The Role of Compassion in Homoeopathic Treatment

The task of healing and helping the sufferings of people is so humane and missionary that the spiritual aspect cannot be ignored. The karma of the patient brings him under your care, to be cured and restored to health.

The total healing does not mean removal of an infection from the system, but to restore a peaceful and harmonious condition between mind and body. A patient suffering from a terribly itching urticaria, stops itching after the eruptions on the skin disappear. However, he becomes more nervous, aggressive and anxious mentally and he develops asthma. Is the patient happiest in this situation? Is it curing, if it is of that sort? We, the community of Homoeopaths look for a deeper healing. If we, as patients, have to choose, between urticaria and asthma, I know the choice is difficult, but it would definitely be for the first. Though none is pleasant, but when we have to choose between a deeper and serious organic problem, we would not mind to sacrifice a less important organ.

A Homeopath as a physician is a teacher to his patients and also to himself. He has to be aware that no human is perfect; the distribution of nature is such. Even sometimes, we have to leave an organ untreated when we find it tends to affect or metastasize to other such important organs. My own teacher, Dr. B.K. Bose had a chronic and serious looking eczema on his legs for about 40 years, which he had left untreated, as he developed respiratory problems, whenever he tried to treat it. We must, as Homoeopaths, be aware at which point nature is trying to eliminate, toxins and suppressions from our system.

For centuries, we have known the best of healers to be extraordinarily compassionate towards their patients. A Homoeopath has to consider the pains and problems of each patient as his own and to react tenderly to them. When the sadness and tears of a patient moves the spirit of the healer, the compassionate healing begins. To give a hungry man some food to eat is healing; to give a melancholic individual the shoulder to cry on is healing too. But to take up the frustrated case, one having misplaced affections, and help the patient to reason out with himself, is the greatest of all. The fine study about the improper flow of the vital energy is the foremost task of the attending healer. The ultimate aim should be to help remove these blockages. The healer must become a channel of Divine Energy.

The mother of a girl in love with a married man wants to help and heal her daughter by talking and counselling, but she cannot do much more than share a few tears of helplessness with her. But a compassionately selected homoeopathic remedy and counselling by the practitioner not only removes the frustration but also helps her to choose and decide the right thing for herself. To witness how a dose of Natrium Muriaticum, or another indicated remedy, helps her to realise her mistake and wake her from this dream and fantasy is a wonderful experience.

It is a normal character of all humans that they do not like anything to be imposed on them. If only we can help them to help themselves to become wiser, we have affected the most natural type of healing.

We have to help our patients with patience and wisdom. Whenever a patient with rhinitis or a high fever comes, the first effort on the part of everyone is to stop sneezing and bring down the fever. We impatiently interfere into every eliminating process of nature and suppress it deeper and deeper until our innocent and ignorant awareness has created deeper, arid, often irreversible changes like cancer. We have to be aware that suppression can also occur through a homeopathic remedy and well understand what is to be treated and what a physiological and necessary elimination is.

As Homoeopaths, we understand the natural law of cure; for instance, a patient suffering from chronic otorrhoea and deafness may be cured of these if he happens to contact smallpox. This is because of the fact that smallpox is capable of creating an identical sickness in a patient.

Similarly, when a person suffering from monetary loss is suddenly told about the death of a near one, he suddenly forgets about the money loss but cries about the latter. When two similar situations or diseases meet in nature and when the second one is stronger, it will remove the original weaker sickness. So according to the law of nature, stronger eliminates the weaker.

The Homoeopath, apart from being compassionate and a believer in nature, has to apprise himself about the material and spiritual sides of life. He has to acclimatize himself with the various constitutions around him. He has to know how each individual reacts under different circumstances. The problems and realities of life cannot always be changed, but we help the patient using the homoeopathic system of medicine to accept them better. For instance, in a patient suffering from insomnia due to a mental shock, can any medical help give him a natural sleep? A Homoeopath can prescribe a remedy not only to give the patient a natural sleep, but also to help the patient to analyze the situation and come to terms with it. In no way can a correct homoeopathic remedy prescribed according to its laws suppress the feelings and trauma of a shock. Another example would be a wife who does not cry at the death of her husband and develops various physical and mental abnormalities. Her whole personality changes and from a lively and sensitive social person she transforms into a cold looking woman. As the years pass by, she develops migraine, psoriasis and persistent insomnia. What needs to be let out from her system? The true outward expression of her sadness and shock is how she manifests her pain embedded deeply in the subconscious self. It is amazing to see how a correctly chosen homoeopathic remedy helps her from centre to periphery. All her problems, which originated from an abnormal reaction to a mental shock, now start to disappear one by one. Such a patient usually reacts to the medicine by crying even at insignificant matters and in the process she lets out her old suppressed emotions. She begin to express her anger and displeasure about certain matters, where normally under similar circumstances she would have taken all these things internally and brooded over them for days and weeks. The introverted state is removed and normal reactions to situations are established.

The Homoeopaths in general have to be aware of this natural and compassionate mode of healing. They should be able to forecast for the patient what the given remedy is going to do.  The ultimate aim of every Homoeopath and the Homoeopathic remedy is to help the patient to cure her/himself. The abnormal signs and symptoms are the real manifestation of the type and kind of help the patient needs.

The laboratory confirmations are only the end result of a disease and only have a statistical value for a Homoeopath. The common symptoms of a disease have no importance in the homoeopathic selection of a remedy. For instance, burning and painful urination, fever, chill, body ache and E. Coli presence in the urine culture test are some of the common symptoms of cystitis. But each patient manifests her reaction differently. Some have more ineffectual urging, others may have burning and pain in the beginning of urination. Some may feel the pain and burning at the conclusion of urination. Apart from these, one patient may be hot and yet thirstless and another may be chilly and thirsty. These peculiar personal characteristics of the patient are the real basis for a true homoeopathic prescription. As in cases of mental shock and depression, some patients are better by consolation and some worse by it. So depression or urinary tract infection does not become the basis for a Homoeopathic prescription. The task of a Homoeopath is definitely more difficult and laborious. It is necessary to observe and understand these painful vibrations and messages of deranged energy of each human in order that the healing takes place. Homoeopathy offers a spiritual and compassionate approach while giving each patient individual care, and particularly care to his mind. The physiological action of drugs during their proving can be observed by killing the animal and testing; but what about their expressions, individual desires and aversions? This was the idea of Hahnemann to prove Homoeopathic drugs on humans, where the topmost priority is given to human feelings and the mind.

The duty of a Homoeopath is very laborious, but duly fruitful. The miraculous cures are so rewarding for us to observe and we should be happy that our sincere and hard labor has been blessed. Of course, there is no short cut to hard work. Dealing with a human life is not a casual matter; it asks for the deepest human knowledge about the disease, the individual patient and his mind. With compassion and dedication, when we approach in this direction, the healing comes for sure. Every time we enter into a case with selfless dedication our energy gets more sublime.

That is why it is important for us to remember the artistic implementation of Homoeopathic Science which believes in bringing back natural laughter, natural tears, and natural sleep. Anything unnatural imposed on a human is bound to become another sickness. We have to make sure that a patient who enters our praxis with one sickness does not leave with another two. When we establish the human values in depth and believe in giving a natural kind of help to a patient, the purpose of our homoeopathic mission is well understood.