Endometriosis and Homeopathy

It is my goal today to explain you what you as a sufferer from endometriosis can expect from homeopathy. How does Homeopathy differ in looking at a condition such as endometriosis, and may I say, looking at any other kind of disease? As you will see, to the contrary of what you might expect, Homeopathy is a true science, looking at each case of endometriosis quite differently than allopathy or modern medical science. I hope to answer more of some questions that might have intrigued the sufferer of endometriosis and which at present time are left unanswered by modern medicine. Questions such as: "How did I come to this condition? Is there any way to prevent this condition? Is this condition just a different expression of the same root of an imbalance deep in our system, and this imbalance randomly expresses itself in different pathological expressions or diseases, one of them endometriosis? What about our offspring? What can we expect them to suffer from in case we suffer from endometriosis? Can this all be answered by Homeopathy? Yes! Much more, it can be treated, cured and prevented.

Before I will answer one by one the above questions which are crucial to your goal of achieving health, I will outline in short the principles on which Homeopathy is based, comparing it with our approach to disease in allopathy so you will see a distinct different approach to illness in general, and endometriosis in particular.

Before I start explaining you what homeopathy can do for you the endometriosis patient, consider the advantages of homeopathy when compared to Allopathic (modern) medicine.

oHomeopathic treatment is individualized-it considers the whole patient through symptoms (causality, mental, emotional and physical), rather than the disease as a name. Too often, we physicians think that our work is finished when we put a label on the patient. "Yes, you have endometriosis (our main mean of diagnosis is the laparoscopy in which we visualize the pelvic and abdominal area through a tube inserted through the navel). Take these drugs; you might need surgery, maybe it is both, go home and pray that it will go away." Homeopathy does not need a name for a disease. It looks at the person as a whole and tries to find the contributing factors of disease. What does allopathy say about the causes of endometriosis? They have not been established-- in other words we don't know! We see that it can run in families (more in first-degree relatives like mother, sister, and daughter) and that the risk increases after age 30, or when having an abnormal uterus (exceptional). But does this knowledge leads to a therapy in which you can say, the endometriosis sufferer, "I know what to do now so I can say for sure, none of my offspring will suffer from this.? Not at all! So we just hope and pray that it will not effect our children. Are the measures (surgery, drugs with its multiple side effects) a guarantee for a "cure" for you the sufferer? We already know the answer to this: it is a resounded NO. How Homeopathy looks at these contributing factors is mentioned further.

All remedies recommended in homeopathy have extensive human experiment. Contrary to what opponents of homeopathy would have you believe, all remedies are tested in the only scientific way, i.e. on normal, healthy individuals. This really should be taken over by modern medicine. I just saw on Larry King Reagan's doctor speaking about Alzheimer and he asked volunteers for studies with new untested drugs. Doctors should be the first ones to do this on themselves like homeopathic physicians have been doing this for two centuries now.

The homeopathic method of prescribing on a totality of symptoms is designed to be curative, not just palliative and suppressive as when takes a sleeping pill for insomnia. Little in allopathic medicine is directed at reparation. This is just the contrary of what is often said by your doctor. Drugs used in endometriosis are geared towards suppressing the activity of the ovaries and therefore slow down the growth of the endometrial tissue. But suppressing is exactly what it means--suppressing, not curing with all dire consequences as a result (see further).

Homeopathy has its time-tested usefulness. Remedies used two hundred years ago are still used with the same efficacy as then for the same diseases. Allopathic medical fads run their course and disappear rapidly, whereas homeopathy is practiced all over the world. In fact it is the second most widespread form of medicine practiced in the whole world.

There is no drugging effect, and there are no side effects from homeopathic remedies. Unwanted effects are homeopathic aggravations, recognized by the well-trained homeopath and easily managed. I am sure when you take Danazol (acne, wt gain, lower voice, beard growth, vaginal dryness, bleeding between periods, mood swings, liver malfunction, etc.) or the birth control pill (increased appetite, vein thrombosis, bleeding, nausea) or the gonadotropin releasing hormone agonists (GnRH agonists) with side effects such as hot flashes, loss of calcium from the bones, dryness of the vagina and mood swings. Drug treatment according to our own medical findings does not cure your endometriosis, when you stop them, the disease usually returns. So in other words, if you don't opt for surgery with a total hysterectomy, (and we are talking about victims between 25-44 years old and even teenagers!--WHO WOULD DO THAT??), you are sure to suffer from serious side effects of those drugs! Surgery is advised to women with moderate to severe endometriosis, again this does not lead to a cure according to allopathy. Why? Because it addresses the end result of the illness--the weeds, but not at all the root, the why you got this in the first place. And then there is the risk of adhesions with every removal of endometrial tissue. Only removal of both ovaries prevents recurrence of endometriosis but is this solution for these young women? Obviously not!

