Homeopathy: Suppressions & Side Effects
Homeopathy goes to the root. The 'others' do not.
Welcome back! This article completes a triad of articles that includes homeopathic provings, aggravations and, now, suppressions.
Suppression refers to masking or pushing down symptoms or a condition, and not uprooting or curing it.
Does homeopathy suppress? No, it does not.
But many pharmaceutical drugs and medical interventions do. So it is basically impossible to talk about suppressions without some discussion of the suppressions of medications and other treatments, as they factor so prominently in most people’s lives and health choices. And side effects can’t be separated from the topic of mainstream medications either.
Although homeopathy does not suppress symptoms or conditions, it CAN bring out— or bring forward— previously suppressed conditions. Which is a good thing, because then these conditions can be addressed and uprooted once and for all, instead of insidiously causing problems.
In some cases a suppression revealed through homeopathy will look like the return of an old condition. Typically this condition will have been treated in the past with some form of drugs, possibly even a very long time ago. (For example, getting a surprise urinary tract infection, a condition that was once an issue for you but that had been ‘treated’ repeatedly with antibiotics.)
But it doesn’t have to look exactly like a condition you had before. A new issue might still be your system’s way of unwinding something deeper and more serious. Most often, IF this happens, in my experience, it ends up presenting as some sort of skin condition.
If you’ve heard of Hering’s Law of Cure in homeopathy, this points to suppressions. This ‘law’ states that (homeopathic) healing migrates from the innermost part of the patient, such as important organs like the heart, to the outermost areas, such as the muscles or skin.
Although this CAN happen, definitely do not expect it to always be the case. (I would not call it a ‘law’, which implies that this always will occur.)
Here’s a most basic and common example of a suppression:
You have a skin rash, the doctor’s office prescribes you a cream, you apply the cream, and the rash goes away (at least for a while).
But where did it go?
Dorothy Shepherd (the famous homeopath and author) wrote about a case like this, whereby an old skin condition reemerged. Here’s my summary of the case—
Ms. Shepherd was treating a woman for a major health condition and, eventually, as the woman improved, a skin issue (that had been originally suppressed by the topical products of the day) returned. The patterned rash covered the woman’s body. Ms. Shepherd was pleased and told the client that this was positive! But the client couldn’t tolerate the skin condition, and Ms. Shepherd didn’t treat it. (That was often the old-school homeopath’s way.) So the woman returned to suppressive medical ointments, and surely entered back into the same old loop again.
[If you ever find this happens, TREAT the skin disorder with homeopathy as it is presenting! It is asking to be properly uprooted!]
Even Mainstream Medicine’ recognizes ‘The Atopic March’, which (for ‘some unknown reason’) ‘marches’ from childhood dermatitis, to chronic allergies and food sensitivities, to asthma. (If you read the article linked above, you may notice they avoid any suggestion that medications might be involved— it’s just another ‘mystery’.)
Joette Calabrese likens this to playing whack-a-mole. You pop one down and another pops up somewhere else. Though, unfortunately, usually the more we suppress, the more serious the conditions that become.
How many times does this happen (drug after drug, each one treating the ‘side effects’ of another, in a terrible chain), until one day the same person, now an adult, is staring down the barrel of a chronic, debilitating, mystery, ‘autoimmune’ disorder.
Apart from suppressing conditions, the other issue is side effects.
Does homeopathy have side effects? No, it does not.
Provings and aggravations can occur from time to time; however, if you stop taking the homeopathy, the proving or aggravation will also resolve within short order. (Or you can antidote it to speed this process.)
But homeopathy does not ever have ’side effects’ such as kidney failure, paralysis of the stomach, vision loss, hair loss, heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, cancer and death, to name just a few of the permanent and debilitating issues causes by modern day ‘drugs of commerce’.
Drugs are constantly being taken off the market, often times after many people have already been seriously injured or killed. (Here’s a list of meds that are currently being ‘monitored’ by the FDA.)
