Are you exhausted? Homeopathy for chronic fatigue
Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Please remember that homeopathic remedies should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.
Whether you’re generally healthy, but are tired all the time (what doctors call ‘TATT’), or you live with a more serious disorder like chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), it can be extremely hard sustain energy throughout the day. CFS, of course, encompasses many more symptoms than fatigue: sufferers often cope with brain ‘fog’ or poor recall, dizziness, muscle pain and so on.
For those without CFS who are tired all the time, it’s worth considering the possible effect on our system of the day-to-day demands we place on ourselves. Human beings evolved over millenia to cope with sudden, short bursts of stress (much like when a wild animal flees from sudden danger), but our body chemistry just hasn’t had time to evolve to cope with the long-term, daily stress like that experienced day-to-day in a busy metropolis. No wonder that homeopathic remedies like Phos-ac, Sepia and Adrenaline, which can all help with worn-out states, are prescribed so frequently in the Phoenix Homeopathy clinic.
Possible causations for the fatigue that can be part of a CFS symptom-picture also vary: for some CFS patients with fatigue, a history of repeated vaccination may be implicated. Other patients report that candidasis (which may be linked to so-called ‘leaky junctions’ in the gut, and to connected food intolerances) may be the culprit. Sometimes contact with toxic chemicals (including pesticides or mercury from dental amalgams), parasites in the system, or lingering or past viral infections (like flu or glandular fever) are suspected. With other patients, long-suppressed emotions may be causing havoc to the body’s subtle energies, and may need to be acknowedged, felt, appropriately expressed and released. No wonder hard-pressed GPs (doctors in general practice) sometimes struggle to help CFS-related fatigue and related symptoms!
Working out why energy levels or stamina have dropped can therefore be a tough task, but a randomised double-blind trial involving 62 patients with energy-sapping ME found that 33% of patients in the group receiving homeopathic remedies showed definite improvement compared with none in the placebo group (Awdry R. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 1996; February, March, April).
And in a triple-blind randomised controlled trial of 86 patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, patients in the homeopathic medicine group showed clinically significant improvement with significantly more improvement on fatigue, compared to patients receiving placebo (Weatherley-Jones E, Nicholl JP, Thomas KJ, Parry GJ, McKendrik MW, Green ST, Stanley PJ, Lynch SPJ, A randomised, controlled, triple-blind trial of the efficacy of homeopathic treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome, Journal of Psychosomatic Research 56 (2004) 189-197).
Fortunately for homeopathy patients, although an understanding of the possible causes of each individual patient’s chronic fatigue and related symptoms can be very helpful, homeopathy concentrates on information from the patients themselves. Appropriate homeopathic remedies are carefully chosen for each separate patient, based on that particular patient’s experience of their particular symptom-package.
Tags: chronic fatigue, Homeopathy
