I have two loves. Yes I do 😂

When it comes to my work there are two things that I pour most of my heart, energy and probably an unreasonable amount of my waking thoughts into. One is PIHAP, my practitioner training programme, and the other is The Atrium.

And this morning I started thinking about why.

Back in 2021 Meta deleted me. And when I say deleted me, I mean literally deleted me. Years of building a social media audience, writing posts, answering questions, having conversations, connecting with people all over the world and then suddenly…gone.

It was quite the lesson in what it means to build your house on someone else’s land.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love social media and I am incredibly grateful for the people it has connected me with, but ever since then I have been very conscious of how vulnerable we are when the spaces where we communicate are owned and controlled by somebody else. Algorithms change, rules change, accounts disappear and ultimately you have very little say in any of it.

And now we have AI. I don’t want to go off into a deep AI tangent but AI is scraping the internet -podcasts, blogs, websites, videos, articles, social media posts and more…

And the more this happens, the more I find myself valuing private spaces where we can actually talk freely. Where somebody can ask a complicated question and we can explore it properly rather than squeezing the answer into a reel. Where we can discuss things, change our minds about things and occasionally disappear down a completely unexpected homeopathic rabbit hole 😂

Which brings me to The Atrium.

I started The Atrium because I wanted somewhere away from social media where we could explore homeopathy properly, but somewhere along the way it became much more than that.

There are now over 300 members and they range from homeopaths with up to 50 years of clinical experience to people who have never studied homeopathy professionally but simply want to learn more. We have students and graduates from all the major homeopathy schools, which means there are all sorts of different approaches, experiences and perspectives coming together in one place.

The Atrium is absolutely NOT the Lisa Strbac show. Yes, I created the platform and organise much of what happens inside it, but the community belongs to everybody in there and I learn from the conversations too.

And this message arrived from someone who had recently joined, which rather perfectly sums up what I mean…

The Atrium isn’t really somewhere to come and ask, “I have X symptom, what remedy should I take?” There are some amazing Facebook groups already doing exactly that. Instead it is for the person who comes in and says, “I had this case, I saw X, Y and Z, I used this remedy and then THIS happened. What do you think? What would you have done?”

Why? Because now we can learn something. Why did you choose that remedy? What did somebody else see in the case? Would another practitioner have approached it differently? What happened after the remedy? What can we learn from the response?

There is a subtle but very important difference between giving somebody an answer and helping them learn how to find the answer. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime and all that…

And at the heart of The Atrium are our live sessions. I commit to doing at least one every month although somehow we normally end up with two or three😂

The Lives are where we get to bring in people doing really fascinating work and actually give the subject the time and space it deserves. We have covered everything from trauma, anxiety, chronic fatigue and practitioner development to deep dives into remedies like Thymus gland, autism, bird remedies, detox, flower essences, case taking and much, much more.

And tomorrow we have Sarah Valentini joining us live from Australia to talk about…

Incarnating: Coming in from the Cosmos.

I mean, COME ON.

Yesterday I wrote an entire Substack about James McCrae’s Instructions Before Visiting Earth, souls arriving on Earth, separation from source, Hydrogenium and the trauma of incarnation.

And tomorrow Sarah is coming into The Atrium to talk about incarnating and coming in from the cosmos 😂

Because Sarah is in Australia, this live will be at 10am UK time, which is unusually early for us as most Atrium Lives take place in the UK evening. Our Australian and New Zealand members are finally getting a sensible time while my American friends may need coffee and an alarm clock 😂 And as always, the replay will be there afterwards.

Which brings me to why I am telling you all of this today.

For the next 48 hours only, I’ve opened a free 7-day guest pass to The Atrium. I won’t be offering another 7-day guest pass in 2026. And during those seven days you have full access to everything.

You can join Sarah tomorrow, watch the recent session with Colin Griffith on the Thymus gland, explore all the previous Atrium Lives and forums and get full access to the four complete courses included inside The Atrium, which are worth over $250 on their own.

Basically you can come in and have a proper rummage around 😂

And perhaps most importantly, you can see what the community actually feels like. Because I can tell you about The Atrium until the cows come home, but the whole point is the people inside it, the questions they ask, the experiences they share and the conversations that happen as a result.

A card is required when you activate the guest pass and if you decide to stay after your seven days your membership will continue at the usual $29.99 a month. If you decide it isn’t for you, simply cancel before the trial ends and you won’t be charged.

COME INSIDE THE ATRIUM FREE FOR 7 DAYS

And I think this is what my shower thought was really about.

For years I put an enormous amount of time and energy into building an audience on social media. And then in 2021 I learnt the hard way just how quickly all of that can disappear.

These days I think I care much more about what I am building away from social media.

PIHAP is where I get to teach homeopathy in the depth I want to teach it and help train the next generation of Acute Integrative Practitioners.

And The Atrium is where learning continues. Where someone with 50 years of experience can be in conversation with a student, a newly qualified homeopath or someone who has never studied professionally but simply wants to understand more. Where we can learn from each other’s experiences and disappear down all those wonderful homeopathic rabbit holes together.

They are very different things, but I think I love them for much the same reason.

They give me the space to do what I actually love doing.

Teaching, learning, questioning, exploring and talking about homeopathy with other people who find it all as endlessly fascinating as I do.

Which, when I think about it, is probably where I want to be spending an unreasonable amount of my waking thoughts anyway 😂

My two loves.

Love Lisa

P.S. This is the only 7-day guest pass I’ll offer in 2026. So if you have been wondering what on earth we get up to inside The Atrium, come and have a look for yourself.

Get your 7 day pass

Well, quite a lot as it turns out…

I came across a poem recently called Instructions Before Visiting Earth by James McCrae and I honestly cannot stop thinking about it.

And before I share it, when I say lightworker I simply mean someone who brings light. Someone who through their work, love, friendship, kindness, creativity or simply their presence makes this sometimes very difficult human experience a little bit lighter for someone else.

Nothing more complicated than that.

So today’s post is for all the lightworkers…

Instructions Before Visiting Earth

By James McCrae

In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form, don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.

You have been selected for the opportunity
of human incarnation.

This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive experience
as a distinct ego identity.

Your body will serve
as your physical avatar
as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature and origin.
You will experience a range of emotions
from joy to loneliness to despair.

But remember – no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.

At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.

On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.

So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.

As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.

Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.

You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell.

You can read and share James McCrae’s original Substack post here.

Isn’t it just incredible? And the line that went straight into my heart was this:

Your soul remains perfectly safe.

I know that everything I have experienced has shaped me into who I am today. But sometimes I oh so wish it had not needed to be quite so painful. So the thought that beneath everything that happens to us here, our soul remains perfectly safe is one I am going to hold onto very tightly.

And when I read this something in my homeopathic brain immediately kicked in and wondered…

If there was a homeopathic remedy that encapsulated this entire poem, what would it be?

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The obvious first thought is Phosphorus.

Phosphorus is light. It is open, sensitive, loving and affected by everything and everyone around it. It is the soft heart without enough of a barrier protecting it from the world.

But Phosphorus is not quite it…because the central theme of this poem is not simply bringing light. It is the soul being separated from source and incarnating into material form.

And that is what led me to Hydrogenium.

Hydrogenium is the homeopathic remedy made from hydrogen, the first and simplest element in the periodic table. Hydrogen is also the most abundant element in the universe, the main component of stars and the fuel that powers them.

Already quite a good start for a lightworker remedy…

But then it gets really interesting.

Out of curiosity, I put the entire poem into Similia, my online repertory software, to see what connections it would make. And this was the first sentence it gave me:

“Hydrogenium is the primary remedy for the sensation of ‘separation from source’ and the trauma of incarnation.”

I mean, COME ON.

The opening lines of James’s poem are:

In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form…

The correspondence is almost uncanny.

Homeopath Jan Scholten goes on to say of this remedy: “It is as if they have just left paradise to incarnate into this world and suddenly they find themselves totally isolated from the universe.”

And here is what Angelica Lemke has to say about this remedy in her brilliant book Healing Complex Children with Homeopathy:

“Hydrogenium helps with incarnation.”

Angelica describes children needing Hydrogenium and Helium as “cosmic kids” who may not seem fully grounded in their bodies. They can appear as if they are floating or drifting, almost like a gas outside the physical body.

She describes Hydrogenium as the more intense and potentially explosive of the two remedies, whereas Helium may appear more angelic and contained in its own bubble. She even writes that the Hydrogenium state can sometimes be heard in the explosive scream of a newborn baby as though it is saying, “I don’t want to be here on this planet!”

With Hydrogenium there may be a powerful desire to experience unity or oneness. The person can throw all of themselves into what they are doing without boundaries. They may taste, smell and visualise things more intensely and experience more empathy than average. They may also be highly creative and particularly interested in space travel, astronauts, fantasy and science fiction.

So we have the soul separated from source, incarnation into material form, the feeling of being a stranger on Earth, the separation of body and soul, a longing to return to unity and an extraordinary sensitivity to the experience of being here.