This type of ‘care’ by doctors has been going on a long time: George Washington was essentially bled to death by his doctors, when they took 40% of his blood volume in an effort to heal him of an acute bacterial illness. In the 1800s bleeding patients was still considered to be a rational practice.
Here’s a silly SNL skit that’s pretty darned accurate!
Just in this last century doctors were giving mercury to babies!
These types of treatments were referred to as ‘heroic measures’ as the patient had to be heroic to survive the treatment. These exact types of treatments are what turned Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of Homeopathy, away from the ‘medicine’ he had learned in medical school in the 1700s. (He jokes in The Organon about giving his patients strawberries and seeing much better results than the other doctors who were administering toxins and bleeding them daily.)
[Which practices do you think will seem barbaric and archaic when we look back to the accepted medical treatments of today? Might chemo treatments fall in this category someday too?]
As Dorothy Shepherd quotes in ‘Magic of the Minimum Dose’— “Another example of the old saying... ‘The disease was successfully treated, but the patient died.’”
Unfortunately, this is still happening today, sometimes just as plainly, but often much more slowly and insidiously.
Drugs do not cure conditions. Period. If you use a medicine for constipation, it may cause diarrhea as a way of getting the bowels to move, but once you stop taking it, it may also rebound back to even worse constipation, since no cure was created, only a temporary overriding (or suppression) of the initial condition.
(Which doesn’t mean no one ever gets better. Of course, the body is always seeking to right what’s wrong and to return to balance! Oftentimes in spite of what we do to it, including diet and lifestyle factors.)
Here are some other examples of known effects of drugs which you can look up online and find a great deal of information about. (I won’t link to all the research articles, as it will take a lot of time and many of the links will become outdated in short order. But most of these can be found with a simple internet search. I have also included some book links, for those of you with inquiring minds who want to take some deeper dives.)
Aspirin leading to hearing loss.
The link between Tylenol use and asthma in children.
Statins leading to depression, headaches, memory issues, muscle wasting, pain and weakness in the legs (especially in men), fatigue, and concentration issues.
Blood pressure meds and side effects such as dizziness, vertigo, and chronic cough.
Topical steroid withdrawal leading to Red Skin Syndrome or an unbearable itch.
Steroid injections leading to glaucoma and cataract.
Aspirin given in flu cases leading to respiratory problems, pneumonia, and even death.
Rheumatoid arthritis arising after a history of antibiotics/steroid use.
Daily aspirin increasing the risk of a bleeding stroke (hemorrhagic stroke), though it may help prevent a clot-related stroke. (Consider low potency Arnica daily instead!)
The link between antibiotics and UTIs, kidney stones, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, colorectal cancer, aortic dissection, depression, and obesity in children. (To name just a few conditions that have been linked to antibiotic use.)
Omeprazole (and proton pump inhibitors in general, which are used for gastric reflux) interfering with magnesium and other vitamin uptake; also their link to headaches and the worsening of migraines.
The use of ‘bio-identical hormones’ leading to uterine cancer.
Birth control use in women leading to disgust for their partner. (Among other issues such as menstrual cycle disruption and trouble conceiving.)
So-called anti-depressants leading to manic behavior, depression (yes), total lack of feeling, and suicidality.
ADD and ADHD meds leading to a wide variety of unhappy symptoms, from intense episodes of anger to permanent tics.
Breast implants leading to numerous debilitating ‘mystery’ health problems.
Medication overuse headaches — also known as rebound headaches — arising after the long-term use of medications to treat headaches such as migraines. (They may help occasional headaches, but those who take them more than a couple of days a week may discover that they then trigger headaches.)
So-called ‘autoimmune’ diseases arising after drug use. Is it really the body attacking itself if it is a reaction to something caused by a drug, a toxin or a pathogen?
Lack of H Pylori being linked to asthma. (Many drugs may interfere with H Pylori.)
There are many other issues you can you can into, as well, including, but not limited to, fluoride use, modern day injections, and even marijuana use.
