People often link old age with illness. To be old is to be ill. The two go together. How often have people been told – “you must accept that when you get to your age”. The ‘that’ can be almost anything! The ‘your age’ can be anything over 30! The medical profession is often the worst offender.
There is a story about a man who went to see his doctor because he had arthritis in his right knee. The doctor noted that he was 92 and suggested that he should accept some pain at his age. However, the man reminded him he had another knee, the same age, which had not pain. Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but it is an excellent point that he made.
Homeopathy considers that an illness is an illness regardless of age. If it is treatable at 6 it is treatable at 60. If it is treatable at 19 it is treatable at 90. Often, age is used as an excuse for doing nothing, for fobbing people off, for laziness, or for having nothing more useful to offer. It results from ageism, a means of discriminating against older people, undervaluing them, and not treating them on equal terms with younger people.
Of course, it is not quite as easy or straightforward as this. Age increases our susceptibility to illness. Ageing may mean that we may have ‘abused’ our body for longer, and it is now less able to cope – bad diet, too much stress, too much alcohol, and a host of other factors do take their toll in time. If this is the cause of illness a change of lifestyle, and taking more care of the body, is as useful as homeopathy.
Homeopathy can treat all illnesses and disease. It can even help people to cope with the feelings of loneliness that so often affect older people. In doing so it works quite differently to conventional medicine. It works alongside the body, helping to support it in performing its normal functions, its natural ability to maintain itself.
Conventional drugs tend to be grouped together until titles beginning with “anti-“ – anti-biotics, anti-histamines, etc; or it works to suppress or kill pain. In other words it seeks to change the normal working of the body, to force it to do something it would not do itself. The body usually struggles against this; so it overcomes pain killers, and bacteria becomes resistant to anti-biotics. Ailments that are suppressed return, often in a more serious or more painful form. This often leads to an increasing dependence on drugs.
“About half of all senior patients take several prescribed… drugs simultaneously, and frequently over prolonged periods. Many conditions mistakenly considered new diseases are, in fact, unrecognised drug interactions. Doctors then prescribe yet more drugs to solve the new problems, which only makes matters worse… The greatest overuse of medicine is among the institutionalised elderly. The average nursing home patient received eight different drugs a day”.
What Doctor’s Don’t Tell You (April 2002)
Homeopathy is an alternative to conventional treatment. It does not produce miracles but it can make people feel better when they have long believed that their illness is untreatable, or their pain an inevitable part of old age. It is often more complicated treating older people, especially if there has been a long history of illness, drug taking, and operations. This makes treatment a longer process, and often one that can only ameliorate pain and illness. But this is often all that older people expect. And the advantage of homeopathy is simply stated - it will not make matters worse.