phoenix homeopathy helping you transform your health

Sarah's story

Paralysed by stress

A former litigation solicitor with a high profile London law firm, in the mid-1990s Sarah Whittaker was working as a law lecturer when she developed numbness, tingling and burning, lack of co-ordination, muscular weakness, fatigue, visual and balance problems, and started to have great difficulty walking.

Shocking diagnosis

After numerous tests, including several lumbar puncture (spinal taps) and MRI scans, doctors diagnosed Sarah as having Multiple Sclerosis, a disabling neurological condition, for which there is no cure.

Rapid paralysis and despair

Sarah’s symptoms worsened quickly, despite repeated high-dose courses of steroids, and by June 1996, Sarah was bed-bound and almost completely paralysed, needing help with all functions except speech.

Sarah also developed meningitis-like pain in her head, most likely caused by intra-cranial pressure as a side-effect of the steroids. Extremely strong painkillers, including Pethidine, were prescribed for this, and excess cerebro-spinal fluid was drawn off via further lumbar punctures to keep the pressure down. Sarah’s prognosis was so bleak at this time, that she and her family contemplated suicide or euthanasia for her.

More bad news at the hospital

Neurologists were shocked at the pace of Sarah’s paralysis over the following weeks and months, and soon diagnosed a second chronic neurological condition, CIDP (similar to a chronic form of Guillame-Barre syndrome), in addition to the MS.

This second disorder was treated with a course of intravenous IgG antibodies, and, after extensive in-patient physiotherapy and occupational therapy, Sarah learnt to sit, stand and walk again, and to tackle stairs.

Sarah was discharged from hospital, a year after her initial diagnosis, only able to stagger a few yards with sticks, and needing extensive care and aids at home. She had been prescribed a cocktail of medicines, including diuretics for the excess intra-cranial fluid, antidepressants, tranquillisers and painkillers (as well as drugs to help her digestion cope with the amount of medicines), and was told that she would most likely need to stay on these medications, and have repeated courses of IgG every few months.

The turning point: homeopathic treatment starts

Fortunately for Sarah, a friend introduced her to a homeopath: within a few months, Sarah had been able to come off all of her medicines (with her GPs knowledge), and was starting the slow and on-going process of rebuilding her health, wellbeing and happiness.

Stress: the underlying cause

During the course of her homeopathic treatment, Sarah gradually came to understand how she had become so ill during the course of an ostensibly ‘normal life’: Sarah learnt to understand how her illness was due to stress – from work, from family life and from unhappy and unstable personal relationships, and how her symptoms had started years earlier on an emotional level.

Sarah’s homeopath also helped her to understand how the stress had led to deeper and deeper warning symptoms over the years, which Sarah had ignored or suppressed with conventional medicine. Slowly, Sarah came to realise that the MS wasn’t something that she had ‘caught’ or developed by chance: it was the result of years of stress, a toxic lifestyle, and suppressing her emotions.

Quitting law for homeopathy

Sarah was so impressed with the physical and emotional changes she felt on her homeopathic remedies that she decided to quit the law for good, and retrained as a professional homeopath. Sarah started her practice in 1999, at first under supervision as a trainee homeopath, graduated and registered in 2003, and founded Phoenix Homeopathy that same year.

Present-day health

Now senior practitioner at Phoenix, Sarah is happily married and manages her remaining MS and CIDP symptoms in a drug-free way, using only natural medicine: over the last eight years, she has only taken one ibuprofen tablet and half a paracetamol tablet, preferring to rely on homeopathic remedies to manage both her neurological symptoms and any day-to-day ailments.

Sarah remains eternally grateful to the team of neurologists, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, care workers and ancillary workers who helped her during the worst days of her illness, but feels strongly that it was her homeopathic treatment that helped her to build a new life, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of her old life.

To date, Phoenix Homeopathy has similarly helped hundreds of patients to transform their own health, wellbeing and happiness.

Contact us now to find out how homeopathy can help you and to book your free mini-consultation.