To illustrate just one of the examples above— A relative of mine developed vertigo. He went to the doctor, who doubled his high blood pressure medication. The vertigo got so bad he couldn’t stand up, or even turn his head, without getting dizzy. I told him about the side effects of the drug he had been prescribed, which I, of course, looked up immediately. (A top side effect was dizziness.) He finally looked it up himself and stopped the drug. And, lo and behold!, the vertigo dropped by 80% overnight.
(He does have a condition that can cause dizziness so he still got little spells from time to time. However, after about 9 months using the Banerji Protocols he no longer gets dizzy at all, and he no longer requires any medications to keep his blood pressure within normal range.)
ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS look up the side effects of any drugs, ideally before you take them. Especially with your children. Recently a client told me of a drug that they had started their 8 year old on. The first thing I did was look it up online. The first information on the page stated that it had not been approved for use in children under 12. And then there was the list of side effects, including lasting neurological damage. (No, thank you!)
When you look up a drug, you may find a lot of information. You may need to search for the definitions of fancy medical terms. You may see some side effects ranked as common, and others as rare. (Though I don’t care if it says rare, do I want to be the ONE that ends up with it?) This all takes some effort— but taking charge of your health does require some effort.
If you go to your doctor and ask them about the side effects of a drug, probably 90% of the time they will dismiss your concern. They may claim that it can’t be the drug, even though you looked up the side effects and it was the most common one! (Or, as I shared above, how the doctor doubled the medication, even though it was causing the terrible vertigo.)
This is all simplified immeasurably when you have homeopathy at home to handle a great many of conditions that pop up, and thus are able to avoid excessive use of steroids, antibiotics and the other medical go-tos.
And this is why, for example, the Banerjis note on pg 49-50 of their book under Atopic Dermatitis (which includes eczema);
‘In addition to the protocols, use only coconut or olive oil on the skin.’
Dr. James Compton Burnett, the illustrious homeopath, used the analogy of pruning a vine without tearing out the roots: The vine actually strengthens and moves in new directions.
Here is a story, in his words, quoted from ‘Curability of Tumours by Medicines’:
“My standpoint is that a tumour is the product of the organism, and to be really cured the power to produce the same must be eliminated, got rid of; cutting it of merely rids the organism of the product, leaving the producing power where it was before, often […] acting like pruning a vine; i.e. the tumour producing power is increased, and the fatal issue is brought nearer. The following case brings well into relief what I mean: Miss X…49…came under my care on July 31, 1893. Formerly had bad eczema, was cured in a fortnight by an ointment; several years later— June, 1885— a tumour was excised from her left breast; said tumour recurred in the same breast and was, July, 1887, again removed together with the whole left breast; then a tumour came in the right breast and in January, 1888, the tumour and whole right breast were removed by a very neat operation. She came to me for reoccurrence of the process in the middle of the scar of the right side with a good deal of inflammation. The treatment lasted four years, ending during the course of the cure in eczema, and patient is actually in better health than ever before in her life… The eczema is also well. What I am here concerned to demonstrate is not how this particular case was cured, but to make manifest that a tumour is really a vital growth arising from disease in the individual and is not itself the disease at all; the initial and subsequent eczemas and the tumours being one and the same thing, i.e. the products of the disease.” (emphasis in original, bold mine).
James Compton Burnett wrote multiples times of cases where, after months or years of treatment, some original and relatively minor condition returned. He then treated it homeopathically, as it might have been originally, and the person was completely well.
This showed up in cases most commonly with skin conditions, such as a rash that had been suppressed with some tar-like goo. But this also showed up in cases where something had been burned off or cut off, such as ulcers on the cervix of a woman that had been cauterized off. In this case, the woman was very ill with mystery ailments, but after prolonged homeopathic care by Dr. Burnett, the ulcer on her cervix returned. Once that was treated homeopathically (the easiest part by far!) she remained perfectly well for as long as he tracked her case.
I, personally, have found that even burning off a mole (‘naturally’, using 30% hydrogen peroxide) resulted in more (and itchier) moles arising later.
