reduce it. But again, logically thinking if you try to push the body in the opposite direction, how is it going to react?

In many cases, the body is going to work by pushing it back. In homeopathy, we look at why the actual state occurs and what is the root cause of for example low thyroid hormones or iron levels.

In more complicated causation like in a case of high blood pressure, it is not enough to just lower it down using medicines, neither allopathic nor homeopathic. High blood pressure indicates that our body demonstrates some kind of imbalance by elevating blood pressure and when forced by medicines to lower it down it would push back. We can see that when doctors need to increase the dose of hypertensive medicines or add another agent where often the root cause of the problem has not been detected or addressed.

Root cause- how to find it?

So, the main difference between homeopathy and allopathy (mainstream medicine) is looking for a root cause of the health imbalance and not just trying to fix it artificially which often only helps temporarily.

In the case of high blood pressure, from a homeopathic perspective, I would be interested in the condition of the adrenal glands and liver of the patient, her/his stress levels, and their origin as well as the quality of sleep. Also, any emotional events like a deep shock that could be recent or from some time ago.

Of course, also other general physical and emotional symptoms as well as unusual things that changed in that person at a similar time. The founder of the homeopathic college, which I completed, kept telling us that 10 minutes of meditation a day can be more effective to lower blood pressure than any medications! And also without side effects;)

Physical or emotional?

The next important aspect of homeopathic treatment would be a question: What can be the root cause of physical states? I would put them in two main groups, external and internal which are quite obvious.

Some of the external factors I have already mentioned before, like food and what is closely related to it, and any type of toxicity we might be exposed to. Toxicity is not only from food but also from other everyday products we may use. Just to mention a few of them, products we use to wash our bodies, clean our houses or treat our hair, nails, and …teeth. You will find more information about toxicity and food in my next blogs.

Within internal factors, homeopathy focuses its attention on our emotional state which can be recent or from many years ago, like emotional traumas from the past. Traumas to the body can be physical or emotional and we may not be able to see a direct link with our current states but it does exist and it is a role of a homeopath to recognize those as they present within the patient.

A good comparison is that treating homeopathically a person is like peeling an onion from layers and the number of those depends on all sorts of trauma that a person had and how deep they got suppressed… Yes, it may sound a bit vague but at the end of the day, every individual is different, so it is a homeopathic approach to every single case. You can check this video on what is chronic prescribing.

Going deeper

One of the emotional states which are hard for everyone is grief. In many cultures, death is not something that might be present in life or something pleasant to talk about.

However, life and death are inseparable as much as it may sound pathetic, which at the same time does not change the difficulty to go through the grieving process when it comes to our loved ones…

Like every emotional state is different for each of us, as well as homeopathic remedies to relieve it, because your way of expressing the emotion of sadness is different from that of other people. One person closes himself and stops eating, another cries and needs conversation, and another cries in secret, or feels strong anger …
So as many variations of the state there are different possible homeopathic remedies that we can use. As with many emotional states, it is different for each of us, as well as homeopathic remedies, help with it. In the state of grief or other emotional imbalances, it is important to “do something” to help our mind to deal with emotions. (You can Check this video to see what is important to help with homeopathy in an acute state.)

By “do something” I mean many things, from simple talk through meditation, Bach flower remedies (they work on emotional states) and homeopathy or some other holistic therapy. Emotions that our mind cannot deal with often get suppressed to reappear after some time in our physical body in a form of sickness. Many diseases have origin in the emotional states or are better to say most of them have an emotional factor that has its input… During homeopathic consultations, we try to recognise those links and choose the most similar homeopathic remedies to stimulate the vital force of self-healing in the patients.

Homeopathic laws and methods

You may ask what similar homeopathic remedies mean. “Law of similium” (Like cures like) is one of the principles of homeopathy which in simple words means taking into consideration the emotional and physical symptoms of an individual to select homeopathic remedies or remedies that in a healthy individual induced those symptoms.

Yes, to answer your next question homeopathic remedies are tested on healthy individuals in the process called “homeopathic proving” to know what physical and emotional symptoms they cause, because then they can be used in people presenting these symptoms.

Like cures, the rule says if something causes the symptoms presented in the patient, giving such a remedy in homeopathic form can give a signal to the body to take care of the symptoms.
To illustrate that, cutting onions may cause our tears to flow and our noses to itch or even start running. A similar presentation of symptoms we get in some people who suffer from seasonal hay fever- running, itchy nose, and streaming eyes and for that presentation Allium Cepa (onion) in homeopathic form can be a great relief. (You can check the video on What is homeopathy?)

It brings me to the other important homeopathic observation that something that directly caused our symptoms let’s say a coffee – raises blood pressure, agitation or in some cases tachycardia and racing thoughts then coffee- Coffea cruda in the homeopathic form can relieve us from these symptoms. I can already hear people saying coffee does nothing to me and I drink it every day 3 or 4… then try to stop your habit for a day and see what happens- unexplained headache, irritability, and tiredness. For those symptoms also homeopathic Coffea cruda can give some relief as well as for sleeplessness from coffee or wine overuse… This matching approach based on direct causation is called a therapeutic method which is just one of many possible methods used in the search for homeopathic remedies.

Several symptoms presented by the patient may match more than one remedy and most of the time it has more complicated causation than a cup of coffee if you know what I mean. That is why in practical homeopathy we treat the whole picture of a person on different levels using multi-method prescribing. On another hand, classical homeopathy still to this day gives one remedy and uses a wait-and-see approach whereby more progressive practical school moves to seeing 21^st-century patients as more fragmented and requiring some support on multiple levels.

