Treat the Cause

Spending 20 hours with Dr. Saine just isn’t enough! Observing Andre as he takes cases has been an amazing experience for me as a developing homeopath. The questions are always open-ended, well-formed and thorough, and Dr. Saine’s decades of clinical experience are vividly clear. 

I have to say that what I learned just this week through observation, was more valuable than spending the last quarter in clinic as a secondary student working directly with patients! Watching homeopaths that really know what they are doing is something all students new to homeopathy should experience. I learned so much about how to take a case. I saw Andre go through the symptoms the patient reported on the initial intake and follow-up on each of them. If a patient mentioned they had been irritable, he would ask how has the irritability been since you’ve taken the remedy. Instead of asking the long drawn out question to ddx nat mur, how long could you sit in the sun on a park bench with no hat, no sunglasses in 80 degree heat, he would simply ask, how are you in the sun?

Watching Dr. Saine listen to patients was also interesting. In the Medical Observer, we read about how important it is to carefully listen to be able to catch the moment when your patient says something important. Dr. Saine really demonstrated how that was done. I could tell when he was differentiating between remedies as well. His questions would bounce back and forth between characteristic symptoms of a few remedies as he tried to narrow it down. It really showed me how valuable a strong understanding of material medica really is.  Watching him use MacRep also made me regret my decision to buy Radar. MacRep is so much simpler to use. He would use something like EH on Radar continually to read the reporting’s of old doctors cases to see if something was comparable to his current case. It was also really interesting to see how patients who were sensitive to remedies were prescribed doses. I never knew that Hahnemann had recommended that sensitive patients smell the remedy, or take it via olfaction, as Hahnemann put it. It was amazing to hear these patients describe how much of an effect such a small dose had.

After this week with Dr. Saine, and my last few weeks with Dr. Kellerstein, my passion for homeopathy is stronger than ever and I am excited to get back to school to start applying what I have learned. I would recommend preceptoring with both of these amazing doctors to all students interested in learning homeopathy the way Hahnemann had originally practiced it.

Over the last two weeks, I have been preceptoring with Dr. Joe Kellerstein. The number of patients coming in and out of the office was amazing to see as a future doctor. I was able to see such a wide variety of patients and pathology.  The experience was also invaluable to my homeopathic knowledge development. I saw new patient intakes and patients on follow up visits, which allowed for further development of my case-taking skills and materia medica knowledge. As a student, I can’t even express how valuable it is to watch experienced doctors take cases in an efficient and effective manner.

A question that Joe asked me multiple times over the two weeks was what is holism? What a daunting question for such a young student! Although I was taken off guard the first time, I managed to describe the importance of treating the whole person and not just looking at individual patterns of disease. Many times I answered and Joe replied giving me a bit more of a clue to what his idea of holism really was. Finally, after being asked many times, I responded that whole is greater than the individual parts and the whole communicates with us through physiologic responses in order to provide the physician with an understanding of the disconnects within the being. We are trying to look at how the whole experiences the disease process, and not just the specific disease. Holism means to look at what the person’s physiology is screaming at us to fix first, and see what is most important in their healing path.

A great book Joe recommended I read when I was in my undergrad was “Molecules of Emotion” by Candace Pert. It was a great book that really took my understanding of neuroscience to a new level. Although most people know that molecules make up our world and our bodies, sometimes we forget that molecules are the factors that influence our mood and our health. Those molecules make up hormones that act on different receptors in our body to make us feel the way we do. Everything in life has a physiological basis and if we, as physicians, can learn to listen to the physiology of the body, we can truly treat the cause and help establish well-being in our patients.

After spending time with Joe, more than ever I feel that homeopathy is the only way to truly help a person’s body re-establish health. I have seen that every person’s body has the ability to heal, and it’s our job to recognize the symptoms and provide a remedy that in a healthy person causes that same pattern of symptoms. I have seen the importance of what Hahnemann refers to as hygiene, and what I refer to as nutrition. Finally, I have seen the importance of looking at the totality of symptoms as they express the outer image of the internal essence of disease, and the importance of focusing on this as the only means by which we choose a remedy.