Respecting the Inner Wisdom of the Body:

How Homeopathy Looks at Symptoms in Illness

One way homeopathic treatment differs from conventional medicine is that homeopathy views the human being as a whole dynamic system with a comprehensive intelligence that directs and manages its functions. Included in this human totality that makes up each one of us, is a defense system designed to rebalance and heal any time something alien or harmful invades us. When illness or imbalance arises, this intricate system of defense creates symptoms as a means of overcoming the invading force and seeking to restore the entire system to health.

When an influenza virus comes into our bodies and invades our respiratory system, a fever comes up to "cook" the virus out; when we've ingested something that wants to set up shop in our digestive tract, diarrhea and vomiting work to expel this foreign intruder asap.  While symptoms may be unpleasant and painful, nevertheless they are the defense system's own best choice of action in order to try and rebalance in the face of illness or threat. 

Homeopathic treatment understands symptoms to be the body's best efforts to heal itself, and works to support their efforts with specific homeopathic remedies.  This is in contract to conventional medicine, which opposes symptoms in its efforts to heal.  When Tylenol lowers a fever, it does so by thwarting the immune system's actions; anti-diarrhea drugs deliberately bind us up.  Symptoms become the target as something to be suppressed in order for the person to get better.

Rather than opposing symptoms,homeopathic remedies work to give additional stimulation to our dynamic healing mechanism.  By encouraging the body's own efforts, symptoms don't worsen but naturally lessen as the defense system becomes more effective in doing its job quickly, easily and thoroughly, restoring us to health and well-being.  By stimulating the defensive system in its specific action against the illness, it more easily overwhelms the illness, causing symptoms to quickly fade as healing takes place.

Much of our science and medicine today is based on a belief that the body is simply a collection of parts and functions which break down and need an outside mechanic to come in and fix.  The concept of the body's wisdom is hardly taken into consideration when prescribing drugs and invasive treatments.  Symptoms and alteration of function are taken at face value as being the problem and most medical treatments are aimed to get rid of them by opposition - shutting them down through a chemical, surgical or invasive procedure stronger than the physiological action creating them.  Suppressing the symptom (which lasts only as long as the drug's action) is the goal, and little thought is given as to why the symptom was there in the first place, and what the consequences of shutting that symptom down could be.  Meanwhile, our defensive system has been undermined even as the invading cause is still at work. 

The wisdom that is born into the cells of our body's immune system will always look for the best way to protect those parts of ourselves vital to survival (our organs, the brain, those parts necessary for life) in the efforts to ward off an alien invading force such as an illness.  The stronger this defensive system is within us, the milder and more superficial the symptoms will be in order to rebalance.  However if the system's efforts to rebalance are negated through the use of oppositional drugs, then not only is the defense system weakened, but the whole body is more vulnerable to a deeper invasion by whatever illness or negative force has come in, which could in turn lead to more severe symptoms being expressed.

Respecting the vital force energy and its wisdom is the foundation of homeopathy.  Always seeking to support and enhance its efforts rather than oppose them is what we consider when choosing a homeopathic remedy.  In a case of illness, the correct remedy (the one which most closely matches the patient's totality of symptoms)will rally the defensive forces and stimulate our system to heal quickly, organically, gently and thoroughly.As the body is stimulated in a healing direction, symptoms subside naturally and inner order is restored.