The cost of homeopathic medications is very modest and its application is simple. Practicing homeopathy by a majority of physicians would turn the health budget around over night! This is quite different from the high prices of drugs now often used in endometriosis patients: Danazol, the GnRH agonists, the BC pill, etc. Not one endometriosis patient in this world has to stay sick because they can't afford the medications. And once you improve with your homeopathic remedies, you start taking less and less, even nothing because the disease gets cured, not suppressed in which case we take drugs indefinitely!

Most of the homeopathic remedies are prepared from fresh plants and minerals. Properly stored away from heat or radiation, they keep their strength indefinitely. And we never have to bring Nature in imbalance to produce the mass of medications asked. We only need to take one little plant and never in the next generations have to kill another plant. Quite a difference again with allopathy. A perfect example is that we need to kill four yuma trees to provide enough Tamoxifen drugs for one breast cancer patient.

Is it not amazing that despite this long list of the benefits of homeopathy that some not-so-well-intentioned people still label this great science as quackery?

Practical plan for the Endometriosis Patient with Homeopathy and Answers to Previous Questions

Time-Line for Order of Treatment and Diagnosis: the big difference with allopathy!: This will answer the question, How did I come to this?

For a physician, every investigation into an illness starts with a good inquiry. Getting the facts together, the symptoms with their modalities and the different factors in the patient's lifestyle contributing to the disease are essential if we want to be successful in restoring the patient's health. Yet, most of the time, the physician often neglects the most important question: "What happened in your life when you became sick or just before you became sick?" I see enough doctors' reports from my patients. They are explicit enough in the description of symptoms and the enumeration of the different illnesses, but they rarely link the onset of the disease to a meaningful event in the patient's life. Yet, it is most often the clue to the solution. For you Endometriosis patient, this will be your first task. Communicate to your physician the exact circumstances and the first symptoms observed. Some examples that I have seen in practice will clarify this. I might see ten endometriosis patients with almost identical symptoms. They will be treated identical in allopathic medicine with the few drugs, which address some of the symptoms. Yet, these ten patients have ten different beginnings or etiologies. They were "never well since" a heartbreak, an operation because of sensitivity to anesthesia, a delivery, an intestinal infection with a loss of liquids, taking the birth control pill, an acute fear situation like one almost died in a car accident, recurrent intake of antibiotics, a sunstroke, death of a family member, etc. I can make this list ten pages long and this is exactly what your doctor needs to do. The regular medical doctor will treat these different beginnings in the same way, simply because they have the same endings! How can we be so shortsighted? But these beginnings (triggers) have decreased your resistance and will lead to illness, endometriosis in your case. And a homeopathic physician can tell who among the population is at risk to get endometriosis even when exposed to the same trigger! (See further, miasms). Because the question can be posed, "Why if a "grief" can lead to endometriosis, why is not everyone getting it when suffering a grief?

A diseased state is to be viewed as a decrease in vital energy (Qi in Chinese medicine). Once this energy has reached a certain low level, the patient is susceptible to viruses, bacteria, yeast and parasites, which are consequences, not causes! When are we going to learn in Western medicine to put the horse before the cart, not behind it? It is this attitude that makes us lose the battle against cancer, AIDS and other serious chronic disease. So the first question I ask you the endometriosis patient is, "What happened in your life on the moment that you became aware of the first symptoms of endometriosis (and we mean the months preceding your symptoms)??? This is the first important factor to discover. It is the trigger that has put the lit on the fire, it is not the only factor because no matter what the trigger is, the terrain has to be just right to start something like endometriosis. This terrain is what we refer to in Homeopathy as the Miasms, which correspond basically, to your genetic background. It corresponds to what you received from your parents and what you will transfer to your offspring. More about this a little later.

