What’s My Specialty?
Friday, October 5, 2007

by Marilyn Freedman

Good question! Short answer is: listening, connecting, and diligence. My listening skills help you, and me, unravel the process that brought you to the state you are in. I call it a “jig saw puzzle” of time, events, and reactions that show a time line and progression of your dis-ease. Connecting is the outgrowth of our patient-practitioner relationship that allows for an understanding of the whole picture, the mind-body relationship, that is the core to correcting the imbalance. Diligence is the many hours that I spend studying the homeopathic medical books to find the right remedy for you at that particular time. The long answer follows.

Perhaps the most telling of my skills, because of my homeopathic training, is that people love to talk to me. I’ve been told that I should have been a psychologist, or that I would make a good social worker. I’ve even been asked if I wanted to foster parent. I declined that invitation when I was told that I absolutely would not be allowed to treat a child in my care with homeopathy, but only with drugs prescribed by a conventional doctor. Patients tell me that they feel better after talking to me. When is the last time you spent 2 hours talking about yourself to someone, without any judgement, analysis, or advice? It’s a pretty neat experience.

I did not realize psychiatrists no longer take the time to talk to patients for an hour, until I heard it in my clinic. I’ve been told that their emphasis is on drug prescribing, and a big issue for some people is that if they no longer want to be on a medication, or on a cocktail of 2 or more, it can be very problematic. If your health care provider doesn’t agree with you, guess what? By the way, there is a universal trend towards pharmacists being regulated to prescribe medication over the counter. This means that you can go to a drug store and get a prescription medicine from a pharmacist. Interesting, isn’t it? Is there something to the ‘Big Pharma’ conspiracy story? Are we being primed by the pharmaceutical companies who are ‘educating’ us regularly on commercial t.v. to be a self-prescribing consumer/patient driven society? It’s going to be progressively easier to get drugs. These are drugs that are easy to get, but by the very nature of conventional pharmaceuticals, create side effects; have long term or ‘rest of your life’ implications; are palliative and not curative. It’s like what my father once told me, “Real estate is easy to buy, but not so easy to sell if you have to get out.” Forgive me if that analogy isn’t a good one. To the point: once you’re on a conventional medicine it’s not so easy to get off it.

How do I differentiate from conventional means? You might feel better coming to me for a cup of tea, a chat, and a short term remedy to get you back on track. I’m like all those guys wrapped into one. Although I don’t “specialize”. my practice has evolved over the years mostly by word of mouth, with those suffering from depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, chronic aches and pains and the like, where conventional medicine has failed them. So I guess I could say: I specialize in helping people that conventional medicine doesn’t.