I was lucky enough to catch a ten minute talk by Jason McChesney yesterday at the Dun Laoghaire chamber B2B meeting. Jason is a business coach and I found every minute of his talk inspiring – it was all about goal setting and in only ten minutes he managed to get across the nitty gritty of How to set goals in a way that was very useful.
But the thing I have come away with was his question why. Why do I want the goal I have set? My goal is always boringly, more patients, more work; I need to pay my rent, I need to make ends meet. But after Jason's talk, when I really stopped to ask myself why, the answer was that the satisfaction of treating someone successfully with homoeopathy is breathtaking. And I don't necessarily mean the big things like less pain for someone with arthritis or a diabetic needing less insulin or someone coming out of depression and feeling it is ok to try to live again though those things are pretty amazing. The thing that I am hooked on is seeing the way that people's lives take a different direction as their health improves – I love watching the tide turn.
You may have heard of the cascade of intervention that can happen in a labour where, if a woman is induced, her pains will be much harder to bear than normal so she will need pain relief which may make it more difficult for her to push when the time comes which may lead to the use of forceps which requires an episiotomy or even a C section. You end up with a sore and traumatised, stitched up woman and a baby who might not want to feed because he is bruised and full of drugs which upset his stomach just at the crucial time when you are trying to establish breastfeeding which will strengthen the bond between mother and baby, protect the baby's health for years to come and protect his mother from breast cancer. The war is lost for the want of a nail. (Homoeopathy is incredibly useful in labour and if you are my patient I will give you every help I can to ensure good progression in labour and pain relief). But I am referring to the cascade of interventions in labour just as an example of how one thing can lead to another and another to the next.
There are so many knots that we can get our lives into where small things add up and up over the years; think of the teenager who has a sports injury, looses physical confidence and doesn't want to go back on the pitch, puts on weight from lack of exercise then loses confidence some more and doesn't want to see her friends. Or think of the teething baby who cries night after night, ends up with an exhausted mother who is dragging through the days unable to meet his needs which makes him more and more clingy and her more and more exhausted and both of them anxious when it is time for the baby to go to the creche where he catches every available bug because he is so below par. If that teenager had the homoeopathic remedy arnica on the day she hurt herself and the baby had chamomilla for his teething neither of these stories would unfold like this.
Most of the people I see in my practice have a back story where one thing has lead to another and another and at each step their health has suffered, hardly noticeably at first but worse as the years go on. People end up in situations they find intolerable; the job they once loved is now too stressful, the people they live with give them no peace. As health suffers over the years so does patience and sense of humour and courage and love.
My job as a homoeopath is to listen to the story, try to understand the tightest part of the knot and how it got tied then find the homoeopathic remedy that matches that particular situation. This is when I get to see the tide change that I love. The remedy gets the person back on track and they begin to use their energy to sort themselves out. Health improves, confidence builds, a sense of humour returns. I have literally seen lonely people find their soul mate and fall in love, troubled teenagers welcomed back into the bosom of their family and people re-engaging with a work situation or a home life that they had thought was impossible. I can't claim that homoeopathy did all that but it did untie the knot that was preventing those people from living the happiest, fullest life that they could live.
It is a full year today since I returned from Tanzania. I miss my friends and patients there intensely but it has been a very satisfying year's work watching the tide turn for so many of my patients here.