When a homeopathic physician looks at the ten above mentioned Endometriosis patients, he will possible come up with ten different remedies, in spite of these patients having almost the same symptom picture. Does it not make more sense to treat the root of the problem, and not merely the little sick branches. Yet most doctors, alternative or classical, do not more than branch cutting, simply because they do not know how to restore the sick root. Allopathic medicine with its strong opinion about germs does not have the tools to repair the beginnings of Endometriosis. So they keep on using the few medications that cover some of the symptoms of Endometriosis or resort to surgery. Yet all these measures fail to address the beginnings of Endometriosis or why you got endometriosis in the first place!. Only "total" health modalities like acupuncture, chiropractic but especially homeopathy is capable of turning Endometriosis patient's lives around.

o Genetic Background (Miasms) or the Fertile Ground for Illness

The second factor that plays a role in getting endometriosis is what we already alluded to: the genetic background. Homeopathy is able to determine what people and who of your children is able to get endometriosis. How? By looking at both parents' family history and see what Miasm is predisposed. (A miasm is a defect, a groove, a predisposition to certain illness, a weakness, we inherited from our ancestors. Obviously we all have defects but in case of endometriosis, we are talking about the sycotic miasm (see figure #). Endometriosis is however only one expression of this Sycotic miasm. What are some of the other expressions? (see figure 1)

You see them on this figure how many of these different expressions you have in yourself or how many you can find in your parents or children.

Symptoms can either be on the mental, emotional or physical plane. Patient's can either show symptoms only on the physical plane, others more sick on the emotional plane and the most sick have symptoms on the mental plane. I invite all of you to think about of how many of these symptoms you have or you see in your children/parents.

Mental for people with endometriosis: Forgetfulness for things just done, just said, Thoughts vanishing while speaking, bad memory for recent things, not old things. Imagine of you have to study this way: the only good energy is at night, starting around 8 PM till 2-3 AM. But during the day, teenager's exhibit dreaming, inattention, restlessness, can't sit still, in other words many of our kids and maybe some among you have suffered from what they call now in general terms ADD and ADHD. But it belongs to the same root as endometriosis.

Emotional symptoms: Thrill seekers, passionate people, love sex and talking about it, they prefer a short but exciting life above and long and boring one. Life has to be full of fun and thrills, unfortunately this can lead to criminality as the border is easily transgressed all in the name of fun, in search of the next new thrill. But definitely a great deal of our sycotic children are ADD or ADHD children. A sycotic person is one of extremes, never finding the middle ground.

Physical symptoms: warts, cysts, asthma, tumors, polyps, and any "hyper" activity of any gland, besides all the "-itis" diseases.

Now if you see any of the above symptoms in yourself or your offspring, they belong to the same expressions as your endometriosis. On the same chart you see also the triggers that will wake up this miasm if it is present in you.

So what about treatment? Do you understand now why in allopathic medicine we have to say that surgery neither drugs is capable to eradicate endometriosis? And if we eradicate (rather suppress) its other expressions and the ones I have mention to you will appear. So in other words, if I suppress physical expressions, either the emotional or mental that I have mention will appear if you are not strong; if you are strong the endometriosis will come back. Why? Because we don't treat the root, the trigger and the miasmatic background. We have those remedies in Homeopathy tailored to each individual, this has nothing to do with a protocol. We are all different, we came to what we are in a different way, it is the sum of whatever happened in your life, and the only thing you have in common now is the endometriosis. And even that is not always expressed in the same way. Now you understand that the remedy you get from a homeopath, after answering so many more questions than to your regular physician, is the sum of your genetic make up and what happened in your life, so in other words it covers the beginnings of the disease, it focuses on them, on the root, because only such eradication can lead to a normal state. I hope that every endometriosis patient would learn about the magic of homeopathy in the eradication of their suffering. In case you want to learn more about "Miasms," order my book, "Human Condition Critical."

Luc De Schepper, M.D, Ph.D., Lic.Ac., C.Hom., D.I.Hom., is in private practice in San Diego, CA (tel. 619-281-8800). He has medical, acupuncture and homeopathy licenses in the U.S. and Europe. He has written twelve books on alternative medicine and is the founder and teacher of the New School of Homeopathy in Boston, MA, open to health care professionals. He has taught extensively in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia.

Newsletters