For over a year I worked as a chiropractic physician in a medical clinic. In addition to adjustive therapeutics, part of my duties was to counsel on nutrition and practice the art of homeopathy.
One of the most satisfying aspects of practicing homeopathy is that it's safe. In most cases the substances are so diluted that no molecular structures are left. Rather than yelling at your body and suppressing the symptoms it uses as a voice, homeopathics approach the body as its servant to "listen" and to obey. The result of this form of health care can be quite rewarding in rather dramatic dimensions.
One day a lady came to me with visual problems. Her ophthalmologist had told her that she had "aging eyes" and that only radical measures might help. For several years, the patient's vision had been failing. Even with the help of glasses her vision was becoming increasingly blurred. After an examination I prescribed two homeopathics which were injected bilaterally into ST36. By that evening she sensed improvement and within a week she was back driving at night, something she hadn't been able to do for years. This all transpired after one treatment.
A few months later a young man about 20-years-old came in complaining of severe visual problems associated with Friedreich's ataxia. Already confined to a wheelchair by the processes of the disease, it was tragic to see someone in what should have been the prime of life ravaged with such pathology. Still, he was fighting back with the determination of his youth. Even though his short life had been filled with therapeutic disappointments, he kept fighting back and hoping. More than anything he wanted to be able to control his gaze so that he could read and look at television.
What could I lose? Nothing I could do would be less effective than the treatment he had already received. After some thought, I decided to try the same homeopathic remedies as the ones used to help the elderly lady with her blurred vision.
Once again, the homeopathics were introduced bilaterally at ST36. Two hours later I looked up from my desk to see my young patient's mother standing in the doorway. "Dr. Tyler, I just thought you'd like to know something. My son was sitting in the therapy room when he suddenly exclaimed that he was beginning to see better." Neither of us could believe that anything could work so fast.
Right now I'm sitting in my office in a small farm house in Vermont. Across the road is a little house where an elderly blind man and his stepdaughter live. Not long ago I made a neighborly visit which resulted in the man discussing the frustration of his loss of sight. Emboldened by past successes, I blurted out that I had noted some improvement in visual problems by the use of specific homeopathic remedies. He leapt at the chance to try. Then, for the first time, I took a careful look at him. His right eye was exophthalmic, while all one could see was the sclera of the left. What had I done? It was cruel to give false hope to someone with such an apparently irreversible condition.
Try as I might to back out, he wouldn't let me. "It won't give you back your sight," I told him. "The best it might do would be to improve your ability to detect light from dark. Maybe not even that."
Nothing could dissuade him. He had to try. Since I told him it would not cost him anything, and since I had warned him not to expect much, I got him the remedies. It was a simple case of nothing to lose -- except darkness.
A few weeks after he started on the remedies, the blind gentleman's stepdaughter called to say that he was beside himself with happiness because he started seeing greater definition between light and shadows and could even visually distinguish movement of one of his hands.
The homeopathics used were the homeopathic form of the herb eyebright, euphrasia, and a homeopathic glandular for the eye.
In spite of the proven value of these safe natural remedies, there are still and, of course, always will be members of our profession who will get all bent out of shape because homeopathy isn't chiropractic; of course, neither is nutrition or physical therapy. If we wanted to be quite literal about it, neither is the use of the Activator adjusting instrument, for it's a mechanical device that comes between the chiropractic hand and the patient.
As far as a recent letter writer is concerned, he's sure that I'm breaking the law. Apparently he's unaware that the California board allows the use of drugless, non-prescription, over-the-counter substances in a chiropractic practice. This doesn't phase the writer. He's afraid. Afraid that someone will frown at us, get mad, and condemn us to some kind of professional purgatory.
To me, he and others like him are professional cowards who cringe behind their philosophical wall too frightened to take the responsibility of being a physician. The only allegiance any genuine physician should have is to the welfare of his patients -- not to the drug companies that seduce their integrity or the philosophical fear-mongers who take away their courage.
Homeopathy is safe and synergistic to chiropractic. Why should we deny any form of safe care to the patients who come to us in a desperate last bid for health? My personal philosophy, therefore the most important philosophy to me, will never allow that.