The good news is that homeopathy can uproot conditions, even in very chronically ill adults. It just can take time to peel back the layers.
As you can see, there is a fair amount of talk of suppressions in the homeopathy literature, even if it isn’t always called that.
What they are mostly referring to is treatments from the mainstream doctors of the day (whether it was mercury treatments then, or Big Pharma now) driving a condition deeper into the organism.
But there are also instances that are more naturally occurring— such as a woman getting super hot, jumping in a cold pool, and her periods stopping. That’s a physical shock leading to a suppression. (In this case Aconitum 200 and/or Bellis Perrennis 200 could be good homeopathic options!)
Emotional shocks and trauma can also lead to ailments or suppressions. Check out Mental Shock on pg. 117 of the Banerji Protocols book. They note that Mental Shock ‘may be the hidden cause of many chronic diseases. The [protocol] may take care of many illnesses that were the result of trauma— immediate or in the past.’
Always look to the symptoms, as they are presenting, and start there. We don’t have to try to figure out what exactly was suppressed, or dream up a deeper cause. As always, we start with what is presenting now, and then proceed step by step, following the symptoms, so to speak, like breadcrumbs.
-The condition is not in the cyst, the cyst arises from some unseen cause.
-The rash is not the problem, it’s the signal that says, hey something is out of balance!
-In homeopathy we USE these symptoms, they are clues.
-We match the symptoms to the homeopathic medicines, and we take up the condition at the root.
-And don’t forget, start with the diagnosis (if there is one) and the Banerji Protocol for that diagnosis!
Healing often occurs in stages. Dr. James Compton Burnett scoffed at doctors who were looking for the *ONE* cure to cancer. As he said (I’m paraphrasing), to get to the roof you need a ladder, and each rung is as important as the next. Step by step!
Now I’ll share some examples of homeopathy and the emergence of suppressions from my practice and experience:
There are two primary remedies that I know can reveal old suppressed conditions, because I’ve seen it time and again. But, really, any remedy might peel back the onion to a deeper layer. We don’t know, and we don’t have to know. We don’t have to label it anything. We just notice what’s going on now and adjust as needed.
One remedy that regularly is related to bringing out suppressions is Sulphur.
Interestingly, Samuel Hahnemann (the German doctor who founded Homeopathy as a system of medicine) used to open cases and to ‘clear’ them with Sulphur, similarly to how the Banerjis and Practical Homeopaths open cases with a dose of Camphora to antidote what might have gone before.
I have now seen a handful of cases where a person is given Sulphur as a remedy (suited to their case), and erupts in an odd rash or itchy skin condition somewhere unexpected. This is not always directly linked to an old condition (at least not that the person can remember), so we might call it an aggravation. However, there are times when even after stopping taking the Sulphur, the rash remained. So, in these cases it could be something underlying being brought out. (I have only seen this happen in cases where there had been a long history of chronic conditions with a lot of drugs and medical interventions.)
Don’t let this make you afraid of Sulphur! Many people (myself included) have found homeopathic Sulphur to be a very helpful remedy. In most of the cases of an aggravation, stopping the remedy was the solution and within days the rash was gone. But in the cases where it doesn’t resolve on it’s own, then we look at the current situation (say an itchy rash) and then give the homeopathic remedies for that.
Another example is Staphysagria. This is a homeopathic remedy that is used for many conditions (such as post-surgical wound healing), but it is also known as a remedy for people who have been abused (physically, mentally) and have suppressed their emotions, and often their true selves.
This can lead to anger, guilt, frustration, feeling victimized, or mortified. Some people (definitely not all), when taking Staphysagria can experience a brief phase of angry venting or lashing out. With continued doses of Staphysagria this resolves and the person may discover increased well being, self-confidence, such as the ability to have more healthy boundaries.
(Staphysagria can also help to heal the traumas related to medical interventions where the person felt helpless, embarrassed, invaded, indignant, unable to express their needs, or were actually wounded in some way by the ‘treatment’.)
But, again, we don’t always know exactly which remedy will bring forth a suppressed condition. (And most people will never experience any of this using homeopathy!)
