Six weeks ago I had a local physician come in to see me for treatment of a very annoying illness. As I shook his hand I saw he was wearing plastic gloves. As we sat down to discuss his problem he immediately began relating what happened a year ago to him. He pretty much spent the next 15 minutes elaborating on how he felt his illness started.
It turned out that he was suffering from a severe skin condition that left his finger nails brittle, broken and deformed and the skin on his hands and feet peeling off in big patches leaving dry cracked painful skin underneath. He had been to the best dermatologists in town.His most recent visit was to a dermatologist, whom I had referred patients to, in which the doctor took only 5 minutes to talk to him and gave him the diagnosis of psoriasis.
After listening to this patient/doctor for over half an hour I thought I knew what caused this disfiguring skin condition. It seemed that a simple course of steroids in the form of a Medrol dose pack was the culprit. Based on this assumption and his symptoms I treated him with a constitutional homeopathic remedy Thuja.
Well on his return visit, a month later, he was not wearing gloves and there was a dramatic improvement in his condition.The doctor was very grateful and shared a quote from an eighteenth century physician Willian Osler, “If you listen to the patient they will give you the diagnosis.” Fortunately, a large part of the homeopathic evaluation is listening to the patient. Unfortunately, today the average physician does not have the time to listen.