I can still remember very clearly the day when I questioned traditional medicine for the first time. It was a warm and beautiful evening. I had just finished my last exam towards earning my medical degree. The graduation was only a few weeks away, so I decided to attend a dance performance in the Garden Theatre of Thessaloniki. While a skilled dancer was moving freely and naturally on the stage, a very strange thought crossed my mind, that Medicine could be completely different from what I had been taught in Medical school all those years…but at that point, I wasn’t ready to challenge my future profession yet.
A doctor’s aim is to heal
Most of my friends in medical school and I were determined and diligent, we did our best and went the extra mile by studying very hard instead of going to parties. I remember that I spent the whole summer after finishing my first year of medical school in a hospital, trying to absorb as much as possible in order to reach my learning objectives.
My priority was the same as every doctor’s: to acquire as much knowledge and experience as possible, so that I would be able to help, solve difficult cases and heal my patients, make them get and feel better.
But as the years went by, even though I loved what I was doing, and I was a caring and compassionate doctor to my patients, my enthusiasm started to fade away. It was the moment when I realised that, sadly, the medicine I was practicing was not at all about the “healing”!
That feeling wasn’t new to me. Even during my specialisation, I had expressed the same concerns and doubts about medicine and healing to a friend. Both of us believed that a doctor is taught to simply maintain a patient’s condition as ¨stable¨ but not really heal him! What this means is that, even after the doctor’s intervention, the patients will be forced to be on medication for the rest of their life: they are not really healed.
Some personal experiences led me to the same conclusions too. My son suffered from asthma and I had always felt that, despite all the promises that cortisone inhalers did not have any side effects, there was just no way I could believe that it was true. I had great concerns about him and his health. Since he had never had fever as a child, I knew instantly that this wasn’t normal. This made me question my profession:
What was I doing wrong?
Why couldn’t conventional medicine heal my son?
Was my son’s asthma really an illness or was there something else that I couldn’t even think about?
What if I was mistaken?
Had I been wrong all along since studying and practicing traditional medicine?
If so, which direction should I take?
I had invested so much time, effort and energy. I had sacrificed my whole life for that purpose. I couldn’t face starting all over again when I had finally obtained recognition for all my efforts. I had finished my specialisation. I was giving lectures in specific areas, such as diabetes, hypertension and medical statistics. I was well recognized among my colleagues. I simply wasn’t prepared to let it all go, and doubting what I was doing and my own self led the way.
I had so many questions and no answers. But one thing was clear to me: I had to break my chains and “dance freely”, and just like the performer at the Garden Theatre of Thessaloniki, I had to find my own steps, my own moves, something that made me feel comfortable, even if that meant exploring other types of dance!
Along came the answer
At the end of my specialisation, I meet an old friend who was practicing homeopathy. I started asking questions to find out how this healing method could help me solve my child’s asthma, and to find answers to all the questions I was constantly asking myself. To begin with, I was very skeptical and argumentative: it wasn’t easy to accept facts and theories that “destroyed” my knowledge, my beliefs and the meaning of my existence until then!!!
For example, I learned about the destructive nature of vaccines, which until then I had held in high regards since I was convinced about their effectiveness and value. I learnt about the side effects of antibiotics, which I had always believed could save lives. And the list is much longer!
Maybe it was my intuition, the curiosity to answer my questions or simply the need to find a solution for my child that led me to spend time away from my family to learn more about homeopathy. And I still remember the first day in class, when myself and another lady (MD) gave the professor such a hard time with our mean questions. After all, I had to decide whether or not to start a whole new chapter in my life!
Whatever the reason, the important thing is that I stayed, while the other lady left. But it wasn’t that easy. Throughout my 2-year-education programme I questioned everything! Every time a difficult case was presented in the seminars and ended well, I thought: ”That was only a coincidence. They can’t prove any causality!” And whenever a treatment didn’t work, it made my uncertainty grow even bigger. In spite of every doubt, I kept attending the lessons because I was so amazed by the theory.
The most impressive thing they kept repeating from the very moment I first started studying homeopathy, is that the human organism works exactly like everything else in nature: it has to obey physical laws. If you try to suppress a symptom, the body will make the symptom manifest in another form, through another path. It’ll definitely find another way, BUT the “other way” is a second and less preferred one.
For example, if you catch a cold and you don’t want to stay at home and lose work days, but instead choose to take medications and suppress the symptoms, your organism will react and either immediately or after a period of time another symptom will appear (i.e. a headache, fatigue, or even a more severe one like high blood pressure). Whatever you do to suppress symptoms will not work as your body will always find a way to express itself.
BUT we, human beings, are so arrogant and superficial that we dare to think that we can intervene on the human organism and decide in what way and how it has to react!!! That’s exactly the price that humankind is now paying, not only regarding health but in every aspect of life and nature.
The challenge of practicing homeopathy
Although I continued my homeopathy studies, I wasn’t really convinced U N T I L I started to see my own patients…and then it became so clear that treatment success wasn’t just a coincidence. It was the clear result of this “magical” treatment. That’s how patients usually express themselves about homeopathy:
Dr. please give me those magical pills again
What do these remedies have inside? Magical powder?
When practicing homeopathy, I have the feeling that God is acting through me because the ability to heal is not a human thing: it’s divine. More from “God” – whatever this word means to you. I, as a doctor, just work as an intermediary!!
But it is not always easy. There are also cases that don’t go well. I am constantly worried to death and I have to be there to stand up for homeopathy all the time, because as my teacher said:
If you are healing thousands with homeopathy nobody cares, but if one dies while under homeopathic treatment, you are the one everybody will blame and they will say “Homeopathy was responsible and did that!!¨
You see, as an allopathic doctor, you can judge, compare and at the end one thing is for sure: in a way, you feel safe and protected. You have all those protocols, guidelines and seminars. You are “covered” even if one of your patients dies, as you have followed all the steps closely. No one can blame you. But, if you practice alternative medicine, you are on your own. I often joke and say: “All the grey hair I have, I got since I started practicing homeopathy”!
I was very insecure when I started and if it hadn’t been for those who mentored me at the beginning of my career, it would have taken me even longer to become a confident practitioner as it takes years and years in order to find rules and explanations. When I first met my mentor, I was hopeless and desperate, and he told me:
Don’t worry! Only the first 10 years are difficult, after that, everything is going to be much easier!”
Well, that was a RELIEF! Now that the first 10 years have gone by, I can actually look back and I’m definitely happy about my decision. It wasn’t easy, but it was definitely a good one, not only for myself, but also for all my patients because now I’m finally able to heal them. I have learnt a natural dance and I guide my patients through the path of healing naturally, in a accordance to physical laws.
I now know that, just like in homeopathy, even my decision to become a home-opathic doctor was not a coincidence; it was my destiny!