To me, Hydrogenium is the poem in remedy form.

And for all the lightworkers out there… Keep bringing your light, keep your soft heart out of its glass cage and whenever walking this Earth feels especially difficult, hold onto the thought that perhaps, beneath everything that happens to us here, our soul remains perfectly safe

Love Lisa

Ps - if you’d like a further peek into how homeopaths ‘repertorise’ and select a remedy, you can watch my free class here.

Ryan has an extraordinary story. His past involved addiction, drugs, violence, crime and the possibility of an eight-year prison sentence, before he eventually reached a point where something had to change.

One of the things he said during our conversation has stayed with me:

“Our nervous systems will always choose a familiar chaos over an unfamiliar calm.”

It made me think about how often we can consciously want something different for ourselves while still being pulled back towards the patterns our body already knows.

We also get into something I think many of us in the wellness world will recognise: the constant urge to fix ourselves.

The supplements. The protocols. The nervous system work. The processing. Analysing every symptom. Looking for the next thing that will finally make us feel “healed”.

At what point does healing itself become another form of avoidance?

Ryan puts it rather more succinctly during the episode: “Stop fucking healing.” 😂

We talk about somatics, emotional repression, German New Medicine, homeopathy, trauma work, why forcing release can sometimes backfire and the possibility that maybe your body isn’t broken at all.

But underneath everything is a huge message of hope. Ryan has been in some incredibly dark places and now talks openly about his story because he wants people to know that there can always be another way.

The Healing Addiction with Ryan Rose Evans is out now.

🎧 Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prefer another podcast app? Listen here →

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But I actually think one of the easiest ways to start understanding them is to stop thinking about them as a list of symptoms and start thinking about them as patterns. What ‘illnesses’ run in a family line? How does someone express their dis-ease? How does someone respond to stress? What happens when life becomes uncertain? Do they prepare, rebel, escape, go deep into something or forget themselves entirely because they are too busy worrying about everybody else?

And for that, lockdown gave us a rather brilliant real-life example.

I use this in my miasms teaching partly for fun, but there is actually something quite useful underneath it. If you take the five main miasmatic patterns and throw them all into the same completely unprecedented world event, they may respond in very different ways.

Psora hoards and preps. Were you suddenly worried about whether you had enough food, toilet roll, flour, batteries or whatever else we all decided we were going to need to survive? Psora is fundamentally a miasm of deficiency and struggle. There can be that feeling of not quite having enough, of just managing and needing to prepare in case things become even harder. So it makes sense that uncertainty might bring out the prepper in someone with a strong Psoric tendency.

Sycosis, meanwhile, parties like there’s no tomorrow. Secret meet-ups, another bottle of wine, finding ways around the rules. Sycosis is the miasm of excess. There is often a huge appetite for life, stimulation, experience and pleasure, and a resistance to being restricted. I sometimes describe it as having a bit of a sex, drugs and rock and roll energy. Tell Sycosis that nobody is allowed out and you can imagine the response.

Then there is Tuberculinum, planning its escape and googling where in the world might possibly be better than here. Which country is still open? Could we move? What about somewhere in the mountains? Where is the grass greener?

I know this one rather well because there is a lot of tuberculosis in my own family history and my grandfather died from it when I was sixteen. Years ago I went through a period of constantly changing jobs. Every time I changed I was convinced the next one would be better, and then I would get there and think, why on earth have I done this again? My homeopath prescribed Tuberculinum at one point when my eczema had also flared and one of the things I noticed afterwards was simply feeling more settled. That constant need for the next thing eased. It helped me understand the Tubercular pattern in a way that reading a list of symptoms never could.

Syphilinum black pills itself, goes deep down the rabbit hole and perhaps never quite comes back out. Did lockdown send you into hours of YouTube, reading things you had never previously considered and questioning almost everything you thought you knew? The Syphilitic miasm is associated with destruction, breakdown and extremes, and it can go into some very dark places. While Tuberculinum was trying to get out, Syphilinum was possibly staying exactly where it was and going further and further down.

And then Carcinosin worried about everyone else and forgot its own needs. Is Mum okay? Are the neighbours okay? Am I doing the right thing? Should I be checking on everybody? These are often very dutiful people who carry an enormous sense of responsibility and can suppress their own needs in order to do what is expected of them. Even if they did not necessarily agree with every rule, there may have been that strong feeling of having to do the right thing for everybody else.

Obviously I am being tongue-in-cheek here. Buying too much pasta or toilet rolls does not diagnose you as Psoric and watching strange things on YouTube does not mean you need Syphilinum. But hopefully you can see why I love this example, because it starts to make miasms feel much more real.

In homeopathy, miasms are essentially deeper patterns of susceptibility. They can be inherited through our family line, but they can also be shaped by what happens during our own lifetime. They influence the way we respond, adapt and the kinds of patterns we may become prone to expressing.

And importantly, we all have more than one.

This is where people sometimes get themselves into a muddle. They read about Tuberculinum and think, oh my goodness, that is me. Then they read about Carcinosin and think the same thing. Then Sycosis sounds rather familiar too.

That is completely normal. You are not meant to fit neatly inside one miasm.

Some miasms may be active, some may be sitting quietly in the background and some may only become relevant at particular points in our lives. One of the reasons a homeopath might start considering a miasmatic layer is when a beautifully indicated remedy repeatedly fails to act as expected, but that does not mean we should all start trying to “clear” every miasm we think we recognise in ourselves.

Please don’t do that.

Deep miasmatic prescribing is something I would always recommend working on with an experienced homeopath. If something is dormant and causing no problem, I am very much of the opinion that we leave it alone.

If you want a very simple starting point, I tend to think of Psora as deficiency and struggle, Sycosis as excess and accumulation, Syphilis as destruction, Tubercular as restlessness, reaction and the need for freedom and Carcinosin as suppression, duty, control and boundaries. There is an enormous amount more to each one, but once you understand that central thread, everything else starts making much more sense.

One of my favourite pieces of feedback about my miasms teaching came from an Atrium member who told me:

“Lisa, you have such an incredibly clear and simple, but also profound way of making topics understandable! I had taken another course on Miasms before joining Atrium but did not come away with the understanding I got from your course.”

I loved that because miasms genuinely are a huge subject, but they do not have to feel completely inaccessible.

If this has whetted your appetite, my full Miasms course, worth $75, is included inside The Atrium and you can watch it straight away for as long as you remain a member. I go much deeper into where miasms come from, the major miasmatic patterns, susceptibility, how they can present physically and emotionally and when miasmatic prescribing may become relevant.

You can join The Atrium here for $29.99 a month, or if you would rather buy the Miasms course separately and keep lifetime access, you can do that here.

Love Lisa

P.S. I would genuinely love to know which lockdown response you recognise most in yourself?

Yet I know what happens every year.

Within the next few weeks, something shifts. September arrives and suddenly people start thinking about studying again. Courses appear, colleges begin advertising their new intakes and that very familiar back-to-school feeling seems to creep in, even when you are decades beyond actually going back to school yourself.

So I thought I would plant a seed now, particularly for anyone who has found themselves wondering whether they would ever like to study homeopathy professionally.

For a very long time, there have essentially been two routes. You could learn homeopathy well enough to use confidently at home with yourself and your family, or you could commit to several years of full professional homeopathy training.

Both routes are valuable, but I became increasingly aware that there were a lot of people who wanted something different.

Some had been using homeopathy at home for years and had reached the point where they wanted to understand what they were actually doing at a much deeper level. They wanted to take proper cases, learn to repertorise, understand materia medica, differentiate remedies, make sense of potency and repetition and know where the boundaries of acute prescribing actually sit.

Others were already working professionally as nutritionists, naturopaths, therapists, health coaches or within another complementary modality and could immediately see how useful homeopathy could be alongside the work they were already doing.

Then there were people who simply knew they wanted to study homeopathy seriously, but the thought of immediately committing to several years of training felt like too enormous a leap.

That is the reason I created PIHAP.

PIHAP stands for Practitioner of Integrative Homeopathy: Acute Prescribing and it is a standalone practitioner-level qualification specifically in Acute Integrative Homeopathy™.

I think one of the problems we have in homeopathy is that acute prescribing is still sometimes regarded as the easy bit. Learn Arnica for bumps, Belladonna for a fever, Apis for a sting and off you go.

Proper acute prescribing is nothing like that.

It requires you to understand what is happening in front of you, what is characteristic about the case, which symptoms actually matter, how to differentiate between several apparently similar remedies and when the picture has moved beyond something you should be treating acutely at all.

There is also a much bigger philosophical reason I care so much about it.

I keep coming back to something the late Robin Murphy said, quoted by Ian Watson when he came on my podcast, that first aid prescribing is the highest form of homeopathy.

The more I have practised and studied, the more I understand what he meant.

