By Lynn Pacifico
Although Homeopathy is a healing modality that is used all over the world, it is denigrated by western medicine and It is almost impossible to get anything about it published. This account is my experience when I was forced to use it years ago.
It’s funny how an event can take a little twist and alter the course of one’s life. This happened for me during the famous 1978 northeastern blizzard. It began early that evening when my son told me that he wasn’t feeling well and that his throat was scratchy. As a single self-employed mother, I didn’t have health insurance. I made him lemon honey tea and put him to bed.
Two years prior, I had been cured of an ‘incurable” illness by a homeopath. I didn’t understand homeopathy so I took a class in it. The premise is that a highly diluted, potentized substance will address the same symptoms caused by taking the gross form of that same substance or that “like cures like.” After class I bought the basic homeopathy kit and book. When I got home I put the kit in a storage closet, thinking, “Why did I waste money on this kit!?”
A repertory (characteristic symptoms) and materia medica (the remedies) with a tube of homeopathic remedy globules. Photo credit: L Pacifico
During the two previous winters my son had developed high fevers, going to the emergency room both years. I was still paying off the second visit. This was all flowing through my mind as I heard the soon to be catastrophic storm outside. By midnight the wind with gusts up to 111 mph, screamed past the tower in which we live and I noticed that my son’s face was bright red. His fever was 104. He was becoming delirious, flailing his limbs and shaking his head. Like the storm raging through the city, a fever was raging through his body. I called the ER. The nurse recommended that I bring him in right away.
It was the middle of the night, during weather that made history by killing approximately 100 people, and I was to wrap my ten year old flailing, delirious son in a blanket, run out into the driving snow and freezing gale force winds (which were causing near invisibility), to find a cab to the er. I didn’t know if there were any cabs working in the extreme weather. I didn’t know what to do and I was terrified for my son.
On the verge of panic, I remembered my homeopathic kit. I flung the closet door open to find the kit and instruction book. Running back with the kit under my arm, turning the pages while on the move, I found the chart for respiratory infections. My son’s symptoms: began with a sore throat; red, hot, dry face; quick onset; high fever; delirium, were an exact match to the clinical picture of the remedy Belladonna. He had the symptoms a person would have if they had taken Belladonna in its gross form.
Hurriedly, as I believed that I would still be forced to run out into the storm to try to save him, I scrambled through the kit for the Belladonna. I took a deep breath and dropped one tiny pill into my son’s mouth. Belladonna is highly poisonous and I thought to myself “What am I doing!?!”
Immediately he broke into a sweat, settled down and went to sleep. I was in disbelief at what I had just witnessed and expected his raging fever to return. But, it didn’t. I sat up for two more hours keeping watch. Then to the sound of the wailing winds outside, exhausted, I fell asleep on the sofa.
By the morning, the snow had stopped. So had my son’s fever. He was draining mucus but otherwise fine. By matching his symptoms to the homeopathically prepared remedy’s refined and potentized energy, the remedy stimulated my son’s immune system to balance itself. The blizzard that dropped 17.7 inches of snow in Manhattan, causing billions of dollars of damage, forced me to try homeopathy.
Lynn Pacifico is a fourth-generation Villager who loves dogs, nature and New York City.