The hardest case, by far, that I have been working on now for over two years, is one of my cats. He came to us at the estimated age of 9 or 10, from a home that certainly was not health-minded. Though I don’t know any details, he surely had been to the vet for who-knows-what, and he definitely was not eating healthy food. He was very overweight and we discovered after a while that his teeth were in terrible condition. He also had a pink spot on his belly that we came to realize he was licking bald.
Most of his issues responded very well to homeopathy (including his teeth— more on homeopathy for dental conditions in a future post!), but the licking continued until his whole belly was pink. And then he licked the fur off the inside of his hind legs, and gradually his armpits as well.
At first there was no rash, nothing to see at all, and being a cat, well, it was hard to get a detailed symptom picture. :) Was it painful? Itchy? Or a neurotic behavior?
As I went on experimenting and observing, giving remedies and watching, he would occasionally get some little pink dots and it because clear that they were itchy spots. Sulphur 30 was one that brought out some of this, but the condition never really got better. Occasionally, his little body would start to get a tiny rash going, but then it would recede again.
Only recently, using some much higher potencies that I have been experimenting with, I gave him a dose of Sepia 10M, and the next day he actually had a full-on rash on the inside of his arms. It was an actual rash for the first time, and was clearly very itchy!
At this point I went back to some of the original remedies that I had abandoned (for not helping much) such as Antimonium Crudum 6C (a top Banerji choice for itchy rashes), and Hepar Sulph 200C from the Banerji protocol for eczema, and for the first time it appears to be settling down.
[Now, I’m sharing what remedy it was, because I know you want to know, but DO NOT take it that Sepia 10M means anything for anyone else in this regard. And it has nothing to do with the Banerji Protocols. It fit his picture at the time and was, to me, a fluke, a blessing. The main point is that if we persist, we may even stumble across exactly what is needed. I will share more about the targeted use of homeopathic megapotencies in the future.]
This can also happen with fevers. Say a person always has a low grade fever—or that when sick they can’t mount a fever. Likely there was a medical suppression at some point. Say, then, that during the homeopathic healing process, a strong fever does occur, it might be (depending on all the details) taken as a good sign and either let to run it’s course or handled appropriately with homeopathic medicines.
(To treat or not to treat really depends on the level of suffering and the condition.)
There are other homeopathic approaches to winding back the clock on suppressive medical treatments, such as The Mueller Method which uses the drugs that were taken— prepared in homeopathic form— to help break through to new levels of healing in chronic cases. (An example of this method might be using Xanax in a homeopathic 30C preparation, taken three times a day for three days.)
[This is something I’m just starting to experiment with. I wouldn’t jump to this right out of the gate, but it may prove helpful in difficult cases.]
As we discussed in the last article on antidoting homeopathy, there are also homeopathic medicines that can deal with the negative of effects of drugs. Top ones are Camphora, Nux Vomica, Arsenicum Album, and Phosphorus.
Although these would typically be employed in more acute instances (such as an overdose, a drug reaction, or not coming out of anesthesia after a surgery), they may also help uproot the effects of drug use in general.
Again, we’d be looking for the remedy to fit the picture— we wouldn’t take these remedies just because someone had used medications at some point.
Almost everyone we encounter nowadays has had at least some drug treatments, if not multiple, often spanning a lifetime. There’s usually no way to know precisely what has caused what. But the good news with homeopathy is that we just start with what is presenting, and the symptoms guide the way.
Drug use, or no, suppressions, or not, homeopathy can go the mile to help us unwind just about any condition.
Of course there ARE people with chronic conditions who have not used drugs in their past! But I do find that chronic cases where the person has been ‘tinkered with a lot’ can be harder to manage, though certainly not impossible. You can read more about this topic here. And if it ever feels beyond you, get help!
A final note— if a person is currently taking pharmaceuticals, do note that this can confuse the picture.
You may need to factor in the original illness picture before the drugs.