So many chronic stories seem to begin somewhere. A shock, a grief, an accident, a significant fever, an illness, a medical procedure, a child who simply never quite seemed the same afterwards.

We spend enormous amounts of time asking how to treat chronic illness once it is established, but perhaps we should also be asking what happened at the beginning and what might have been different if somebody had recognised that moment and supported it properly.

That idea sits right at the centre of PIHAP.

What I also love about the course is that you do not need to arrive with years of homeopathy behind you. Complete beginners can join because we start properly at the foundations and build from there.

At the same time, the first cohort included people who had used homeopathy for decades, complementary practitioners, students already attending other professional homeopathy schools and qualified homeopaths. One student who was about to graduate from another homeopathy school described PIHAP as being like a “dessert buffet of all the things I loved in homeopathy school”, because she was able to revisit subjects she already loved while learning from completely different teachers and hearing different perspectives.

I still think that might be one of my favourite descriptions of the whole course.

Another student had been using homeopathy for 25 years before joining and said PIHAP had finally given her the confidence to use the repertory and materia medica with ease and prescribe with greater accuracy and competence. Another described it as one of the best courses she had ever studied and said the content was far more in depth than she had imagined.

Reading through the feedback from that first cohort has probably been one of the most satisfying parts of creating the programme because so many of them said versions of the same thing. They felt more confident, they understood what they were doing, they could use the repertory, they felt clearer about scope and, perhaps most importantly, they felt ready to actually use what they had learnt.

One graduate said PIHAP had given her a clear direction for opening her own acute prescribing practice. Another said she now felt able to practise a valuable branch of homeopathy alongside her existing talking therapy clinic.

This is the bit I really want people to understand because January can sound a long way away right now.

The next PIHAP cohort starts in January 2027 and, by May 2027, successful students could be qualified to practise within the scope of Acute Integrative Homeopathy™ and beginning to build their own acute practice or integrate it into the work they already do.

Five months.

That does not mean you suddenly know everything there is to know about homeopathy. I am not sure any of us ever reach that point and, frankly, I would be slightly suspicious of anyone who thought they had.

It means you have trained properly and specifically in a defined area of practice.

Some PIHAP graduates will finish the programme and realise they want to go much further and continue their professional homeopathy training. We are developing pathways for those students. Others will finish PIHAP and think, actually, this is exactly what I wanted.

I understand that too because trust me when I say the course is HUGE.

I was showing PIHAP to the principal of another homeopathy college this morning and taking them through what is actually included. They were genuinely bowled over by the amount of content.

Sometimes I forget because I have been living inside this course for such a long time, but when I step back and look at it again, there really is an extraordinary amount in there.

We cover the foundations of homeopathy and acute case-taking, emergency prescribing, repertorisation, fevers and red flags, potency and repetition, classical philosophy, ethics, emotional acutes, shock and trauma, pregnancy and hormonal flares, making remedies, organ support, sarcodes, maintaining causes, miasms, tautopathy and isopathy, nosodes, Narayani remedies, flower essences, tissue salts, therapeutics and more.

Then there are the guest teachers, the live Q&As, the case examples, the assignments and all the conversations that happen around the teaching.

One student described the course as “so, so rich”, which is probably the simplest way of putting it.

Another said the course had given her an entirely new lens through which to understand healing because she had begun seeing how something chronic may have started as an acute situation much earlier in the story.

That is exactly what I hoped PIHAP would do.

So perhaps this is simply me planting the seed before September arrives and everyone suddenly starts thinking about what they might want to learn next.

If homeopathy has moved beyond being an interesting hobby for you, if you find yourself wanting to understand it properly, if friends and family already come to you for remedies or if you have quietly wondered whether you might actually be able to do something professionally with all of this, there is another route.

You do not have to decide today what your entire future in homeopathy is going to look like.

You can start here.

PIHAP begins again in January 2027 and enrolment is already open. The 10-month payment plan is available until 31st August, after which you can still enrol but the payment term becomes shorter as we get closer to the January start.

You can read all about the programme, the syllabus, the tutors and exactly what the qualification covers here.

Perhaps by May next year you will be the person opening your own Acute Integrative Homeopathy practice.

Stranger things have happened.

Love Lisa

P.S. If you are interested but genuinely have no idea whether PIHAP is the right level or route for you, please email hello@academyintegrativehomopathy.com. I am always happy to point people in the right direction, even when that direction is not PIHAP.

Learn more here

Not because it tells me something I didn’t already know, but because it shows that mainstream medicine is finally beginning to ask some of the questions homeopaths have been asking for generations.

A recently published case report describes a boy diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder whose cognitive and neurobehavioural symptoms improved dramatically following treatment aimed at multiple vector-borne pathogens, including Bartonella and Borrelia.

The improvements weren’t subtle. The authors describe significant changes in learning, concentration, mood, behaviour, tics and social functioning, to the point that he moved from long-term special education into an age-appropriate mainstream classroom before eventually being accepted into college.

Of course, this is only a single published case. It doesn’t prove that every child with autism has an underlying vector-borne illness, nor should it be interpreted that way.

What it does tell us is something far more interesting.

It suggests that, in at least some individuals, pathogens may play a far greater role in cognitive and neurobehavioural symptoms than has traditionally been recognised.

For many homeopaths, that won’t come as a surprise.

Homeopathy has always asked a different question

Rather than asking, "What disease does this person have?", homeopaths ask, "Why has this person become susceptible to expressing this particular pattern?"

Conventional medicine often begins by asking: “What is the pathogen?”

Homeopathy asks something totally different. “Why this person?”

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Why does one child develop profound symptoms while another exposed to the very same organism appears completely unaffected? Why does one person’s nervous system become overwhelmed while another recovers quickly? Why does one person experience anxiety, another develops arthritis, another chronic fatigue and another severe neuropsychiatric symptoms?

Homeopathy has always recognised that susceptibility sits at the centre of health.

The music analogy

In a previous post, I explained homeopathic remedies through music. The remedy was the song. The potency was the volume. Repetition was how many times you played it.

I think music can also help us understand susceptibility, although in a slightly different way.

We can all hear the same song, yet it will not affect us in the same way. One person may barely notice it. Another may find it irritating. For someone else, it may stir a memory, send chills through their body or move them to tears.

The song is the same but what changes is the person hearing it and what that person is carrying at that particular moment.

Perhaps it resonates because of the way we were incarnated. Perhaps it connects with something in our constitution, our life experiences or the present state of our terrain. Whatever the reason, there is a point of recognition between the song and the person.

I think susceptibility works in much the same way.

We are all exposed to countless microorganisms, environmental influences, toxins and emotional experiences throughout our lives, yet they do not affect every person in the same way. Some pass through our lives without causing any obvious disturbance. Others meet something within our terrain that is able to resonate with them, and a particular pattern begins to express itself.

That has always made far more sense to me than believing every person exposed to the same microorganism should become ill in exactly the same way.

Every pathogen has its own energetic signature

This is where homeopathy becomes so fascinating.

We don’t simply recognise energetic patterns within people. We recognise them within remedies and we also recognise them within pathogens. Each one has its own signature and pattern.

Homeopaths who work with nosodes have long observed that certain pathogens seem to carry recognisable themes. And when a susceptible individual resonates with that energetic pattern, similar pictures can begin to emerge.

Take Bartonella.

The Bartonella nosode carries one of the darkest remedy pictures I know. It is a remedy I think about when I see explosive rage, terrifying intrusive thoughts, violence, profound neurological disturbance, personality change and the feeling that someone has become almost unrecognisable to those who love them.

Does that mean every person who has come into contact with Bartonella will express those themes? Of course not. Susceptibility still determines whether that energetic pattern resonates with the individual.

Homeopaths recognise that it is this relationship between the energetic signature of the individual and the energetic signature of the pathogen that matters.

This is also why homeopathy can help even the darkest cases.

Sometimes the patient resonates most closely with a well-known polychrest such as Stramonium, Hyoscyamus, Belladonna or Mandragora.

Sometimes that resonance is expressed so clearly that a nosode prepared from the pathogen becomes the simillimum

Our role as homeopaths is not to treat Bartonella, or PANS, or autism. Our role is to recognise the song the patient is expressing and find the remedy that sings the same tune.

Homeopathy has never separated the mind from the body. Our remedies contain some of the deepest descriptions of human suffering ever written.

Stramonium.

Hyoscyamus.

Mandragora.

Belladonna.

Anacardium.

These remedies describe states of overwhelming terror, violence, hallucinations, obsessive thoughts, profound fear, altered perception and experiences that many would simply label as psychiatric illness.

Alongside these polychrests, we also have nosodes. Rather than being prescribed simply because somebody has tested positive for a particular organism, nosodes are prescribed because the energetic picture of the patient resonates with the energetic picture of the remedy.

That distinction is incredibly important. We’re never treating a laboratory result (although sometimes they are helpful in confirming our remedy choice). We’re treating the person sitting in front of us.

Every remedy has its own energetic signature and through that carries information.

