Here are some actual cases from my practice to illustrate what you can expect from homeopathic treatment.  Everybody responds differently, and here I am only trying to show you the possible range of results.  Most good homeopaths will have very similar stories. 

3 year old girl with severe constipation.

The first remedy produced questionable results, so after 3 months of treatment we decided to change the remedy.  I took the case again and re-prescribed. The new remedy produced slow but definite improvement in the first couple of months, so I knew we had a good one.  Constipation completely resolved over the following 18 months.  Then the remedy was stopped.  2 years later she got constipated again.  The same remedy was given with good results for 6 more months, then stopped.  Several years later she is doing quite well.  I know this, because I am in contact with her mom, and she often tells me how happy she is that she brought her daughter to see me.  This is a fairly typical good reaction.

15 year old boy with chronic abdominal pains diagnosed as gastritis.

The first remedy produced immediate improvement.  He felt much better, there was no more pain.  We continued the remedy for about 5 months, after which the patient decided to try not taking it.  Ordinarily, if this is done at this stage in treatment, most people will experience a relapse.  However, he did fine and we did not need to treat him any more.  As far as I know, he is cured.  This case is very unusual.  It usually takes much longer to get a permanent cure.

41 year old woman with cough

This very nice woman had cough for about a year.  She'd been checked by regular doctors and no cause had been found.  Of course, in conventional medicine we are looking for some tissue pathology, like a pneumonia, cancer, bronchitis, etc.  The fact that she had none of these does not mean she had no cause for her cough. 
As I took the case, she told me of her life and work.  She worked in some industrial capacity with a lot of men.  She tried to help everybody as much as she could, sometimes to her own detriment.  She could not say no.  She was just too nice and let everybody use her.  When pressed, she said she resented the situation, but did not know how to change it. 
Here was the cause of her cough, as far as I was concerned.  She suppressed her emotions a bit too much, so the inner tension resulted in a physical symptom.  There was no physical pathology yet, but it would appear in due course.  This is very common.  We all have our stresses, and if we are unable to deal with them effectively, the inner tension lets itself be known in the form of symptoms.  Some get cough, others, a backache, a headache, irritable bowel, psoriasis, depression, etc.  Most chronic diseases wax and wane along with our level of dysfunction.
After she started the remedy a change came over her.  She started telling people off.  She was no longer willing to put up with the work situation.  What is interesting, while initially her coworkers were a bit surprised, they quickly got used to it and stopped using her.  Her stress diminished.  She became more self-assured and comfortable to tell people exactly how it was.  Soon, the boss saw the new her and she was promoted to a managerial capacity.  The cough resolved about 6 months into the course of treatment.
Who says Homeopathy treats only physical conditions?  We remove blocks to being the best you can be on every level, so you can express the real beautiful you.  Of course, then the symptoms you came to treat also go away, but by then the patient often realizes they were a secondary problem.  We see this effect in the majority of our successful cases.

A horse with some kind of hoof disease.

I did not actually see this horse.  I don't see horses. My patient told me about it.  She was quite upset, as she was told that her horse would have to be put down because of this incurable hoof disease, and I saw a big time grief reaction coming and me needing to deal with it.  As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am rather lazy, and the prospect of this much extra work did not appeal to me.  Therefore, I decided to try to cure the horse and thereby prevent my patient from getting worse.  I asked a few more questions about the horse and prescribed a remedy that miraculously cured the horse within just a few days!  My patient was ecstatic.  Sometimes, one needs to treat the core of the problem, and it is not always in the patient...

30 year old woman with ITP (Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura)

ITP is a serious auto-immune disease.  The body's own immune system attacks platelets, those tiny cells that prevent internal bleeding.  The numbers of platelets go down and the patient may start getting spontaneous bruising and internal bleeding.  This can be life threatening.  The conventional treatments include drugs like steroids and immunosuppressants, and in severe cases splenectomy (taking out the spleen).  This woman had some bruising, and her platelet count was 20,000, which is about 10 times below normal.  She was on Prednisone (a steroid).  We started the remedy and within a couple of months the bruising disappeared and platelet count went up.  It continued increasing over the next two years on the same remedy.  We were able to wean her off Prednisone.  Then one day she called me and told me that her platelet count dropped again.  The specialist wanted to pursue splenectomy.  I instructed her to get off the remedy and wait a couple of weeks.  The specialist was quite unhappy and called me a quack.  The patient decided to follow my advise and wait.  We watched carefully, and in the next two-three weeks the platelets increased in numbers again.  She felt fine.  I watched her for the next few months and she remained healthy.
What happened in this case was a classic response to a well selected remedy at the end of the case.  The symptoms may get worse just at the time the treatment needs to be stopped, then they go away again once the remedy is discontinued, and the patient remains healthy.  This does not happen in every case, but a good homeopath needs to be able to recognize this phenomenon and keep their cool.  One just needs to stop the treatment and monitor the case.

10 year old boy with ADHD

The boy has trouble in school.  Teachers complain.  He barely gets a C average.  Remedy started in June.  School started fairly good in September, but not without some degree of problems.  However, over the next few months he got much better, teachers commented on the fact that he changed, and the grade point average came up to B+  by May.  He was on the remedy for a year and a half, then stopped it and remained healthy.  Ritalin was never needed.  This is quite typical.  Such cases are my bread and butter.  They are also very fun for me.  Just imagine the impact of such treatment on a young person.  We are changing his whole life radically for the better!

