After Pierre’s Initial Consultation
After our Initial Consultation, I usually require about 24 hours to go through my notes taken during the interview, then do research through the various homeopathic repertories and materia medicas that I use, to determine the best indicated homeopathic remedy. Usually, one particular remedy will stand out above the alternatives, but sometimes two or three remedies might appear equally appealing. When this happens, I need to go back through my notes, and sometimes I need to contact the parents to probe a little bit more about one or another comment they expressed during our Initial Consultation. Eventually with this additional work and understanding – one of the two or three alternative remedies will now more clearly stand out above the others – and that’s the one that is our best indicated remedy. If I have this remedy in my professional pharmacy, I send it to the patient within a day or two via USPS Priority Mail 2/3 Day Delivery envelope. So normally, patients living here in the US in the “lower 48” can expect to receive their remedy from me in about 5 days after our Initial Consultation. If I need to order the remedy, then it will instead take about 10 days after our Initial Consultation for you to receive it.
Depending on the particulars of the case, I send enough remedy for the patient to take either once or twice a week, from 4 to 6 weeks (however, the remedy is not to be “automatically” taken – when to take and how often to repeat will be determined by our careful observations). During this time, I keep in touch with the parents via email, at least twice a week. I want to know if any changes are being noticed, or if the severity of other noted abnormal behaviors (such as ‘the doors’) are diminishing.
Four to six weeks in, we do the Video Follow Up session. This is similar to the Initial Consultation and takes about 45 minutes. The purpose of this session is to appraise whether there’s been any changes since the Initial Consultation. We’re primarily focusing on whether or not we have noticed changes touching on The Core of the case. (Recall that “The Core” comprises the three main symptoms of diagnosed Autism: 1.) lack of eye contact; 2.) lack of spontaneous interaction; 3.) lack of spontaneous speech. I also refer to these as “the three legs of the stool”.)
I’ll give you an example of how a case often proceeds: a few days after the child has taken the first dosage of his remedy, a mother calls and tells me that she and everyone else around the child has seen a lot of improvement. First she tells me that the constipation is not as severe and that her child does not need as much magnesium to poop. “He also has been asking spontaneous questions” such as “Can you open the door?” and also he is “responding and labeling such thing as ‘the kite’, and ‘the squirrel’, “we had no idea he even knew these words”. This is of course wonderful, but a long road remains to be traveled. The mother also tells me that in the last two days “his stool is not as good as it was in the beginning of the week”. I asked her if she has seen any additional regressions to the state he was in before he was taking the remedy. Other than the stool she had not. In this case – we have direct evidence that this remedy is effecting positive change… so it’s appropriate that the child can repeat taking it.
This is the ‘watch and observe’ period. “Watching” and “observing” in detail is difficult. In mainstream medicine, we have been conditioned to just take pills at automatic intervals. This does not happen much in the practice of Classical Homeopathy.
It is very difficult for us to get a grasp of what to watch and observe. I like to have as much of a whole picture as possible. The example above tells us that one of the main physical complaints of this child is better. It also tells us that his interaction is a bit better, and that his speech is also beginning to improve. So The Core symptoms are definitely improving. During this watch and observe period, I’m hopeful to help the parents develop a keener sense of recognition of their child’s unique expressions of this disease.
The individual pattern of the disease is very important to recognize. This is what I call the rolling in and the rolling out of the condition. In this example, constipation was first noticed to regress, but it is perfectly possible that speech could regress first, and then constipation or even something else regressing afterwards – such as irritability. The goal of understanding the patterns of the disease is to be able to repeat the remedy at the most optimal time, so as to develop as much of a smooth arc of reversal as possible rather than an arc of ‘seesaw’ – which is common, because to complicate matters even more – it’s not so unusual that by the time we figure out a pattern – the pattern naturally changes on its own.
Seven-to-ten-day intervals in telephone communication between me and the parents is about the same amount of time there is between repetitions of the remedy. The repetition of the remedy doesn’t have to strictly follow this exact same schedule. It can vary widely, from between twice daily – to once monthly. There is no hard and fast rule about this – and it is part of the education of the parents during this “watch and observe” phase. The natural pattern of the condition may evolve and move the goal posts – even as the overall state of the child improves. It is a very multi-dimensional dynamic process where we can’t expect that any prospective “automatic” solutions can help us at all.
If our remedy selection is optimal, it’s very likely that we’ll experience a brief return of older symptoms the patient previously exhibited. This might seem like a bad sign, but in Classical Homeopathy this is a very good sign: We call this the “law of cure”, and it simply asserts that a good remedy prescription is likely to cause an observable “un-winding” of the patient’s recent symptoms… a repeat of earlier symptoms, but now in reverse. The body is now effectively re-expressing the same earlier symptoms, but under the new power of the homeopathic remedy, these symptoms are now being resolved or reversed… they’re being worked out of the body. If the remedy is optimal enough to continue this ‘reverse direction’, eventually all accumulated layers of symptoms will be effectively resolved/reversed, and the patient will be returned to a good state of health.
Old symptoms can come back for a limited amount of time. Symptoms that diminished either with the passage of time or were force/stopped with meds can come back for a brief period. Old behaviors can come back as well at times and then disappear, all that with some improvement at the core, which can make matters quite complicated to understand. Keep in mind that what I am talking about is not the “candida die off” I hear so often about. It is nothing like that. When the body detoxifies itself via an optimal homeopathic remedy, it does it gently; when candida die off via use of an optimal homeopathic remedy, it is gentle. If the remedy is working for us (if the Law Of Cure is working for us), some previous symptoms will come back and then leave – and optimally never return.
For example, if a symptom or a behavior such as hyperactivity in the form of climbing on furniture really got under your skin and you spent years fixated on that issue and then it was finally settled (suppressed) previously – but now it comes back after introducing our new homeopathic remedy – this can seem very disconcerting. It can be very difficult for the parents to simply disregard or “ride it out”. So these quick 10 day interval communications between us can help keep our arc of reversal smoother – by perhaps repeating the remedy more often, even on a daily basis if necessary. Each case is unique. We keep in touch, you observe, you report, together we work as a team toward the common goal of reversing your child’s autism: we can do this!
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