Our job as homeopaths is to recognise which pattern the patient is expressing. Sometimes that’s Stramonium. Sometimes Hyoscyamus. Sometimes Mandragora. Sometimes it’s a nosode prepared from the pathogen itself.

When you begin studying these remedies deeply, you realise how extraordinary our materia medica really is.

Homeopathy has been exploring this for years

Long before mainstream medicine began publishing papers like this, homeopaths were exploring the relationship between susceptibility, terrain, pathogens, neuroinflammation and some of the darkest neuropsychiatric presentations we see in practice.

Few homeopaths have explored this area more deeply than Wren Lloyd. She has spent years helping practitioners understand these relationships and has worked with children and adults with autism, PANS, PANDAS and other complex neuroimmune conditions, always asking a much bigger question than simply, “What diagnosis does this person have?”

Instead, she asks, “What is the energetic pattern being expressed?”

That single shift changes everything.

The exciting part

Reading this paper genuinely gave me hope.

Not because it proves homeopathy right (it doesn’t). It gave me hope because mainstream medicine is finally beginning to recognise that profound changes in mood, behaviour and cognition may have biological drivers and that we need to look beyond diagnostic labels.

Homeopaths have been doing exactly that for over two centuries.

Perhaps mainstream medicine is finally beginning to look in the same direction.

Dare I dream?

As encouraging as it is to see published case reports describing improvements following allopathic antimicrobial treatment, I can’t help wondering what the next chapter might look like.

Dare I dream that one day these papers will include carefully documented homeopathic cases too?

Cases where the practitioner recognised the patient’s unique energetic pattern and prescribed the remedy that resonated most deeply with their state.

Cases showing how the vital force can reorganise when given the right stimulus.

Many experienced homeopaths have quietly witnessed extraordinary recoveries for years.

My hope is that more of those cases begin finding their way into the scientific literature because that’s how conversations change.

That’s how curiosity grows. And that’s how medicine moves forward.

If this article has sparked your curiosity, I’d love you to join us.

Wren’s full masterclass, The Darkest Remedies, is now available inside The Atrium, and today we’re hosting a live Q&A where members can ask questions, and continue exploring this fascinating area together.

If you’re ready to think differently about susceptibility, terrain and some of the most complex cases we encounter in practice, come and join us here.

As I write this, today is actually the final day to join this year’s Summer School, so I thought I’d answer it here because I suspect many more people have wondered the same thing...

It is such a good question because it exposes one of the biggest difficulties people have when they first begin using homeopathy. We have spent our entire lives being taught to think about medicines in terms of quantity. Two tablets contain more medicine than one, a larger dose has a stronger effect and therefore it seems entirely logical that five homeopathic pills must be stronger than one.

Except that homeopathy does not work like that.

Once we move beyond 12C, we are no longer dealing with a material quantity of the original substance. The little white pill is not the medicine itself. It is simply the vehicle that carries the energetic imprint of the remedy into the body. Whether that remedy comes on sucrose pills, lactose pills, tiny granules or in liquid form, the physical vehicle may change but the information being delivered remains the same.

This is where my music analogy comes in.

A few years ago, I wrote a post explaining remedies through music. The remedy was the song, the potency was the volume and repetition was how many times you played it. The same analogy is useful here too, because it helps explain why the form of the remedy is not the important part. You can listen to the same song through headphones, on the radio or from a CD. The device carrying the music changes, but the song itself does not.

In the same way, a homeopathic remedy can be carried on a sugar pill or administered in liquid. The vehicle is different, but the message remains the same. Once you begin thinking about homeopathy this way, so many of its apparent mysteries suddenly start making sense.

This is also why taking five pills at exactly the same time does not mean you have taken five times the remedy. You have simply taken the same energetic message on five separate pills. In theory, you could take one pill or a thousand pills together and the potency would remain the same, although in the latter case you would have consumed a rather unnecessary amount of sugar.

So why do some manufacturers recommend taking three, four or five pills?

One explanation often given is that some manufacturers believed not every pill would necessarily be equally medicated during production, so recommending several pills increased the likelihood that at least one had received the remedy. Rather than relying on one individual pill, several were recommended. Other manufacturers have always been entirely comfortable recommending a single pill.

Either way, the recommendation was not based on the idea that five pills contained five times as much medicine. That would bring us straight back into chemical dosing, which is precisely the model we have just moved beyond.

Samuel Hahnemann later came to favour liquid dosing because it allowed him to adjust the dose more gently and flexibly, particularly through succussion and repetition. That takes us into the sixth edition of the Organon, LM potencies and a much larger discussion about what Hahnemann was doing towards the end of his life...although that's a story for another day. (And just for the record, I absolutely love LM potencies in chronic prescribing. I used them extensively in clinic and personally think they're hugely underused.)

What also interests me about this question is that it helps explain why homeopathy has traditionally placed so much emphasis on single remedies.

If a remedy is carrying information to the body, then surely we want that information to be as clear as possible. Imagine trying to listen carefully to one song while four completely different songs are playing over the top of it. You may still hear something, but it becomes much harder to distinguish what you are actually responding to.

A single remedy allows us to observe more clearly. Has the person’s energy changed? Are they sleeping better? Have the symptoms begun to move in the right direction? If something changes, we have a much better idea of what the body is responding to.

That does not mean remedies can never be used together, or that every combination is somehow wrong. Some remedies are well known to complement one another and can act beautifully in harmony, whether they are prescribed together, alternated or used in sequence. The important distinction is between thoughtfully selecting remedies because they genuinely support one another, and simply adding several remedies together in the hope that one of them will work.

We are so conditioned to believe that more must be better that homeopathy can feel difficult to understand at first. More pills must mean a larger dose. More remedies must cover more symptoms. Repeating more frequently must make the remedy work faster.

Yet homeopathy repeatedly invites us to think differently.

Perhaps the biggest shift is this.

Homeopathy stops asking, “How much medicine should I give?”

Instead it asks, “What message does this body need to hear?”

That is one of the questions we explore inside Homeopathy Heals at Home because learning homeopathy is not simply about memorising which remedy to take. It is about understanding what you are doing, why you are doing it and, just as importantly, when not to interfere.

Love Lisa

P.S. If you'd like to join us for this year's Homeopathy Heals at Home Summer School, today is the final day to enrol. We'll be exploring questions like this, alongside remedy selection, dosing, repetition and much more. You can find all the details here.

Different species have evolved different ways of doing it, but the message is remarkably consistent. When the body detects that its internal environment has been disrupted, raising its temperature appears to be one of the ways it works to restore balance.

Think about that for a moment.

Evolution is ruthless.

Anything that consistently reduces an animal’s chances of surviving long enough to reproduce is gradually selected against. Over millions of years, inefficient strategies disappear. Helpful ones remain. Which makes fever rather extraordinary. Despite very different mechanisms across species, the strategy itself has persisted throughout evolution.

Yet somewhere along the way, humans decided this ancient survival mechanism was something to fear.

The moment the thermometer creeps upwards, panic sets in. We reach for the Calpol. The Tylenol. The ibuprofen. We congratulate ourselves for bringing the temperature down, convinced we’ve helped the body do what it couldn’t manage on its own.

But what if we’ve misunderstood fever entirely?

What if we’ve mistaken one of the body’s greatest healing strategies for a mistake?

Modern medicine has become extraordinarily good at asking one question: “How do we stop this symptom?” Yet it rarely stops to ask another: “Why did the body produce it in the first place?”

That question changes everything.

For decades we’ve been taught to think of symptoms as evidence that something has gone wrong. Fever. Vomiting. Diarrhoea. Coughing. Inflammation. They are presented as problems to eliminate, inconveniences to suppress and signs that the body is malfunctioning. But what if they are doing exactly what they were designed to do?

If you’re someone who follows terrain theory, you’ll already know that illness isn’t simply about an invading pathogen. It’s about the condition of the terrain itself. The body isn’t a passive victim waiting to be rescued. It’s an active participant, constantly adapting, repairing and restoring balance.

Seen through that lens, fever begins to look very different. Rather than being a dangerous accident, it starts to resemble a carefully orchestrated physiological response.

As body temperature rises, the internal environment changes. Certain microorganisms may find those conditions less favourable, while multiple parts of the immune response become more active. Fever-range temperatures can influence immune-cell movement and signalling, while activating heat shock responses that help cells adapt to physiological stress. The body appears to be deliberately altering its internal conditions as part of a coordinated attempt to restore health.

One of the most fascinating areas of emerging research concerns something called exclusion zone water, sometimes referred to as the fourth phase of water.

Dr Gerald Pollock’s work suggests that water inside our cells isn’t simply H₂O sloshing around randomly. Under certain conditions it appears capable of forming a far more ordered structure. Pollock proposes this may have profound implications for how cells function, communicate and maintain health.

Even more intriguing is what happens during a fever.

