Classical Homeopathy vs. "Pseudo-Homeopathy"

Sometimes people tell me they are seeing a homeopath but are getting a mixture of remedies that the practitioner chooses after hooking the person up to a machine. They usually spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the initial consultation and the follow-up appointments are also very expensive. They often admit that they have been seeing this practitioner for many months or years and have seen “great results—I’m at least 20% better after two years” one person told me.

I have to shake my head when I hear what they are doing—if my patients were only 20% better after six months I would be dissatisfied.

What these people are describing actually isn’t homeopathy, it is more accurately described as “pseudo-homeopathy” or fake homeopathy.

I am very familiar with this pseudo-homeopathy, also known as electro-diagnostic homeopathy. The first “homeopath” I saw did this type of treatment. That clinic was staffed with MDs, had a waiting list and the first visit cost over $1,000­­­­--almost 20 years ago.

That clinic did get some results, but the question I would put to you is the question I did not get a good answer for until I saw a classical homeopath: Is this treatment healing the problem or is it just band-aiding the symptoms?

I used this treatment of almost four years, making many, expensive trips out-of-state to this clinic. The treatments just patched me up, they never took care of the underlying imbalances that were keeping me sick. I never got well, just somewhat better, so I kept going back.

I was a very vocal defender of that type of treatment (because I got some results at a time when nothing else had helped me).

But then I experienced classical homeopathy, meaning using one remedy at a time, the remedy chosen after an extensive interview with the homeopath.

With classical homeopathy I have experienced improved health beyond anything I could have imagined. I am comfortable in my own skin, I look very different and feel very different on the physical as well as the mental-emotional levels.

The gift and challenge of homeopathy is that even very bad homeopathy gets results of some kind. And if a person has been quite sick, with little or no help from conventional or other types of alternative medicine, even very modest improvements seem great.

The other thing to consider is that this type of treatment is often used by practitioners who are very poorly trained, who may have taken a weekend short-course on how to run the machine and are told that “the machine will do it all, you don’t need to study to earn a lot of money with this.”

These practitioners are looking for short cuts and they often make a great deal of money by seeing a lot of patients in a short time; in other words, they run a patient mill-type clinic.

The biggest drawback is that these patients will spend lots of money trying to improve their health. With the electro-diagnostic work, they may get some results—so they are willing to continue to see the practitioner (usually because nothing else has helped them). But because the electro-diagnostic work is very superficial and doesn’t take care of the deeper imbalances that are behind the person’s symptoms, they will not get well. So they have to keep seeing the practitioner.

That is great for the practitioner—they have patients for life, or until the patient runs out of money. But it is not so great for the patients who so desperately want to recover their health.

Having experienced both pseudo-homeopathy and good classical homeopathy I learned the difference between the two. I learned the good classical homeopathy can help people recover their health at a reasonable cost, that people don’t need to accept partial results while spending huge amounts of money for those poor results and that good classical homeopathy can make huge differences in people’s health.

That is why I went to 3½ years of homeopathy school in Minneapolis, then completed a two-year postgraduate program and a four-year postgraduate program in homeopathy.