Autoimmune and complex chronic illness

Autoimmune conditions, understood as a whole person.

Classical homeopathy for rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Hashimoto’s, lupus, sarcoidosis, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, in San Diego and online worldwide.

Where this began for me

I was the patient first.

In my mid-twenties I developed sarcoidosis.

Conventional medicine gave me a name for it and a plan to keep it quiet. What it could not give me was a reason. Why this, why me, why now. Nobody I asked could tell me why the illness had settled in me and not in the people around me living much the same life.

Classical homeopathy was the first thing I met that took that question seriously. It treats the disturbance as something to be understood rather than something to be silenced.

My sarcoidosis resolved. Not reduced to something manageable. Resolved, and it has stayed that way for more than fifteen years.

I have never asked anyone to take my recovery as proof of theirs. It is the reason I do this work, not an argument for it. For the fifteen years since, I have worked almost entirely with people who arrived carrying something they had been told was permanent.

How I understand autoimmunity

The immune system is not making a mistake.

Immunology describes autoimmune disease as the immune system misreading the body’s own tissue. A malfunction, to be suppressed.

Classical homeopathy asks something else, and it is the question Hahnemann arrived at in 1828 after twelve years of watching chronic cases improve and then relapse. Two people meet the same trigger. One develops the disease and one does not. What is different about the one who does?

His answer was the miasm: an inherited susceptibility running through a family line, lying quiet until something wakes it. A stress, an infection, a bereavement, a suppression. The trigger takes the blame, but the trigger is not the cause. It acts on ground that was already prepared.

Watercolor of a split seed pod with scattered pale seeds and one deep plum seed among them
One pod, many seeds. Each carries the same origin; one carries something the others do not.

In autoimmune illness that inherited layer is usually the whole case. It is why I will ask about your grandmother’s arthritis and your father’s skin, why I want to know what has run through the family and not only what is happening in you now. In an acute illness, family history is background. Here it is often the case itself.

A well-chosen remedy relieves the flare, then stops holding. The next one does the same. A third covers the symptoms beautifully on paper and does nothing at all.

That repetition is not bad luck, and it is not a signal to keep hunting sideways for a better surface match. It means the prescription is not reaching deep enough. Something underneath is relighting the fire as fast as it is put out. Recognizing that pattern, and knowing where to go once I see it, is most of what this work actually is.

What people arrive with

I don’t keep a list of specialties.

The remedy is not chosen from the diagnosis, so a page advertising the conditions I “treat” would misrepresent how the work is done. Two people can arrive with the same letter from the same rheumatologist and need entirely different remedies, because the illness is expressing itself through two different people.

That said, people reasonably want to know whether their situation is familiar ground. In most weeks I am working with:

Inflammatory arthritis Rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic and other inflammatory joint disease
Inflammatory bowel disease Ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s
Autoimmune thyroid Hashimoto’s and Graves’
Connective tissue disease Lupus and related conditions
Sarcoidosis The condition I came through myself
Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue Including ME/CFS and post-viral states
Autoimmune skin conditions Psoriasis, vitiligo, alopecia areata
Neurological involvement Multiple sclerosis and related conditions

If yours is not on that list, it does not mean it is unfamiliar. Write and ask.

What to expect

Roughly a tenth of the time you have had it.

This is the most common question I am asked, and the one people are most often given a vague answer to. So here is mine.

My working figure is about ten percent of the duration of the illness. Ten years of rheumatoid arthritis, and I would ask you to give the work something in the order of a year before judging it. Eighteen months of a thyroid condition, and we should both know a good deal sooner than that.

It is a rule of thumb rather than a promise, and it moves with severity, with how much suppression the case has already been through, and with how much of the picture has become structural rather than functional. Illness that has already changed tissue takes longer than illness that has not.

The first changes usually do not appear where you are watching. Sleep, energy, appetite, temper and mood tend to move before the named symptom does. In classical terms this is Hering’s observation: improvement runs from the inside outward and in reverse order of appearance. In practice it means that when you tell me you are sleeping properly for the first time in years but your joints feel much the same, I am encouraged and you are disappointed. We have that conversation often, and it is usually the point at which the case is turning.

Alongside your medical care

I will not ask you to stop your medication.

If you are taking a biologic, a steroid, a DMARD or any other immunosuppressant, stay on it. Keep your rheumatologist, your gastroenterologist, your neurologist. Keep the bloodwork and the imaging on schedule.

I am a certified classical homeopath. I am not a physician, and decisions about prescription medication belong to the doctor who wrote the prescription. What I do see, often, is that as someone’s overall health improves it is their own physician who begins reducing the dose. That is the correct order, and it is the only one I work in.

Teaching this work

Much of this I teach to other practitioners.

The thinking on this page is drawn from teaching I give to other homeopaths, including sessions for the Aurora Global Webinar Series and the Remedy Roundtable conference at hpathy.com. The subject is reading the inherited layer in autoimmune disease: how to identify which miasm is driving a case, and why remedies that fit the symptom picture perfectly can still fail to hold. I continue to teach and write on chronic disease and on Hahnemann’s sixth-edition Organon.

Some of the same ground is covered, for a general audience, in The Invisible Cure, a documentary on classical homeopathy that follows several patients through their treatment.

A classical perspective on immunity →

Ready to begin?

The first step is a detailed initial consultation.

Autoimmune cases need time and a full history. The initial consultation takes 60 to 90 minutes, in person in San Diego or online anywhere in the world.

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