Interestingly, infrared energy has been shown in Pollock's laboratory to expand these structured water zones. Because fever generates heat and infrared radiation, it raises an intriguing possibility: could one purpose of fever be to help reorganise the body's internal environment at an even deeper level?

No wonder evolution kept it.

Even the current NICE guidance in the UK doesn’t recommend giving antipyretic medication simply to reduce a child’s temperature. It also states that these medicines do not prevent febrile convulsions, despite this remaining one of the biggest fears for parents. Instead, they recommend considering them only if the child appears distressed.

Why don’t more parents know this?

We’ve shifted from treating the child to treating the thermometer, and perhaps that’s one of the greatest losses of modern healthcare - we stopped trusting physiology.

As a homeopath, this is one of the reasons I fell in love with this medicine. Homeopathy doesn’t begin by asking how to silence the body’s response - it begins by asking why this particular body is responding in this particular way.

What happened just before these symptoms started?

Why is this fever dry and restless?

Why is this one burning and delirious?

Why is this child inconsolably angry while another wants only to lie still?

The symptom is no longer the enemy. It becomes information. A map pointing towards the remedy that best supports the body’s own attempt to heal.

I once heard this quote…

“Artificially lowering a temperature when dealing with a viral infection is like shooting your guard dog while someone is trying to break into your house.”

Whether or not you agree with every aspect of that analogy, the principle deserves reflection. Once you stop seeing symptoms as enemies, medicine itself begins to look different. You stop asking how quickly you can make the body quieter and you start asking what the body is trying to say.

That single shift is one of the reasons I created Homeopathy Heals at Home - because I wanted more families to understand what the body is trying to achieve during acute illness, and to feel confident supporting it with homeopathy instead of fearing every symptom. Yes, you’ll learn which remedies I reach for most often during acute illness. We’ll cover fevers, tissue salts, first aid and the practical prescribing frameworks I use every week. But more importantly, you’ll learn to see illness through an entirely different lens.

Because once you stop declaring war on the body’s intelligence, you start working with it.

And that changes everything.

PS. If you’re ready to become the healer in your home then click here to secure your spot on my Homeopathy Heals at Home Summer School bundle - available for just $99 for just 6 more days 🔥

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On the face of it, it’s a perfectly sensible question. But the more I’ve thought about it over the years, the more I’ve realised that hidden within that one question is something much bigger. I don’t actually think people are only asking about repetition. I think they’re revealing the way almost all of us have been taught to think about illness.

We’ve grown up in a world where medicines come with instructions. Take one every four hours. Finish the course. If nothing seems to be happening, take another dose. Medicines are measured by the clock and improvement is often judged by whether the symptoms have disappeared.

So when people discover homeopathy, why would they think any differently? Of course they don’t.

Over the past few years, I’ve taught homeopathy to thousands of people and, long before they ever join one of my courses, I see the same pattern over and over again. People buy a remedy kit. They follow a few homeopaths online. They might read a book or watch a few YouTube videos. They become excited by the possibilities of homeopathy and can’t wait to try it.

Then somebody in the family becomes ill and suddenly all of that enthusiasm is replaced by uncertainty.

“Have I chosen the right remedy?”

“Should I repeat it?”

“Nothing seems to be happening.”

“Perhaps I should try another one instead.”

Before long, they’re reaching for another remedy, and another, and another. I often joke that they’ve started pepper-spraying their children with remedies.

The funny thing is that whenever I say this in a class, everybody laughs. Then almost everybody nods because they’ve done it too.

I certainly did.

I often think how different my own journey would have been if somebody had explained these principles to me years earlier. I wish I’d understood fever instead of automatically reaching for Calpol or Tylenol. I wish somebody had explained that healing doesn’t always look like symptoms disappearing and that some of the earliest signs of improvement can be incredibly easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

Perhaps a child who has been restless for hours suddenly falls asleep. Maybe they finally ask for a drink. Or perhaps a discharge begins.

That last one can really throw parents because we’ve been conditioned to believe that every symptom is bad. But what if the very symptom we’re trying to stop is actually one of the body’s first signs that healing has begun?

The trouble is that if we’re only looking for the fever to disappear or the cough to stop, we’ll often convince ourselves that the remedy hasn’t worked at all. And that is frequently the moment we either repeat unnecessarily or abandon a well-indicated remedy far too soon.

The more I teach, the more convinced I become that the greatest challenge in learning homeopathy isn’t actually learning remedies. It’s learning to let go of the conventional model of disease that most of us have carried around for our entire lives.

We’ve all been conditioned to think in an allopathic way, so it is hardly surprising that we bring that same thinking into homeopathy. We’ve been taught that symptoms are the enemy and that medicine works by suppressing them. Homeopathy invites us to think very differently.

Perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than with fever. We’ve become so focused on bringing the temperature down that we sometimes forget to ask why the body created the fever in the first place. Instead of asking, “How do I stop this symptom?” we begin asking, “What is this symptom trying to achieve?” Instead of watching the clock, we begin watching the person. Instead of expecting every improvement to be dramatic, we begin recognising the quieter signs that the body is responding. Instead of prescribing for the diagnosis, we prescribe for the individual in front of us.

This shift in thinking doesn’t always happen overnight. In many ways, it requires us to unlearn decades of conditioning before we can really begin thinking like a homeopath.

Perhaps that’s another reason I believe we’ve accidentally made homeopathy seem far more complicated than it really is.

In my last article, I wrote that I think we’ve started teaching chapter twenty before chapter one. We become fascinated by constitutional prescribing, miasms and all the incredible depth that homeopathy has to offer, yet many people still don’t feel confident supporting a child with a fever or knowing whether to repeat a remedy.

Maybe chapter one isn’t really learning remedies at all. Maybe chapter one is learning how to observe, because once you understand that, everything else starts making much more sense.

One of my favourite moments as a teacher is watching someone stop asking, “What’s the best remedy for a fever?” and start asking, “What is this particular person telling me through their fever?”

That single shift changes everything. Instead of reacting automatically, people begin observing. Instead of feeling they have to do something immediately, they become more comfortable watching what unfolds. Panic gives way to curiosity, fear to observation and helplessness to confidence.

People often tell me that Homeopathy Heals at Home has been life-changing and, whilst I’m always incredibly humbled to hear that, I don’t think it’s because they’ve learnt dozens more remedies than they knew before.

I think it’s because they stop feeling helpless every time someone they love becomes ill. They become calmer, more capable and more confident because they finally understand what they’re looking at.

For me, that is one of the greatest gifts homeopathy has to offer.

P.S. If this article resonated with you, this is exactly why I’ve decided to run Homeopathy Heals at Home Summer School this year. It isn’t really about learning more remedies. It’s about learning how to observe, how to trust yourself and how to become the person your family turns to when illness strikes. You’ll receive immediate lifetime access to the complete Homeopathy Heals at Home course, together with three live Q&A sessions with me and two special sessions with the wonderful Natasha Burns. If you’ve been thinking for years that you’d love to learn homeopathy properly, I’d genuinely love you to join us. Learn more here.

Like so many things that came out of that strange period, it was born out of frustration. We knew we had this extraordinary system of medicine that could support people when they were facing Covid, flu-like symptoms and so many other acute illnesses, yet so many people simply didn’t know it existed or where to turn.

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The clinic was run entirely online. No consulting rooms. No expensive equipment. Just Zoom and six homeopaths passionate about helping people.

People booked appointments for everything from hay fever and anxiety to mastitis, skin flare-ups, childhood illnesses and infections. The feedback was incredible.

And all of this could be done with very little set-up cost.

How amazing is that?

In fact, some of my PIHAP graduates are now creating similar models themselves. Others are running workshops in their local communities, offering drop-in clinics or integrating homeopathy into their existing work as nutritionists, naturopaths and other holistic practitioners.

I absolutely love seeing the different ways they’re taking homeopathy out into the world.

My dream is two-fold…I want to see brilliant homeopaths in every community. But I also want every family to have homeopathy in their home. Think bottles of Arnica, Aconite, Belladonna, Chamomilla in the kitchen drawer alongside the plasters.

A basic remedy kit costs less than $50, yet I genuinely believe it has the potential to transform the way a family navigates everyday illness.

Nearly every experienced homeopath I speak to says something similar. The wonderful Helen Johnson recently shared during one of our live sessions inside my online homeopathy community, The Atrium, that if every family simply understood Arnica and Aconite, the world would look very different.

And honestly, I think she's absolutely right. Just these two remedies have applications in everything from shock, trauma and accidents to fevers, bruising, sore throats, flu and so much more.

And yet, for some reason, not everyone seems to be getting the message.

I actually think one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made as a profession is accidentally convincing people that homeopathy is far more complicated than it really is.

Somewhere along the way, we started teaching chapter twenty before chapter one.

We talk about constitutional prescribing, miasms, bowel nosodes and chronic disease before people even know what to do when their child bangs their head.

Of course there are incredibly complex cases. That’s why we need brilliant practitioners. But beginners often think they need to understand hundreds of remedies before they can use homeopathy at all.

