Sunday 15 May 2016

The patients come in many varieties;


There are the broken ones, survivors of horrific crashes who have been heroically repaired by the surgeons, sport enormous scars and have been in continuous pain since their accident – for one man that has been 16 years. No prescription pain killers here. I give arnica or rhus tox, wishing they could have had these remedies years ago.


There are the women who have back pain and waist pain from carrying heavy loads over long distances every day. I find it hard to believe that a remedy is going to help when the carrying must continue with no chance to rest and mend, but I know from past experiences that a remedy that helps the woman to deal with her anger about her situation or her sense of injustice or hopelessness, is going to help the pain.


Epilepsy; no medication, just have your fits. We see patients who have already been given homoeopathic remedies by the student homoeopaths here in Mzimba. Patients who are having fits once a month now instead of every day. If you have epilepsy here you cannot get married, you will have no life. A mother brings a child who has recently started to have epileptic convulsions and her grief is palpable, she knows that as of now her little girl has no future. Why does homoeopathy work so well here? I have no idea but I am continually blown away seeing people's new lives emerging from the chaos of their illness.


Babies; I only saw one baby on this visit, Desire. Ten months old and bright as a button. I had a long conversation with her, delighted to discover that baby Tombuka is the same language as baby English which is a language I speak, I even got some smiles. Desire was born at 8 months gestation weighing only 3 lbs, she is healthy and the doctors say there is nothing wrong with her but she cannot sit up. She is fat and soft and she has no strength in her core muscles to hold her upright. Desire's mother sits Desire facing her on her lap, holds her two hands, looks in her eyes and says “stand Desire, stand” and Desire, eyes locked on her mother's in absolute trust and hope, uses every ounce of her obstinate determination to slowly, slowly, slowly pull herself to standing. I give her calc carb and hope to hear that she getting on well when she comes back for her follow up visit next month.


HIV/AIDS, always there in the back ground, mostly unspoken of. I have a long conversation on a break one day, sitting in the shade, with a man who speaks English. He talks at length about the cost of living, inflation – food costing more in the market each week, the price of rent, cars, houses, funerals, how to make money and how to make money. He is voluble and friendly, chatting openly until I ask him about HIV/AIDS but now he is upset. When he was nine his father died. He does not know if it was HIV/AIDS but his mother died soon after. When his father died his father's family came and took all of his father's possessions. They took everything including the chance for this man and his three sisters to go to school, get an education and have any kind of future.


We have patients who know they are HIV positive and are on ARV drugs, patients who know but cannot tell anybody because of the enormous, life stopping stigma and patients who don't know. The beauty of homoeopathy is that you treat the person not the disease so we don't actually have to have a diagnosis of HIV to give someone a homoeopathic remedy that is really going to help them but the atmosphere in the room when we have a patient who hasn't dared to go to the hospital yet is pretty grim.


After a day of seeing patients the overall feeling is one of endless, enduring, suffering. If I was here for a month I wouldn't write about it until I could see the good results but I am on my way home today – we will hear next month when Fulgensio, Flyness and Lameck do the follow up visits. I would like to stay forever to do this work but I cannot. Hopefully teaching twelve other people will have a better result.

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