When Karen Ambler gets the flu, she doesn’t pop a couple of Tylenol or reach for the Nyquil. Instead, the busy professional and fitness buff schedules an appointment with her homeopath. Ambler turned to homeopathy eight years ago after conventional medicine failed to alleviate the fatigue, pain, bowel issues, and headaches she’d been suffering concurrently for two years. After consulting a homeopath and receiving a sweet-tasting remedy, Ambler was soon on a fast road to recovery.

“By the next day I felt human again,” she recalls. “In a week’s time I was about 80 per cent back to my normal self—whom I had long-since forgotten.”

Six weeks and one more appointment with the homeopath later, her symptoms had completely disappeared.

Ambler is one of a growing number of homeopathy users in North America. Unlike in Europe, for instance, where up to 50 per cent of the population reports using homeopathic remedies, in 1997 only eight per cent of Canadians and less than half as many Americans reported homeopathic use. But in the decade that’s ensued, homeopathy has been gaining in popularity thanks, in part, to the internet.

“Homeopaths were very scarce and isolated 10 years ago,” explains Nathalie D. Allen, a homeopath and instructor at Vancouver’s Boucher Institute of Naturopathic Medicine. “The internet has helped people connect with one another from all around the world and it’s created a lot more support and presence.”
These are good tidings for homeopathy, which was nearly wiped off the North American map back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when advances in conventional medicine and changes in American medical education saw the closure of most homeopathic colleges on both sides of the border. It began experiencing a resurgence in the 1970s with the general public’s increasing demands for complementary health care options.

Homeopathy first flourished on this continent in the early 1900s, about a century after it was established by German physician Samuel Hahnemann. Critical of harmful medical practices of the time such as bloodletting and purging, Hahnemann began researching alternative “cures” and found evidence to support the idea of “like cures like,” the principle that became the basis of homeopathy.

With homeopathy, a sick person is treated with very small doses of a substance that in larger doses would produce the same symptoms in a healthy person. The substance is heavily diluted with water and vigorously shaken, and it is believed the essence of the substance is released during this “potentization.” After that it is administered to the patient, where it restores his or her “vital energy”—similar to the concept of “chi” in Chinese medicine. And as with Chinese medicine, homeopathy treats the person—not the symptoms—placing equal importance on the mind, body, and emotions.

“We really see the person as a whole,” says Kim Boutilier, a homeopath at CCH Vancouver Centre for Homeopathy and co-founder of the Vancouver Homeopathic Academy. “The disturbance or unease in the whole of the system may be more centered in one area—may be more physically centered, or it may be more emotional or mental—but we always look at it as a whole.”

A visit to a homeopath is nothing like a regular visit to the doctor. You will not be poked or prodded or told to disrobe. Instead, your homeopath will sit you down and ask you a series of questions in order to determine precisely what your issues are.

“We’re trying to identify the type of pain, what triggers it, and everything that makes it better or worse,” explains Allen. “They have to answer all these questions to understand their condition in a very different light.”

Although homeopathy is a gentle and non-invasive approach to treatment, the efficacy of homeopathic remedies cannot be tested in the same way pharmaceuticals are: in double-blind placebo-controlled studies. 

“We can’t explain it by science but that doesn’t mean it has no explanation,” says Dr. Afsaneh Nikkhoo, MD, who quit allopathy (conventional medicine) to practice homeopathy. “When you see that your patients get well—not only the symptoms that are the chief complaint but also the other things like his sleep, his constipation, his mind—it shows that it works.”

Just ask Gail, a Vancouver professional who turned to homeopathy to help her battle depression and anxiety. She was on antidepressants and was “sick of taking drugs every day.” Her homeopath prescribed a remedy containing thuya, a type of evergreen tree. Her symptoms diminished after a couple of weeks, but what surprised her was her fingernails seemed stronger. When her homeopath confirmed that thuya did indeed strengthen nails, Gail was impressed. 
“That’s when I was sold on homeopathy—it fixed something I didn’t even know it was supposed to fix,” she says.

It’s also easy to use homeopathy yourself when medical care is not necessary. There are many homeopathic guidebooks that offer direction on how to select the correct homeopathic remedy for numerous common ailments and injuries and, importantly, when to seek a professional’s help (a good one is Everybody’s Guide to Homeopathic Medicines by S. Cummings, MD, and Dana Ullman). The leading brands of homeopathic remedies sold in Canada include Boiron and Hyland’s.

Tamara Letkeman is a Vancouver writer and SharedVISION’s new editor. She will never attempt to separate mind and body again.

Where to find homeopathic remedies

Natural food stores often carry homeopathy lines, as do progressive pharmacies. Some Lower Mainland outlets include:

Capers, 604-739-6676, capers.ca [1]
Finlandia Pharmacy, 604-733-5323, finlandiapharmacy.com [2]
Kripps Pharmacy, 604-687-2564, krippspharmacy.com [3]
Sweet Cherubim, 604-253-0969, sweetcherubim.com [4]

To find a homeopath near you: 

West Coast Homeopathic Society, wchs.info [5]