They don’t.

Most families can deal confidently with many everyday acute situations using around 10 to 20 core remedies. The difficulty isn’t really the number of remedies but that home users often haven't had the principles explained in a way that makes sense.

Take potency, for example. It’s probably one of the questions I’m asked most (in fact even with student homeopaths)…“Which potency should I use?”

Once you understand what potency actually represents, it suddenly feels much less mysterious. If you’ve read my previous article comparing remedies to songs and potency to volume, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

When people understand that, I can almost see the penny dropping.

It’s honestly one of my favourite moments when I’m teaching. Watching someone stop trying to memorise remedies and start thinking like a homeopath.

Over the years I’ve had countless people tell me that learning how to prescribe confidently for acute illness has completely changed the way they care for themselves and their families. Not because they’ve become professional homeopaths, but because they no longer feel helpless every time someone becomes ill.

That’s exactly why I’ve decided to run Homeopathy Summer School this year. It isn't about learning hundreds of remedies. It's about finally making sense of homeopathy.

You’ll receive lifetime access to my Homeopathy Comes Home course, together with three live teaching sessions on 30 July, 6 August and 13 August where you can ask me anything, work through real-life examples and deepen your understanding.

It’s just $99, which I’ve done very deliberately because I want this to be accessible.

I’m also delighted that Natasha Burns will be joining me for two of the sessions. Natasha recently established the first registered homeopathic pharmacy in the UK in over 25 years, and she’ll be answering your questions about building your own home pharmacy and sourcing remedies. If you've ever wondered what remedies to buy, where to buy them or how to build your kit over time, you'll love this session.

Whether you’re completely new to homeopathy or you’ve been meaning to build your confidence for years, I’d absolutely love you to join us.

You can find all the details on my Academy website.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes from the late Robin Murphy, shared by Ian Watson when he joined me on the What Heals podcast.

“The highest form of homeopathy is first aid prescribing. You homeopaths... you think it’s all this fancy miasms stuff and chronic stuff and constitutional? It’s not... It’s first aid. Almost every chronic case, if you take it back, where did it start? It started as a shock, with a grief, an accident, with a medical procedure that went wrong. It started as a first aid situation and if that had been properly treated in the moment, someone had a home remedy kit and they knew what to do, this whole chain of health problems would never have needed to happen.”

Every time I hear that quote, I think about how different things could look if every home simply had a remedy kit and someone confident enough to use it.

Some may say that’s an impossible dream.

I don’t think it is.

Homeopathy doesn’t need to become more complicated. It simply needs to come home.

P.S. If you’re reading this as a practitioner, or someone considering becoming one, and your dream is to bring homeopathy to your own community through clinics, workshops or your existing practice, you can also find out more about PIHAP here. We begin in January 2027 with graduation in May 2027.

It was the first homeopathic remedy I ever gave my daughter, before I trained as a homeopath and whilst I was still totally sceptical about homeopathy (in fact the remedy had stayed on my shelf for months…)

What happened next changed the course of my life.

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You can hear me share more of that story on The Way Forward podcast, but it was the moment I realised there was something very special about homeopathy.

Even now, all these years later, bowel nosodes remain one of the most fascinating groups of remedies I use in practice.

Many homeopaths find them intimidating. They are not remedies that are taught in great depth in many colleges. Yet time and again I have seen them unlock cases that seemed completely stuck.

And bowel nosodes are even more relevant today than they were in the days of Bach and Paterson. We now live in a world of repeated antibiotics, ultra-processed foods, environmental toxins, chronic stress, immune dysregulation and widespread gut dysfunction.

Modern medicine has finally caught up with what the bowel nosode pioneers appeared to recognise almost a century ago: that the health of the gut profoundly influences the health of the whole person.

For those unfamiliar with bowel nosodes, I thought I would share an excerpt from my book The Trailblazer’s Insight Into Homeopathy, in which I introduce these remarkable remedies.

Reshared with permission from The Trailblazer’s Insight Into Homeopathy

I will be forever indebted to the bowel nosode Proteus, which, as I mentioned previously, triggered such an incredible and instant healing response in my daughter that I felt like I had witnessed a miracle. I was so awestruck with what I saw that I knew I had to learn more and so, not being one to do things by halves, I signed up to study homeopathy professionally.

As previously discussed, nosodes are homeopathic remedies made out of diseased tissue, pathogens or bodily secretions associated with a particular illness. Bowel nosodes are a specialised group of nosodes which are created from part of the bacterial flora in the human intestine.

‘In spite of the name, the bowel nosodes are not similar agents to other nosodes, and do not act in the same way. Other nosodes act on a disease situation, either as part of treatment in the acute illness, or to address the energetic imprint of that illness, or to correct imbalances in the ‘soil’ of potential sufferers. In contrast, the bowel nosodes, with their source material being the result of a healing reaction in the body, act at the curative end of the ‘dis-ease’ spectrum and augment that curative action.’

John Saxton - Bowel Nosodes in Homeopathic Practice

Bowel nosodes were discovered by Dr. Edward Bach (1886–1936), a renowned bacteriologist at University College Hospital, London. You could say Dr. Bach was ahead of his time. While modern science now recognises the importance of gut health and its connection to mental well-being, Dr. Bach had inklings of this as early as the 1920s. He noticed that high levels of certain bacteria in his patients’ stool samples correlated with specific health issues. His curiosity led him to accept a position at the London Homeopathic Hospital, where he encountered homeopathic principles. Collaborating with Dr. John Paterson and Dr. Charles Wheeler, he began creating homeopathic preparations from intestinal bacteria, which became known as the bowel nosodes.

Dr. Bach’s work was groundbreaking, suggesting that the balance of bacteria in the gut could influence overall health—a concept now widely accepted.

Bowel nosodes are generally used when there is a deep-rooted imbalance affecting both body and mind. Homeopaths often turn to these remedies when symptoms persist despite other treatments, such as constitutional or miasmatic remedies. This wonderful group of remedies are amazing at treating a whole range of issues, including bowel, digestive, lung, skin and immune system issues as well as toxicity and emotional disorders.

They are valuable for patients experiencing mental tension, anxiety or feelings of being ‘stuck,’ often linked to a toxic or imbalanced gut environment.

By addressing the gut—the body’s ‘second brain’—bowel nosodes help realign the body’s energetic field, promoting harmony and resilience across both physical and emotional health. This approach recognises that disturbances in the microbiome can mirror and perpetuate deeper emotional and physical states, making bowel nosodes a potent tool in restoring balance and health holistically.

There are 13 core bowel nosodes, each with their own specific picture as detailed on pages 178-197.

When are bowel nosodes prescribed?

• As a constitutional remedy in their own right, but note these remedies are hugely under-represented in the Repertories, so it is essential that the homeopath has an excellent knowledge so they can spot them in their patients.

• As an intercurrent remedy to address obstacles or blocks that prevent the patient’s primary remedy from working effectively.

• To help produce a clearer symptom picture - for example, to help clear a drug layer (say where there has been a history of excessive antibiotics) or where it is difficult to differentiate between multiple constitutional remedies which may be suitable.

• When well-indicated remedies fail to act or to hold.

The bowel nosodes are generally only prescribed by professional homeopaths for chronic states of ill health, on the individual’s specific symptoms and health history.

The Bowel Nosode That Started It All: Proteus

Proteus will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the remedy that ultimately changed the course of my family’s life.

When I think of Proteus, the word that immediately springs to mind is suddenness.

Everything about the remedy can feel sudden. Sudden emotions. Sudden reactions. Sudden anger. Sudden deterioration. Sudden recovery.

There is often an intensity to Proteus patients which can be difficult to miss. In my experience they may be highly sensitive, easily overwhelmed and possess a strong need for routine, predictability and control. Anxiety, nervous tension and hypersensitivity frequently feature strongly.

Below are some of the keynotes from my book.

Poly Bowel Plus

Interestingly, the number one selling remedy at Stellar Online during June has been Poly Bowel Plus.

Created by Dutch homeopath Ton Jansen, Poly Bowel Plus combines all of the bowel nosodes together with enzymes, Candida and yeast preparations.

It is actually something that I am currently taking myself as part of my own homeopathic detox and healing journey

I have followed Ton’s work for many years and find his thinking around the terrain, connective tissue and extracellular matrix absolutely fascinating.

Ton describes Poly Bowel Plus as one of the remedies he prescribes most frequently in practice as so many people living in modern Western society suffer from varying degrees of increased intestinal and connective tissue permeability. Poly Bowel Plus may help support restoration of gut flora, connective tissue integrity, vitality, healthy immune function and balanced histamine responses.

Of course, the most profound results are usually seen when a bowel nosode is individually prescribed according to the totality of the person’s symptoms. That is where homeopathy truly comes into its own. But how wonderful that we now also have remedies such as Poly Bowel Plus to support broader terrain and detoxification work.

