Hi I'm Alastair Hay and I'm a home-visiting homeopath, which is actually quite unusual in my profession. Most people work from a clinic and you go and see them in that clinic or they use FaceTime, Skype, all those sort of media to communicate with but the most common way in which people practice homeopathy is within a clinic that you will go and see them. That can be in their home, that can be in a town, that can be in a converted outbuilding somewhere, somehow but essentially you go and see them.
But, I get asked the question quite a lot, “Why do you do home visits?” and there's many reasons. My current tag line for homeopathical is… hopefully you can read that… ‘bringing homeopathy to you’. My tagline used to be ‘helping people get well and stay well’ and my next tagline… this could be an exclusive, my next tagline will probably be something on the lines of ‘we are nature’.
Well let's talk about the ‘bringing homeopathy to you’ first of all. Home visits give you an insight into people, they’re more comfortable with it, most of the time, unless their home environment is their problem.
You may also have seen from my Instagram profile that I travel around quite a lot. I get to see some very beautiful places, the Surrey Hills the beach at Hayling Island, Bookham, Guildford… even parts of Croydon are beautiful… really, they are! I've worked in clinics that have no windows. If you're a practitioner that's working in natural medicine, to promote health and you spend the whole day in a room that hasn't got any windows, how healthy is that for you? I've worked in clinics where you have to pay to park or you can't park nearby, or there's a flight of stairs to the clinic room and someone might have a physical disability that makes that at least tricky or at worst impossible. Another scenario can be that someone brings in their whole family and you're dealing with one child, everyone else gets bored and it kicks off.
If, for instance you’re at someone’s home, someone else can be watching Peppa Pig, someone else can be on their iPad, someone else could be getting a snack from the fridge and we're having the consultation separate to that but another reason is that if you're dealing with someone, especially a child that may have an attention problem and you're in a room where that's divided by the next room by a partition board, they're not going to be quiet, not always anyway and that can be disruptive to the next room and so on and so on, it works for me.
Now, as a business model there are people that say it's pretty pants because I can't see as many people in a day as I would be able to do if I'm seeing them in a clinic. However I'm not having to pay room rent when I do that and I do get to see some beautiful, wonderful parts of the South of England.
The other thing it allows me to do which isn't something I share very often… but I'm gonna do in a video, is that some people will tell you things that are harrowing. When you have a consultation with someone it's a bit like you put their shoes on. You empathise with them and people tell you stuff that they've never told anyone else before and that is a privilege but what I also need to do is to be able to leave that behind having provided a homeopathic solution for them that they work on both from the consultation but also with the homeopathic medicines but also I need to leave that behind for myself so I don't carry that with me and the beauty of having a home visit is I can then put my shoes on, walk out the door and drive and let go of that previous consultation and prepare myself for the next one, so it actually works for my ability to be fully in the moment for the clients that I see and I understand that's not gonna work for everyone, that kind of model but that's why I do home visit and for me it's perfect!
So, if you see ill people today, think of Alastair Hay.