Conclusion

Homeopathy is such a vast subject that needs time to sink in. That is why I do not feel I want to write much more at this stage so let’s say there will be a part two of this subject in the future.

As homeopathy requires time to be processed and understood because it does not happen immediately, I will take a little pause here… Healing is an art, and let me not overdo it. Let’s talk about homeopathy!

Homeopathy- a short introduction

I decided to write about homeopathy to have a possibility to express what I have learned and at the same time, I am thinking about a few other burning subjects…

So, what is homeopathy without using complicated definitions and words? It is a part of medicine that originated over 200 years ago and it has been around ever since. A part of medicine that encompasses so much and so little at the same time comes to our internal vital force doing a healing process with just some stimulation from a homeopathic remedy.

Here comes the difficult part to understand how homeopathic remedies work, but we will get there. What is important to remember is that at the time Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, was experimenting and changing his views on homeopathy, the technology to prove the mechanism of its action in our body did not exist!

Nowadays we can finally understand how homeopathic remedies act, which I will explain later.

You can watch a video I made about what is Homeopathy here.

My journey…

Just to start this discussion I want to share my journey to homeopathy. I am a pharmacist who always would advise more natural ways of treatments since I can remember. As well as I used to and even more so today I advise against the overuse of antibiotics.

I never was comfortable just dispensing medicines and with the progression of my role in the hospital, as a clinical pharmacist, I gained some influence in the prescribing process. Seeing a lot of irresponsible antibiotics prescribed in the hospitals my dislike for them turned into almost hate and war! You would probably ask why? What is wrong with antibiotics then that it pushed me away from working in the clinical setting?!

…against the antibiotics and…

Antibiotics can stop life-threatening infections but they do not come without a price, which is the destruction of good bacterial flora and suppression of infection into deeper levels of our body.

To rebuild a good flora inside of our gut it takes around 6 months and in most cases support from probiotics or even better from a variety of probiotics foods. Good gut flora is essential for our digestive system to work properly and it is essential to produce neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.

The infections being pushed deeper in our body means it can weaken our vital organs and also often we see recurring the same infection in a short time. Also, overuse of antibiotics, especially broad-spectrum antibiotics in indications when you can avoid giving them, is in my opinion a big crime against humanity!

Yes, I am not joking! Poor compliance to follow guidelines in prescribing antibiotics which in a return can become useless (bacteria is becoming resistant) is irresponsible and dangerous for everyone, not only for the patient itself!

Serious side effects after intravenous antibiotics, especially in compromised patients, include Clostridium difficile infection which is a life-threatening condition and it can lead to even more complicated chronic states. All of this has been a huge problem that is on the rise because more and more resistant bacteria exist. Logically, if you try to “kill” bacteria it normally tries to change a form, shape, or mechanism of action to survive. Therefore, it is important to use antibiotics with a narrow spectrum of action to allow unnecessary changes (mutations).

… a place for antibiotics

So yes, antibiotics have usage in life-threatening states and that is how we should think of them! It is not a quick solution for our common colds,  sore throats, or earaches! You can read about them in my previous blogs.

Anyway, the origin of those is normally viral so antibiotics are pointless and they can only cause side effects. Sorry for the prolonged antibiotic discussion but I feel not many people are aware of that I am sorry but I have no trust in most of the doctors’ deeper understanding of it….

In many cases, the use of antibiotics is like using a shortcut. Our body has a natural ability to fight infections if we support them properly and homeopathy stimulates the vital force to regain balance and changes the environment so that the bacteria cannot multiply. In many cases, rest, lots of fluids, vitamin C, and homeopathy mean that our body stops being a place where infectious bacteria can thrive any longer!

One of the reasons I could no longer bear a clinical pharmacy setting was the lack of responsibility for prescribing medicines that have so many side effects. I started to look for ways and alternative treatments which can do less harm to patients. At the same time, I wanted something where I can use my previous experience as a pharmacist.
And that is how I found homeopathy shortly after I quit my last hospital job.

My homeopathic journey begins…

When I found homeopathy, I may have thought similar, so it is not surprising that for some people homeopathy seems to be not very scientific.
Often people say that homeopathy does not follow rules or theories, but that is not true.

There are theories and methodologies behind homeopathy which have a very scientific background. It might be hard to understand some of them because they are not mainstream medicine theories.

For example, within homeopathy, we believe that there is “soil” which can make us prone to infections and it is not the actual bacteria that cause them. By soil, it is understood our body and all that comes with it, like imbalances of nutrients or vitamins or not managing stress which can lead to states of diseases.

All of this at some points may cause our immunological system to miss intruders or not be able to deal with a possible overgrowth of less friendly bacteria or candida. It is very important to keep your “soil” nourished to prevent it from being prone to infections! That is why in homeopathy we pay great importance to “the soil” and “building blocks” meaning the food we eat because homeopathic healing sees those things as a possible obstacle to a full cure.

…and continues in a homeopathic pharmacy

My journey then continues and shortly after I started Homeopathic college I joined a homeopathic pharmacy. In my next blogs, I will continue my discussion about the different aspects of homeopathy I learned through college and the homeopathic pharmacy I worked as a homeopathic pharmacist.

For now, if you are curious to know some insight into homeopathic pharmacy you can listen to the Podcast with me by Mary Greensmith below.

Thank you for listening and sharing. Let’s speak about homeopathy.