Homeopathic Guide to Stress

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From nervousness and anxiety to the effects of caffeine, allergies And long hours in the workplace, we're bombarded with emotional And physical stress every day. This book presents inexpensive and Easy-to-use ways to self-treat its symptoms and handle them Effectively.

This book is written in a clear and engaging style. It offers an Introduction to homeopathy, with a focus on stress. Miranda castro Suggests several homeopathic treatments, with clear instructions On how to choose the most appropriate solution for more than four Dozen specific emotional states or physical causes of stress. A Comprehensive section describes each remedy in detail and each Entry gives a clear picture about the usage of the medicine in an Appropriate way. This book is an easy and comprehensible guide to Understand the treatment of the various effects of stress during the Phases of life.

Miranda Castro is a Fellow of the Society of Homeopaths. She is one of the faculty of Bastyr University in Seattle, where she is developing a postgraduate homeopathic medicine program. Her other works include ‘The Complete Homeopathy Handbook’ and ‘Homeopathy for Pregnancy’, ‘Birth and Your Baby's First Year’. Presently, she is staying in Seattle, Washington.

When I first ‘discovered’ homeopathy I felt as if I had ‘come home’. One of the main reasons for this feeling was that my homeopath took a wide view of stress, one I hadn’t experienced or heard of in any other medical discipline. It was such a relief to know that there was a place where medical professionals not only saw that each individual was unique, with particular strengths and weaknesses, but that each person was potentially vulnerable to different stresses, or would at least respond in their own way to different stresses whether they were physical, mental or emotional. This made tremendous sense to me.

In my early years in practice, however, I found myself somewhat perplexed when patients would tell me at the beginning of a consultation that they had come to see me because they were stressed, or because their doctors had diagnosed them as having stress. I would ask them to tell me more and I would also ask what they meant by the word ‘stress’. Some of these patients would look at me somewhat suspiciously, even irritably, as if to say: ‘What kind of homeopath are you? Don’t you know what stress is?’ And they would repeat their original statement, but speaking a little slower this time, as if they were talking to someone whose first language was not English. Some patients would go into a lengthy explanation about stress, in a genuine attempt to educate me. Others would shrug their shoulders and look at me baffled as if to say: Well, if you don’t know what I mean then I certainly don’t.’

In the past, doctors who were having difficulty helping certain patients would often, if all tests came back negative, make a diagnosis of psychosomatic illness. They might add that the patient had to learn to live with their complaint, that there was nothing they could do. This has always seemed to me to be a rather cruel blow to deal to those who may be running out of hope anyway.

Then there came a time when the diagnosis changed to ‘stress’. It was an easier word to say (and spell!) and tripped off everyone's tongues without any trouble whatsoever. Doctors now added that the patient had to learn to live with their complaint, that there was little advice they could offer except, maybe, to learn to relax.

The trouble is that stress, like psychosomatic illness, is almost completely meaningless as a diagnosis. It is like taking your beloved car to the garage, saying that it has a worrying knocking sound every time you brake hard, and that you have noticed some other peculiar symptoms as well. Your mechanic takes a close look and performs many sensible tests but is not able to find what ails it. He then hands it back to you saying that he cannot therefore treat it, and you will have to live with it. You know that it is just a question of time before something goes wrong. Your mechanic knows it too, but neither of you say anything. You don’t want to make your mechanic feel bad, especially since he has done his best to uncover the cause of the problem.

It has been suggested that the human body is like a car. That we have to attend to it with the same degree of loving care and attention. If only it were that simple! We cannot take it apart, lay all the parts out on the garage floor, clean them and put them back together again. We cannot easily replace parts that have become damaged. And we do not run on fuel alone. Our vitality and our energetic processes are not fully understood. The sheer complexity of the human body should be listed as one of the seven wonders of the world.

Any system of medicine that seeks to treat the human body as a mechanical object is going to be limited in terms of its ability to offer serious healing. Patients have learned to rely on doctors more as mechanics than anything else ... presenting a straightforward. complaint and expecting and getting a simple solution which treats the complaint (a prescription). The problems start when the complaints become more complicated and do not respond to standard drug treatment.

A car is mostly a three-dimensional object, operating within fairly comprehensible boundaries. A body is multi-dimensional, multi- faceted. And so is life. My task as a homeopath is to make a four- dimensional jigsaw puzzle out of the mass of information that each patient presents, one that makes sense to both of us, one that I can prescribe on, that takes these many facets into account.

I have learnt to ask my patients about the stresses they have experienced and to describe the effect they have had. As they tell their story I listen carefully, in order to pick up clues about their emotional responses to a stressful situation, to build up a picture I can understand and work with. For many people, everyday stresses include those which are mundane (like poor diet, commuting or lack of exercise); unpleasant (living with an abusive partner or a sulky, angry adolescent); or severe (the death of a close friend or relative or redundancy). For some people traumatic stress is a tragic reality, either as a one-off (a disabling accident or sexual abuse) or in an on- going way (those caught up in war-torn areas or nursing staff on an accident and injury unit). The stress of being shot at in Bosnia or Northern Ireland is very different to that of being stuck in a traffic jam on a motorway.

Alternative medicine in general, and homeopathy in particular, can offer much to patients who have been encouraged to dismiss or ignore their complaint because it has been diagnosed as ‘psychosomatic' or ‘stress-related’. There is almost unlimited help available in the homeopathic medicine chest, whether the stress 1s physical (headaches caused by a head injury, a cough caused by teething, or an earache after a chill); emotional (depression due to a difficult relationship or resentment due to an unpleasant work situation); or mental (exhaustion and inability to make decisions after an exam, Or a period of overworking). A well chosen homeopathic remedy can heal emotional pain as well as physical symptoms, and enable people to recover their vitality and sense of well-being.

This book is intended as an introduction to homeopathy with a specific focus on stress. It isn’t a comprehensive guide to either stress or homeopathy. I hope that you will use this book to begin to build a healthy relationship with stress: to identify your own unique responses to particular stresses, to understand what affects you and when, to check out ways to balance out those stresses, and to explore the part that homeopathy may play in helping you on your path to health.