Homeopathy Book Reviews

Healing Complex Children with Homeopathy by Angelica Lemke, ND, is reviewed by Vatsala Sperling

Healing Complex Children with Homeopathy by Angelica Lemke, ND, is reviewed by Vatsala Sperling

Publisher: Workplay publishing USA
ISBN 978-1-7343946-0-3
453 Pages, black and white, paperback, USD 49.00 

As any Homeopath would attest, we all run into “complex children” in our practice. In earlier decades, these children were also referred as difficult children. However, with an overall growth in the understanding of how some children are born different or go through situations in prenatal time and early childhood that transforms them into a different person, we are now aware enough to accept that some children are different and complex but not necessarily difficult.

This is comforting, because often parents of these complex and different children usually see their kids as someone special, unique, unusual and sometimes even as a gift that enables them to view family, relationship and life itself with a different perspective.

I can say that this book “Healing complex children with Homeopathy” will specially resonate with these parents. Along the same theme, the back cover reads, “This book will empower you to be your family’s best healer by tapping into your intuition and your innate connection with your child.”

The book itself is simply written – it will appeal to parents with complex children as well as rekindle passion amongst practitioners when sometimes they go through a burn-out with cases of complex children that progress in fits and starts.

Healing with Homeopathy is the very first chapter and it walks the readers through a simplified version of case taking for complex children. Dr Lemke makes a point to clarify that Homeopathy works just fine with all the other healing modalities out there.

This reassurance means much to the parents of complex children as in deed, in the practical world, these parents are found to be trying everything under the sun to bring healing to their child. In this process of finding healing for their child, often the parents put themselves on the back burner….but again, Dr Lemke makes a case for the idea that the parents too should avail of homeopathic treatment alongside their child. When all the individual vital forces in the family are functioning at their optimum best, the emerging dynamics will be conducive to a collective healing experience.

Homeopaths can do a quick read of the chapter “The history and practice of homeopathy” but it is essentially geared toward informing the consumers, readers and home-prescribers about the basics of homeopathy. The same can be said for the brief chapter on miasms. Dr Lemke has covered five miasms, namely, cancer, tubercular, sycotic, syphilitic and psoric, and the portraits of these miasms are just enough so that the reader can spot a miasmatic influence in the complex children.

The materia medica part of this book is divided into animal remedies, plant remedies, mineral remedies, nosodes and sarcodes. In the chapters dealing with these remedy groups, Dr. Lemke has again quite successfully kept the remedy portraits ultra-ultra-brief.

At this point I am quite enjoying the book. Sometimes, we read so much about the remedies, in such exhausting, my-eyes-could-use-some-Ruta type of detail, that we forget how to spot / describe the remedy if all we have by way of information, is one small paragraph about the remedy!

For example, Hahnemann has given us details about Ambra grisea in 16 pages in his Materia Medica Pura, volume 1. Dr. Lemke has devoted 218 words to this remedy. Within these words, you will find the personality type, mental and physical keynotes, and a hint about other remedies that that have some of the characteristics of Ambra grisea.

After reading these sections, I come to a conclusion that this book is going to be so useful to the professionals as well as parents / caregivers of complex children, when they need to read about a remedy quickly without owning volumes of very serious materia medica of homeopathy. The remedy pictures, whittled down to barebone essentials and written in a simple language, are a treat indeed.

The chapter on tautopathy gives an idea about what is possible in the area of counteracting vaccines, toxins, clearing pharmaceutical drugs, heavy metals and even the electromagnetic field. However, knowing how complex these aspects are, and what sustained effort is required for achieving results, I would hope that parents of complex children opt to work with qualified professionals instead of taking these approaches in their own hands.

As a practitioner, I found the chapter on ‘Remedies by categories of complex kids’ interesting. Keeping the same tone and pace as in the previous parts of the book, Dr. Lemke has given a small write up about the categories of kids followed by a tabulation of special features of the most commonly indicated remedies.

Take for example, a category, ‘Highly Anxious Children’ – A small paragraph describes these kids and a tabulation shows us the twelve most commonly indicated remedies. ‘Remedy for angry children’ again describes the angry children in few words, and then, a tabulation shows us the most highly indicated twenty remedies.

Having come so far, feasting on bite-size samplers, the reader is going to ask, so what’s next, where are the cured cases? A general purpose educational book of this nature does not need cured cases to make a point. And the question about ‘what next?’ has been answered in the conclusion section.

The author has based her book on her own experience of working with parents and families of complex kids. This experience has shown her the extent of a fundamental necessity – the utter necessity of education!!!

Particularly in the industrialized, Western world, very sadly, Homeopathy is either quite poorly and negatively portrayed, or pathetically very little understood, if at all. But times are changing. Parents with complex or even regular children, are doing the rounds of the offerings made by the mainstream and then, in utter helplessness, turning their gaze toward the alternative practitioners.

What Dr. Lemke is trying to say, via the medium of her book, “Healing Complex Children With Homeopathy” is that parents simply need to familiarize themselves with what homeopathy has to offer. Once they do that, they might end up trying remedies on their own at home, by taking cues from this book, or other sources, and they might also consider a serious homeopathic intervention for their special and complex child.

But it all begins with just a little bit more of education and to that effect, Dr Lemke encourages readers to enroll in homeopathy classes, read more serious books on homeopathy, have a small collection of remedies at home that they can prescribe for self and family, join support groups that help bring practitioners and seekers of homeopathy together on one platform, and finally, she also encourages her readers to seek out professionally trained homeopaths.

In all, this is a neat book for professionals as well as consumers of homeopathy, and surely, parents with special-needs children can find very useful information contained within the covers of this simple book.

I am delighted to have had an opportunity to read and review this book.

About the author

Vatsala Sperling

Vatsala Sperling, RSHom (NA), CCH, MS, PhD, PDHom was the Chief of Clinical Microbiology services at a children’s hospital in Chennai, India, when she published extensively and conducted research with WHO, Denmark. On moving to the USA, Vatsala pursued a 4½ year course in Homeopathy at Misha Norland’s school. She has authored twelve books including her latest, Colubrid Snake Remedies and Their Indication in Homeopathy Practice. Journals from US and abroad frequently publish Vatsala’s writings on spirituality, health, and homeopathy. Vatsala continues to study with several teachers and practices classical homeopathy. She has served on the board of directors of NASH and currently she serves as a volunteer with NCH. She can be reached via her website (www.Rochesterhomeopathy.com)

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