And for me, this will always be personal. Proteus was the remedy that changed my daughter’s health and ultimately changed the course of my life. Without it, I may never have become a homeopath at all.

Psora is the original chronic struggle, forever striving. The Syphilitic miasm is destruction in motion, breaking down what can no longer be endured. Tuberculinum is restlessness, dissatisfaction and the constant need for change, always convinced that happiness lies just over the next horizon. The Cancer miasm is the cost of holding it all together.

And then there is Sycosis.

The miasm of excess.

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Before we go any further, let’s briefly talk about what miasms actually are.

Miasms are one of the most important concepts in homeopathy and yet they are rarely discussed outside practitioner circles. Hahnemann used the term to describe inherited or acquired susceptibilities that affect an individual’s health across their lifetime.

In simple terms, they are patterns of predisposition. They can be passed down through generations, but they can also be shaped by what we encounter in our own lives: illness, trauma, toxins, medications, suppression and the emotional weight of lived experience.

Modern epigenetics gives us one possible language for understanding this. We now know that inheritance is not just about DNA, but also about how experiences may influence gene expression across generations. Homeopathy has been speaking about this kind of inherited susceptibility for over two hundred years. So when we talk about miasms, we are not simply talking about disease labels. We are talking about the deeper patterns that shape how a person adapts, compensates, reacts and eventually becomes unwell.

We all know someone who embodies the Sycotic miasm. Maybe you are that person. The one who does nothing by halves. The one who can be passionate, impulsive, inconsistent and restless. The one who craves intensity, novelty and stimulation. The one who starts strongly, changes quickly and struggles with anything that feels too ordinary, too slow or too restrictive.

Excessive. Changeable. Restless. Intense. Overgrown.

If the Cancer miasm is self-control, the Sycotic miasm is too much. Too much energy. Too much appetite for life. Too much that builds, repeats, thickens or grows. Too much that has not found a clean route out.

Sycosis was originally associated with the suppression of gonorrhoea. This is why the main Sycotic nosode is Medorrhinum, a remedy prepared from gonorrhoeal discharge. But in homeopathy, we are not treating gonorrhoea itself when we talk about the Sycotic miasm. We are looking at the deeper energetic pattern that can follow suppression or be inherited through the family line.

That pattern is often one of excess, accumulation, repetition, thickening and overgrowth.

It is the tendency for things to build up rather than clear out.

Interestingly, even the naming of this miasm feels slightly excessive and confusing. The miasm is called Sycosis, the disease association is gonorrhoea and the nosode is Medorrhinum. Three names, one energetic thread.

Perhaps that is fitting. Sycosis is rarely simple or linear. It accumulates layers. Symptoms repeat, thicken, shift and build. Even the language around it feels like too much to untangle at first.

And perhaps there is another layer here too. Even the name is hidden. Sycosis does not reveal its origin in the way Tuberculinum does. You would not necessarily know, from the word itself, that it belongs to the gonorrhoeal sphere. The thread is concealed - and concealment is such an important part of Sycosis. It is not only the miasm of excess. It is also the miasm of what is covered over, kept secret or pushed out of sight.

What cannot be admitted may become hidden.

What cannot be released may begin to build.

What cannot be expressed cleanly may thicken, repeat or grow.

So yes, Sycosis is too much, but it is also the secret underneath the too much.

The Emotional Blueprint

People with an active Sycotic miasm often carry a huge appetite for life. This is sex, drugs and rock and roll energy. The party animal. The thrill seeker. The one with passion, desire, intensity and a restless hunger for experience.

This is where we see:

✔ Excess energy – passionate, driven and full of appetite for life
✔ Impulsivity and inconsistency – starting strongly, shifting quickly and struggling to sustain
✔ Restlessness and hurry – time passes too slowly and everything feels urgent
✔ Hyperactivity in children
✔ Panic attacks and anxiety
✔ Feeling disconnected, unreal or as if life is dream-like
✔ A surge of energy in the evening
✔ Addictive tendencies – alcohol, drugs, pleasure-seeking or compulsive behaviours
✔ Shunning responsibility or resisting ordinary structure
✔ Fears of the dark, monsters or someone being behind them
✔ Weak memory
✔ Heightened intuition or clairvoyance
✔ Secrecy, shame or hidden inner conflict

This is not always hidden, quiet or controlled. Often it is the opposite - it spills over, it wants more, it struggles with limits.

And yet, even this excess can be a disguise. The intensity, the appetite, the busy-ness, the thrill-seeking - all of it may be visible to everyone, while the shame, secrecy or unresolved conflict beneath it remains unseen.

The Body Keeps Secrets

The Sycotic miasm is characterised by excess, accumulation and overgrowth. Rather than clearing, the body repeats. Rather than resolving, it thickens. Rather than releasing cleanly, it holds on.

The classic Sycotic miasm symptom picture:

✔ Warts, skin tags and moles
✔ Fibroids, cysts and polyps
✔ Chronic catarrh and sinus congestion
✔ Recurrent urinary tract issues
✔ Fluid retention and bloating
✔ Rheumatic and joint complaints
✔ Pelvic pathology and reproductive issues
✔ Chronic lingering complaints that never seem fully resolved

The body literally begins to hold onto things.

Photo shared with permission from The Trailblazer’s Insight Into Homeopathy by Lisa Strbac

The Sycotic Miasm Reflected in the Collective

This isn’t just playing out on an individual level. Our entire culture is steeped in the Sycotic miasm.

Look around. What do you see?

✔ More stimulation
✔ More consumption
✔ More excess
✔ More pleasure-seeking
✔ More addictions
✔ More restlessness
✔ More chronic conditions that linger, repeat and never fully resolve

We live in a world that constantly tells us we need more. More success, more experiences, more products, more distractions, more dopamine, more noise. And then we wonder why our systems are overwhelmed?

The Sycotic miasm is what happens when life becomes too much and the body can no longer clear what it keeps accumulating.

Breaking Free

So how do we begin to loosen the grip of the Sycotic miasm and reclaim vitality?

✔ Create space – less stimulation, less excess, less constant input
✔ Support healthy elimination – physically, emotionally and energetically
✔ Address inherited patterns – this is not always just your burden
✔ Allow the system to complete what has been interrupted
✔ Homeopathic remedies – Medorrhinum can play an important role depending on the individual picture, although deep miasmatic work is best undertaken with an experienced homeopath

The Medicine of the Future

The Sycotic miasm is what happens when the system becomes overburdened. Too much input. Too much stimulation. Too much accumulation. Too much that has not been fully resolved.

We are not meant to carry endless build-up in the body or the psyche. We are meant to move, clear, express, resolve and return to balance.

Maybe the real lesson of the Sycotic miasm is this: more is not always medicine. Sometimes healing begins not by adding more, doing more or stimulating the system further, but by helping it release what has been held, hidden or accumulated for far too long.

Want to go deeper?

Members of The Atrium receive full access to my Miasms course as part of their membership, at no additional cost, where we explore how these energetic patterns influence health, personality and chronic disease.

Animals do not know what they have been given. They have not read the materia medica. They are not expecting a result. They simply respond.

And then, of course, there is agrohomeopathy, where homeopathic remedies are used with plants and crops, which takes the whole placebo argument to another level entirely.

Which brings me to a little public service announcement.

There is one combination remedy I have used many times over the years for the second stage of inflammation.

I used it when my dog had a stubborn, gunky ear infection that was not resolving. I also used it for my daughter when she developed swimmer’s ear on holiday. The pain and ear symptoms came on so severely that morning that we had to miss our flight home.

The combination helped enormously. In fact, I will be bold enough to say that it has never let me down. That is why it earned its place as one of the nine combination remedies I included in The Homeopath in Your Hand. I had simply found it too useful not to share.

It is traditionally thought of when inflammation has moved beyond that very first hot, sudden stage and has become more established, congested or swollen.

You can buy it pre-mixed from Stellar Online if you are already familiar with combination remedies. Or you can make your own if you have a basic homeopathy kit containing Merc, Hepar sulph and Silica.

So consider this a reminder of two things.

Firstly, this is an incredibly useful combination remedy to know about when you find yourself dealing with any inflammatory issue that’s settled in.

Secondly, homeopathy can be wonderful for animals.

Watching an animal respond to a remedy is one of the clearest demonstrations of homeopathy I know.

And the reason this was particularly on my mind today is that tonight, inside my online homeopathy community The Atrium, we are being joined by Chris Auckland, a veterinary surgeon, homeopath and one of the experts featured in the film Introducing Homeopathy.

We’ll be talking all about homeopathy for animals. The live begins at 7.30pm BST / 2.30pm EST, and the replay will be available afterwards. If you’d like to join us, you can find all the details here.

A quick note before anyone asks: this is not veterinary advice. In the UK, only vets are permitted to diagnose and treat animals professionally. This post is simply sharing something I personally used with my own dog.

And actually, it doesn’t even need to be a room. It could be done on Zoom.

