Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, founder of the GAPS Diet, talks about the cherries on top of our GAPS cake and I've explored several “cherries” in the past four years. Recently I decided to take a look at what homeopathy can do for me and my mom. Sometimes I delve into learning more about a healing modality by researching it myself, but this time I decided to work with a practitioner. A friend gave me a recommendation and I decided to check it out.

I have used homeopathic remedies over the years. One very popular for my entire family has been Rescue Remedy (affiliate link). My mom has had a bottle on hand for years, I've kept it on hand and my sisters use it, too. When my children were younger I used Hyland's Homeopathic Teething Tablets (affiliate link). We even contacted a homeopathic veterinarian once for our dairy goats when one of them had a stubborn case of subclinical mastitis.

I've learned a few things about classical homeopathy in the past couple of weeks:

• I've heard that there are remedies that include many components, but these often do not work as well as the singular remedy.
• I did not know that someone who works to find your one remedy is called a classical homeopathic practitioner.
• I was surprised to learn that most people will be “prescribed” just one remedy, which will address your symptoms and issues at the root of the problem. The practitioner figures out which remedy is the one for you based on your history.

I was asked to share traumatic events, accidents, surgery and pregnancies. I'm 50, and I feel like I've experienced more than my fair share of trauma. I decided to focus only on the trauma which I felt had been life changing. I gave a brief one or two sentence summary of each event, and I also listed the year and my age. That wasn't asked for, but I thought it might be helpful. While responding to the pregnancy question, I also included miscarriages. My understanding is that the practitioner includes these events to narrow down your specific remedy.

During the appointment I was asked questions about my body, how are my ears, eyes, skin, etc. and asked to expand a bit more on some of my traumatic events. My practitioner is very compassionate and it was quite cathartic working with her during my appointment.

When reading how classical homeopathy works it sounds quite logical to me. What really resonates is that the root of the problem is treated. Now compare that to traditional allopathic doctors who treat symptoms with little or no consideration toward why the person is experiencing symptoms in the first place. Take depression, for example. This could be caused by adrenal fatigue, hypothyroid or any other number of physical causes but the first thing many allopathic doctors will do is to prescribe an anti-depression medication. Now granted, there are probably persons out there who are so deeply depressed that they do need something to help them get through a difficult period in their life, just so they can begin to rise out of the muck and the mire of depression but then let's figure out what the real cause for depression is.

Something else I really found interesting is that there are Homeopathic Constitutional Types. My remedy is Staphysagria and in doing some online research I discovered that this remedy does indeed describe some parts of me.

One characteristic I have which matches is I rarely get angry. I suppose if I were to analyze myself, I would find that it was unsafe to get mad as a child (and teenager) and so I disowned that part of myself. I have lost my temper only a few times in my adult life and always something happened to cause me to rethink my actions and decide losing my temper only caused me grief and frustration. There are three times I can recall getting angry as an adult and the outcome was too much of a lesson.

Incident #1

I was working in a warehouse, the company sold plastic and glass bottles. I was making my way through a narrow aisle and I was frustrated and in a hurry. I shoved my way through quickly and this caused the top box, which was open, and contained ONE THOUSAND 2 ounce plastic bottles to fall and spill out onto the cement. These bottles were going to be used to silk screen a label onto them, but now that they had fallen onto the ground they were covered with dust. The bottles were very static-y and attracted every tiny piece of dust to every square inch of the surface. This was a disaster as for now these bottles were worthless for the job.

Incident #2

Again in this same warehouse I was having a difficult time and I'd seen the men punch and kick boxes to let out their feelings of anger. I knew better than to punch a box, that would hurt my fist! Instead, I decided to kick a box. Well, I kicked that box so hard that my foot got stuck! I had to extract my foot from my shoe and then wrench my shoe out. The box I'd kicked was at the bottom of a stack about five high. That was just embarrassing.

Incident #3

I don't even remember what happened but I was really mad at my husband over something. This was probably within the first year of our marriage. I picked up my cast iron skillet and threw it on the ground. The handle broke off. I was just sad over that because I had ruined my skillet. You see, when the handle broke, it also took out a good hunk from the wall of the skillet so it became worthless.

And so I stopped throwing hissy fits because they didn't work out so good for me. 😉

Here are some links with information on the Staphysagria Constitutional Type:

• Psycho Dynamics of Staphysagria
• Homeopathy for Women: Staphysagria

By the way, I wasn't sure where to find my remedy so I ended up ordering online. It just so happened that the winter storms back East were raging and my remedy was stuck in the mail for an extra week. I ended up ordering a second bottle from a company in California. After ordering twice, I discovered that Sprouts (a crunchy farmer's market health food type store located in Arizona) carries homeopathic remedies.

So these are things to take into consideration when ordering yours – 1) Can you get it from a local health food store 2) Order from a company near your state if at all possible. Amazon also has homeopathic remedies but they are considered “add-on” items so you have to combine them with items to ship from Amazon totalling over $25.

Have you ever used a classical homeopathic practitioner?