For my money one of the most dramatic expressions of the power of homeopathic medicine is pain management in acute situations.
One afternoon last December I was standing on the lid of the toilet in my bathroom, driving a phillips head screw into a plant hanging bracket. Unknowingly, I had the drill set for speed, not power, and when I was bearing down as hard as I could to drive the screw in with the drill, the bit jumped out of the screw head and tore through the tip of a finger on my left hand. Instinctively, I dropped the drill and applied presssure.
I howled, half laughing at myself, and my daughter called to me from another room, "Are you okay?"
"No, not even a little bit!" I called back. Seeing me standing on the toilet holding my hand, she asked what had happened and I filled her in.
"What do you need me to do?" she asked in business mode.
"Help me down off the toilet and up to the dispensary."
As we walked upstairs, the pain in my hand was really intense. Later when I was able to look at it, I saw that the philips bit had almost gone through the tip of the finger and torn my finger up pretty good as well, but at that moment the intensity of the pain was making me light headed. When we got upstairs I had to sit down and was feeling like I might pass out -- a decent indication of oncoming shock.
Rain asked me what remedy I wanted.
"Aconite, 200 (C)" I replied. She got the remedy out of a cabinet and gave it to me dry.
About 30 seconds later my head cleared, and I was not worried about going into shock or passing out. Had it not worked, I would have had her get a 1M dose and followed with that, but it did, so we went on to pain management.
"Hypericum, 200C, please," asked her. She got the remedy and gave it to me. Again, after about 30 seconds, the pain level went from a solid 9 to about a 1 or 2, and I regained the capacity to carry on a conversation in full sentences.
"Okay, what else?" she asked me.
About 5 minutes had passed after the injury, and I responded, "Arnica 200C." She got the remedy and gave it to me. Then we applied peroxide and diluted calendula tincture to the wound and dressed it up snugly, but not tightly. The bleeding had almost completely stopped when I stopped putting pressure on the wound.
About an hour later, when I changed the dressing for the first time, I snapped the photograph above.
Over the next days I took doses of Hypericum as needed. Frequency for the first 24 hours was about one dry dose about every three or four hours as needed. Pain management this way was was nearly total, and I was able to go about my day and do just about everything I normally did, just without much use of my left hand. The frequency of dosing was about the same as I had experienced the year before using hypericum for pain management after a root canal and crown overseas in Bogota, Columbia.
In that situation I had traveled to Columbia to have a root canal, crown and other dental work done because the quote I had gotten at home was about the same as what I would pay for a good used car. Instead I flew down to Bogota to have a friend do the work and a lot more, for a fraction of what I was quoted here.
But in Bogota, the oral surgeon looked at my xray and said to me that she was going to try her best, but she did not know if she was going to be able to save the tooth. She ended up working on it for nearly an hour, during which my nerves were deadened with novocaine injections. I didn't feel a thing.
I followed up that visit with an Uber across town to my dentist's office, where she put in a temporary crown and took moulds for the finished crown. By the time she was done, about three hours had passed and I was starting to feel things. I had hypericum with me and took a 200C while I was there in the chair. The pain was pretty much gone in a minute. My dentist, Sara Herero, was also a homeopath. I had met her in 2018, at her graduation from the same homeopathy school I had attended.
"I will write you a scrip for painkillers," she said.
"I'm actually good. I don't think I will need them," I replied.
She raised her eyebrows. She was a homeopath, but had not seen what it could do acutely for pain.
I walked back to my AirBnB a few blocks away, and crashed. One thing that acute remedies do do, is bring on sleep. Your vital force gets shifted towards healing and away from waking energy. You want to flop. If you see that in someone you give an acute remedy to, that's gold. It means that the remedy is acting.
As with my finger, I used hypericum as needed for the next two days. As needed turned out to be about every three to four hours, and as the days passed the frequency lessened until I didn't need it at all.
This past weekend I attended the annual Joint American Homeopathic Conference in Reston, VA. One of the most striking presentations I saw was from a homeopath and naturopath named Lisa Amerine, who for many years has used homeopathy acutely, while leading groups of young folks on treks through the Colorado Rockies. She keeps a homeopathy kit with her to treat kids with all kinds of acute insults, quickly and without side effects of any kind. It was a joy to get more of this kind of knowledge from someone who has such extensive experience with it.
Homeopathy can save your life.
I love what I do.