For example, if someone is taking drugs to lower their blood pressure, but they want to try homeopathy, then they might use the Banerji Protocol for high blood pressure (see pgs 137-141) with the understanding that they WOULD have high blood pressure readings without the meds. (Even though their blood pressure is not high at this moment, if they stopped taking the meds it would be.)
Over time, the homeopathic medicines can work to make the other medications unnecessary. (This can take time, but I have now seen two people do this with blood pressure. It took 9 months and 14 months, respectively, for their blood pressure to be corrected to the normal range and to gradually wean off the drugs.)
If there is a current side effect from a drug that you are taking regularly, it may be very hard for homeopathy to help. Simply because it is being taken and created anew over and over again. This is what we might refer to as an obstacle to cure. I would put it in the same category as someone who continues to smoke cigarettes while taking homeopathic remedies for their lung condition.
(Although I don’t believe there are any inherent obstacles to cure that reside naturally within anyone, there are things that we DO that create obstacles. This can also apply to recreational drugs, the so-called ‘soft’ ones, such as alcohol and marijuana, and the clearly ‘hard’ ones as well.)
In summary:
Drugs suppress symptoms.
They drive the pathology to a deeper state and kick the can down the road.
Drugs hide information that we need, our wonderful symptoms. In Homeopathic Medicine we USE SYMPTOMS. They are our guide in the storm. We don’t even have to have a diagnosis (though that can be helpful), we just need to know what’s going on in layman’s terms. (Sore throat, worse swallowing, worse hot drinks, swollen lymph nodes.)
Drugs give a false sense of comfort. We may believe we are taking care of a problem, without a true understanding of what the drug is doing. And we may never know, because many drugs are not adequately tested. And people are taking more drugs than ever. Once taking a drug, it is generally expected that you will take it forever. (That is not what I call a cure!)
The ‘side effects’ ARE the effects. If you take a drug and it’s causing some new symptom (aka a side effect), that is just part of what the drug does in you. If you then take another drug to address that problem (maybe because you didn’t even know it was related to the first drug), then you are compounding the issue. Likely taking both drugs together has never been tested. And when you later have new symptoms (usually deeper and more serious), and take another drug for that… well, you get the idea. If you sit down and look up the side effects of all the drugs you are taking (or took for an extended period) you may be surprised to see that drug #1 likely led to #2, which led to #3, and which led to #4. At that point you don’t even know what is your problem and what is the drug.
Homeopathy can help no matter the situation, whether you need to keep taking the medications you are on, if you want to wean off of them, and/or if you want a solution that’s just a truly viable alternative. And even those issues caused by medical interventions may be helped with homeopathy!
To clarify: Am I saying never take a drug? No. But I would choose wisely. I probably want anesthetic for surgery(!), but not those corticosteroids on my skin. I may not choose the quick relief of antibiotics over and over again (particularly now that I know that the gut flora is being destroyed), but if I was in a terrible accident, I would go to the ER— and I would be taking my homeopathic remedies all the way there! Unavoidable surgery, stitches, broken bones, and diagnostics, these are what I want a traditional doctor for.
ALWAYS THE GOOD NEWS
It’s not too late. And yes there are always homeopathic options! Even during our last days on earth, homeopathy can greatly smooth the way. And, for those of us that still have time, and even in very complex cases, homeopathy can peel back the layers and help us to truly heal.
‘What I call a cure is an alteration of the disposition and the effect of that disposition, and not the destruction of the cancerous parts.’ John Hunter from the intro to Curability of Tumours by Medicines by J. Compton Burnett
And now we reach the end of the foundational material that I wanted to make sure everyone had access to. At this point anyone can go back to the beginning of Homeopathy Rising archive and take it step-by-step from the most basic foundational information to the more complex, as we build on this beautiful topic together!
Going forward, posts will cover more cases and will address homeopathy for more specific issues. If you have a topic you’d like to see covered (I’ve already had some requests), you can post it in the comments section of any of these Substack articles (if you are a paying subscriber) or you can drop me a note over at X.com.
Thanks for reading and subscribing, until next time!