Why do your symptoms matter?
They give us important information, which not only flags up that something is not right, but also provides vital clues to getting you better.
So symptoms are not just inconvenient, painful or a nuisance.
Sometimes symptoms are indicators of something obvious: if you feel thirsty, your body needs water, and if you want to take that heavy jumper off, your body is probably too hot.
But other, less obviously connected symptoms are important too. For example, if you have a skin rash, or eczema, your body is trying to push something it didn’t like out.
Maybe you tried a new cream, or ate something different, or even took a new medication – and it gave you a nasty rash. That was your body saying “Hmmm – there was something in that we did not get on with. Let’s get try and rid of it.”
The skin is often where this kind of problem becomes visible, because it is your body’s largest organ and it is furthest away from your vital organs, so from your body’s point of view it is the safest place to try and push something out.
Mental or emotional issues may also cause physical problems. Lots of people with eczema find it gets worse with stress, but sometimes the whole eczema problem can be caused by stress alone, such as with Meg, who at 70 developed a nasty belt of eczema around her waist on the way back from holiday to a difficult home situation.
Even muscular or skeletal problems can be linked to mental and emotional issues, like Karla, who was 57 when she developed a stiff painful neck after the death of a friend, or Ines who at age 82 developed bad sciatica after a lot of anxiety about her health.
Sometimes there is a change in your mental state which goes with a new symptom, such as being very short-tempered and irritable with hayfever, which happened to Isabel, aged 27, or Fenella, aged 24, who experienced terrible mood swings and a big lump in her throat at the same time as a digestive upset .
And sometimes what changes is more physical. Maybe what you want to eat or drink changes radically – such as suddenly developing a strong desire for salty foods when you have a cold or flu, which happened to Norman, who was a (normally) very healthy 83 year old. Or you might suddenly find you cannot cope with a food or drink you absolutely love reverse. This happened to Oscar, who was 56 and had terrible congestion and found he just could not tolerate beer (which he loved) after it started.
So symptoms are very important.
And what was going on when you developed whatever is bothering you, may be closely linked to the problem, because that is what your system could not cope with, and what pushed your body out of balance – producing those symptoms.
How other things such as sleep, thirst and appetite have been affected since you developed the problem provide more clues, which will help your homeopath work out what is the right remedy to nudge your system into getting better.
Your body has a simply remarkable capacity to heal itself. And when that capacity stalls a bit, what you need is the right remedy which will provide the right stimulus to get it going again.
- Karla’s stiff neck cleared up with homeopathic Causticum.
- Ines’ sciatica responded beautifully to homeopathic Arsenicum Album.
- Isabel’s hayfever resolved with homeopathic Nux vomica.
- Fenella’s digestive system returned to normal after homeopathic Ignatia.
- Norman’s flu got better with homeopathic Nat mur.
- Oscar felt much better after homeopathic Pulsatilla – and could enjoy beer again.
Each of these people were different: they had different systems (mind and body) and different situations. So a different remedy was needed in each case to provide the right nudge to get them better.
Finding the right remedy for the person who is suffering so they can get better is what a homeopath does.
And symptoms provide the vital, individualised clues your homeopath needs.
Photo of megaphone and person shouting: by Shubham Pawar on Unsplash
Photo of redhead smiling by Gabriel Silvério on Unsplash
