Hi, I'm Alastair Hay and I help people get well and I help people stay well using homeopathic medicines and I'm a home visiting homeopath for Kent, Surrey, London, Hampshire and West Sussex and you can find me at homeopathical.com.
What I'd like to talk with you today about is whether you've ever considered ‘what are symptoms?’ We tend to think of symptoms as stuff that happens to us rather than in any other way so for instance we talk about ‘I've caught a cold’ or ‘I'm allergic to…’ such and such or even if you've got a bruise it's as if that is the thing that happened to you but let's use those as examples.
So for instance, if you've caught a cold, what's actually happened is, your symptoms that you have, are your body's reaction to the virus. Viruses are all around us and you're not gonna catch every cold that's around. Some people in exactly the same environment as the next person, for instance kids at home, will be exposed to virus and not get the cold despite the fact they have definitely been exposed to it. Your body produces those symptoms as a response to that, to fight back. Better still, you can be exposed to something and not have to produce a reaction… to not have the cold, yet you've been exposed to it. That's impressive!
The next thing is an allergy, so for instance if you were allergic to pollen in the hay fever season, we tend to think of taking medications like antihistamines to reduce the immune response so you're no longer allergic to pollen, rather than saying, well you know, this is my body's reaction to pollen. How about rather than getting rid of the histamine response, to get rid of the allergy, you strengthen the person, so that your body just goes ‘this is pollen’! …And finally a bruise… I know some people for whom you could squeeze their arm, not that I suggest you go around doing this, but you could squeeze their arm and it will bruise and other people, other people, a bit like myself, I can… bash myself around but you can get a bash and actually I very rarely bruise. That doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt but I rarely bruise and by the time you've got a bruise that is your body working to heal itself, to repair the tissue that has been damaged. So for instance if you were to take a painkiller, the pain is still there but you can't feel it. For some that has its place, ideally don't get bruised in the first place but do think of symptoms as actually our body's way of telling us that something isn't right.
Our symptoms are ambassadors from within, our symptoms stop us from doing things and ultimately our body made them and if you truly want to get someone better, then I feel it's better to work with the body to strengthen it, to get rid of symptoms, rather than against it.
So if you see ill people today think of Alastair Hay!