How I Became a Homeopath – Dr. Bonnie Camo

It seems my life was always unknowingly leading me to homeopathy.  I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, site of the first homeopathic school in America, the Allentown Academy, founded by Constantine Herring in the mid 1800’s.  He later moved to Philadelphia and founded Hahnemann Medical College, named after his mentor, the father of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann.  By the time I graduated from Hahnemann as a medical doctor in 1978, it was totally allopathic, a regular medical school, where the ideas of its namesake were ridiculed.

I have been enamored of nature all my life, so I got a Bachelor of Science in Biology, then went for a Masters in Botany at the University of Pennsylvania. (I’m probably the only MD besides Andrew Weil with a background in botany.)  I taught plant taxonomy at the U of P, collecting wild plants, drying and pressing them, then classifying them into the proper family and species, learning all the Latin names.  This knowledge was put to good use when I studied homeopathy, in which all plants as well as animals are known by their Latin names, the same all over the world.

I went to medical school with the intention of treating people with nutrition rather than drugs.  (I would have lost my license for this if I practiced today.) After my internship in Internal Medicine in Allentown, PA, I moved with my family to New Jersey in 1979 to work with Dr. Carl Pfeiffer at the Brain Bio Center near Princeton (later changed to Princeton Bio Center.)

There we practiced Orthomolecular Psychiatry, treating mental illness with “megavitamin therapy”.  Pfeiffer did research on histamine as a brain neurotransmitter and devised protocols for different biochemical types of schizophrenia.  We diagnosed and treated allergies, vitamin deficiencies, mineral imbalances, and heavy metal toxicities. This experience also facilitated the study of homeopathy, since most remedies are made from minerals or herbs and other plants.

I worked at the Princeton Bio Center for sixteen years, helping thousands of people control mental illness with large daily doses of nutrients. Many people were able to get off or avoid being put on psychiatric drugs, and most were able to reduce their dosage, and live a freer, happier and more useful life.

The PBC relieved many people of mental as well as physical disorders using nutritional principles.  As I became more interested in homeopathy, I decided for various reasons to leave the Bio Center in 1995.  I studied homeopathy intensively at the National Center for Homeopathy’s Summer School near Washington DC, and then opened my practice integrating orthomolecular nutrition and homeopathy, which in my experience gives better results than using either method alone.

I have written a book called Natural Medicine, for a Healthy Mind and Body, and a Healthy World, which covers orthomolecular medicine, homeopathy, natural living, and other modalities I have learned and used over the thirty years of my practice.  Dr. Pfeiffer used to say that we were twenty years ahead of our time.  Now, over forty years later, allopathic medicine, especially psychiatry, has still not caught up.

Homeopathy is a whole new way of looking at the world.  Something containing no actual matter, only energy, enables people to cure their illness from the inside out.  Modern physics now knows that the universe is not composed of matter, just concentrated probability waves of vibrating energy.  Homeopathy was two hundred years ahead of its time.

I retired in 2009 and moved to Italy with my Italian husband.  Homeopathy is practiced very differently there, but that is a story for another time.

Editor’s note: We asked our readers if they had an interesting or unusual story about how or why they became a homeopath. Dr. Camo offered the story above.  If you  have a story to share, just send it to:  [email protected]