15 year old boy with chronic pancreatitis.

This kid developed pancreatitis a year prior to seeing me.  Nobody could explain it.  They saw many doctors with minimal help.  Pancreatitis is a disease of pancreas, a gland in the abdomen, which aides in digesting food, but, what is more important, it also makes insulin.  People with chronic pancreatitis will often lose this function, and then develop severe diabetes.  In most cases pancreatitis is caused by alcohol or bile stones, but in this case we had neither.
Weird cases that don't have a good explanation in conventional medicine are what I like to see most.  I don't need an explanation to treat something, I approach it from a totally different perspective, so with homeopathic treatment one can expect a cure where it does not seem possible for a conventional physician.  These are also the cases that give me the most ego boost!
So, anyway, we started the treatment and the remedy was right on the first try.  We started seeing improvement within a month.  Abdominal pains receded.  Diarrhea became less and less frequent.  It took about 15 months for a complete cure.
4 years later he called me again.  He was an adult by then, a college student.  He developed diarrhea a couple of months ago and was not sure what to do.  Again, he'd been through a regular workup without a good working diagnosis.  Then he remembered the weird doctor that cured him a few years earlier and called him up.
 I saw him again and prescribed a different remedy.  It worked right away and within a couple of months he was completely fine. 
This is a fairly typical case.  Many of us need a "tune-up" once in a while, and I don't know another medical discipline that can do it as effectively as homeopathy.

70 year old man with psoriasis all over the body.

This gentleman was in quite a bit of suffering.  He itched all over.  The skin was flaking off all over, and he had open ulcers from scratching on extremities and torso.  Back was the worst, as he had a hard time scratching it, and it would wake him up at night.  He was determined to not use the suggested steroids.
We started treatment.  The remedy did not work at all.  We tried another, no luck.  We tried several remedies over about 2 years with no effect whatsoever.  I was amazed he stuck with me.  Of course, there was no question of charging him.  I saw him for free for several years.  My pride was hurting!  Then my most favorite teacher came to town to teach a seminar.  I brought the patient in as a class case.  The prescribed remedy did not work!  My pride calmed down.  So, I took it in my hands again and we kept on working on it.  Four years ago I said to myself: it can't be so hard, maybe I'm just being too smart for my own good.  So, I prescribed a remedy that would come to the mind of any homeopathic student after having classes for a month.  Well, what do you know, it worked!  Slowly but surely, the itching started going away.  The skin started looking healthier and healthier.  I started charging him again.  As of this writing, he is still on the same remedy, slowly going up the potency scale.  Itching still happens on and off, but it is so much better than it was 4 years ago.  He still has some sores, but it is nothing compared to what he looked like before. 
Steroid creams would've had a much faster effect.  However, their effect on his overall health would've been quite deleterious.  This is not an average case by any means, but it illustrates a point: he was determined to get better and trusted me, and if my patient is determined to let me help them, I go out of my skin to do it, and in the end I often succeed. 

40 year old man with kidney stone

This is a fairly typical "acute" case.  This guy developed a typical renal colic a couple of days before seeing me.  He had to take narcotics for pain.  I saw him as soon as I could, which was at the end of the work day on the day he called.  I prescribed several remedies for him to take home and try in succession.  He was to call me every several hours so I could decide if he was to switch to the next remedy or stay with the one he was on.  In acute cases one expects a quick result from a remedy.  Often, within a couple of hours of taking a good remedy we have a turnaround in the case.  On the other hand, acute remedies are often more difficult to prescribe than so called constitutional ones, because the information we rely on in chronic cases is often not developed in acute ones, so we have to go on scanty data.
It was the third or fourth remedy down my list, that took the pain away by the middle of the next day, but then the stone slipped out painlessly, and we were done.

x year old woman with tooth ache for several months

And here is another, semi-acute case.  I will be severely punished if I reveal the age of this patient.  As I was writing the above paragraph, my wife came up to me, enthusiastically chewing on a piece of pizza and said: there is no end to my thankfulness for what you did for me!  I can eat and chew without needing to be careful!  You can't believe what a relief it is! 
A few months ago she saw a dentist for a filling in a wisdom tooth.  It caused more discomfort than she had before the procedure.  They redid it.  It made matters worse.  She saw other dentists who could not figure out what was the problem.  Eventually she had the tooth pulled.  Contrary to our expectations, it did not resolve the issue.  She developed pain in other teeth, even on the opposite side of the mouth.  She could not eat without pain.  She had a constant discomfort in her mouth and was quite irritable because of it. I hate it when my wife is irritable, I like her to be always sweet.   I tried several remedies early in the process, but then gave up, as they did not work, and I thought it was more of a structural problem with the tooth, which would not respond to homeopathy. 
Given the new developments with the pain traveling around her mouth, I realized that the problem was not structural.  It did not make any sense anatomically.  Therefore, I looked at the case in a more "constitutional" manner.  I really listened to her this time, and not just to the description of the pain, but to her feelings about the pain and the "worthless" dentists that caused it, and how frustrated she was about the whole incident.  Sometimes, it pays to listen to your wife!  The new prescription relieved this 6 month old pain in a manner of 1 week!  This was a month ago and I am still getting the kudos!  

Last updated 9-19-04