This is one of the things I love most about homeopathy. You don’t need MRI scanners, operating theatres or millions of pounds worth of equipment to begin making a difference. You need knowledge. You need observation. You need ethics. You need to understand red flags, scope and when urgent medical care is needed. And you need to know how to take an acute case properly, because acute prescribing is not basic homeopathy. In many ways, it may be where homeopathy has the chance to make the greatest difference.

I imagine one of these practitioners in every town, village and community. Someone parents can turn to when their child develops a fever. Someone who understands shock, grief, trauma, accidents, operations, frightening events and acute illness. Someone who can recognise when a symptom is simply a symptom, and when it may be the beginning of a much bigger story.

The late Robin Murphy once said that acute prescribing is ‘the highest form of homeopathy.’ I remember hearing that years ago and it gave me full body chills.

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Many homeopaths see constitutional prescribing as the pinnacle. The complex chronic case. The person who arrives after twenty years of suffering and slowly finds their way back to health. And of course, that work is extraordinary. But the longer I practise, the more I understand what Murphy was getting at, because what if the highest form of prescribing isn’t always helping someone recover from twenty years of illness? What if it is helping prevent those twenty years from happening in the first place?

As homeopaths, we often hear the phrase ‘I’ve never been the same since.’ I’ve never been the same since the divorce, the operation, the bereavement, the illness, the accident, the birth, the fright, the humiliation, the medical intervention. Different stories, but the same theme. Something happened and the system never quite found its way back.

One of my cases that has stayed with me involved a little girl with eczema. By the time she came to see me, she had been suffering for over a year. Her family had tried all sorts of approaches. They had seen homeopaths. Constitutional remedies had been prescribed. Yet nothing seemed to create lasting change.

This was her before treatment.

When I took the case, I wasn’t particularly interested in the eczema as an isolated symptom. I was interested in what happened before the eczema. Because illnesses rarely appear out of nowhere. Sometimes there is toxicity. Sometimes there is depletion. Sometimes there is an emotional shock or a physical trauma. Often, there is a story.

So I kept asking questions. When did it begin? What happened before the eczema appeared? What was happening in her life at that time? The answer surprised everyone. A tongue-tie snip.

Now before anyone misinterprets what I’m saying, this is not a criticism of tongue-tie procedures. Nor is it about blaming parents. Parents make the best decisions they can with the information they have at the time. I know that more than most. But the timing mattered. The eczema appeared after the procedure. So instead of focusing purely on the skin, I focused on the event that appeared to have knocked her little system off course. The physical trauma. The emotional shock. The before and after. The remedy I prescribed reflected that.

This was the result.

Whenever I look at cases like this, I find myself asking the same question. What if somebody had known what to do at the time? What if somebody in that community had understood acute homeopathy? What if her mum had known how to support her system immediately after the procedure? Would the entire chain of events have unfolded differently? Of course, we can’t know. But I think it is a question worth asking.

German New Medicine has its own framework for this. It proposes that many illnesses begin with an unexpected shock or conflict that catches the system off guard. Homeopathy has been observing something similar for over two hundred years. Different language, different models, but both often lead us back to the same place: what happened before the symptoms appeared?

Because symptoms don’t usually arrive without a reason. And perhaps this is why I feel so passionate about acute prescribing.

It is also why I created PIHAP. Not because I woke up one day and thought the world needed another homeopathy course. When I first started teaching home prescribing, creating a professional qualification wasn’t even on my radar. But over time I began seeing a gap. There were practitioners who wanted to integrate homeopathy into their work but didn’t know where to begin. There were homeopaths who felt confident with constitutional cases but less confident with acute situations. And there were people who simply recognised the power of homeopathy and wanted a structured way to learn it properly.

The more I listened, the more I realised something. If we truly want homeopathy to become mainstream again, we don’t just need more constitutional homeopaths. We need more acute prescribers. We need people embedded within communities who understand fevers, shock, trauma, red flags, scope, remedy reactions and how to support the body’s healing response when life happens.

My dream is simple. I would love to see a day when every community has at least one well-trained acute homeopathic prescriber. Not hidden away. Not impossible to access. Not viewed as a last resort, but available in the moments that matter most.

Because sometimes changing a life isn’t about finding the perfect constitutional remedy twenty years later. Sometimes it’s about recognising the significance of a moment when it first happens.

And that, more than anything else, is why PIHAP exists. Doors have just opened for the January 2027 intake - you can learn more here.

Love Lisa

I think this video speaks for itself.

Imagine if every home had a homeopathy kit and every health practitioner, including medical doctors, knew how to use homeopathy safely and effectively.

This is exactly why I believe we have to keep spreading the word.

You can listen to the full episode, ‘The Book That Fell Off The Shelf’, with the legendary Ian Watson by clicking the link below.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2501371/episodes/17897686

Love,

Lisa

• The child who changed after being bullied.

• The person who was never the same after an operation.

• The toddler who lost functions after a ‘medical intervention.’

• The teenager who lost confidence after being humiliated.

• The adult who never seemed to recover after a bereavement, divorce or frightening illness.

• The person who says, ‘I’ve never been the same since.’

As a homeopath, I hear that phrase all the time. And it’s interesting because sometimes people recover from extraordinary things and seem relatively unchanged. And sometimes an event that looks small from the outside changes the entire trajectory of a person’s life.

Why?

A decade ago, I was sitting in one of Colin Griffith’s amazing lectures and the remedy he was teaching was Thymus gland.

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Now if I’m honest, before that seminar, the thymus was not an organ I spent much time thinking about.

Heart? Yes. Liver? Absolutely. Gut? Constantly.

Thymus? Not so much.

But by the end of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about it because Colin wasn’t really talking about an organ. He was talking about people whose story seemed to have got interrupted after a significant event.

The Thymus Picture

The thymus gland sits behind the breastbone and plays a major role in the development of the immune system during childhood. It naturally atrophies in later life, particularly after puberty. It helps teach the body what belongs and what doesn’t. What is self and what is other.

And when you look at Colin’s remedy picture, those themes seem to extend far beyond immunity. This is often the person who never quite found their place in the world. The person who lacks confidence in who they are. The person who seems disconnected from their purpose, or who feels as though life somehow went off course.

Why? Because something happened that interrupted their development. This is where Thymus gland becomes so interesting.

Those of you who are familiar with homeopathy know that we have plenty of ‘never been well since’ (‘nbws’) remedies, for example, Ignatia or Nat Mur aka nbws grief, Staphysagria nbws violation, Nat Sulph nbws a head injury and so on.

But Thymus Gland is slightly different, it’s a remedy that is about opening a door and letting us see if there is anything in the history of the patient that we need to look at. It might be an event so deep that the patient has forgotten about it or doesn’t even know about it.

Colin shares that we may be inclined to think Thymus Gland is indicated when the patient’s story includes trauma, repeating patterns or destructive pattern and that the thymus is a kind of witness recorder or black box. A place where significant experiences may remain imprinted long after the event itself has passed.

I think many of us recognise the people he is describing. The ones who never quite came back or the ones whose story somehow got interrupted.

One of my favourite lines from Colin’s work is this:

‘The remedy opens a door to potential that would otherwise be locked away.’

I think that’s beautiful because healing doesn’t have to be about making something perfect, but helping someone reach their full potential.

Want To Go Deeper?

Later this summer, Colin Griffith will be joining us inside my online homeopathic community, The Atrium, for a live deep dive into Thymus gland and how it differs from other ‘never been well since’ remedies.

Having learned this remedy directly from Colin, I can honestly say it changed how I think about certain cases. If you’ve ever worked with someone who never seemed to fully come back after a life event, I think you’re going to find this conversation fascinating.

The Atrium is currently open, and this month we also have two incredible live sessions: Helen Johnson, Colin’s colleague, will be joining us to share her wisdom on trauma, and vet Chris Auckland will be teaching on homeopathy for animals.

This is exactly why I created The Atrium. For the deeper conversations. The ones that don’t fit into Instagram captions but completely change the way we see a remedy, a case, or even a person.

You can learn more here.

Love Lisa

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Then just the other day, someone jumped into my DMs after I shared something about my recent health emergency and told me ‘it was all happening perfectly and that it couldn’t have happened any other way.’

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I know people usually mean well when they say things like this. I really do. They are often trying to comfort by offering a higher perspective or trying to make the unbearable feel less random. But if I’m honest, this phrase did not land the way it was intended...

Because I’ve heard it before. Such as after my baby died. and then later when my daughter became severely unwell. Two occasions when life didn’t gently nudge me into growth but completely ripped the floor from underneath me.

According to some well meaning people, my baby’s death happened for a reason. And similarly apparently my daughter’s suffering was chosen by her soul. And again I hear that my recent emergency surgery and nearly leaving my children without a mother was all unfolding perfectly.

And I just can’t get there.

I do believe meaning can be made from pain. I believe beautiful things can be born from the wreckage. I believe grief can crack us open, illness can change our priorities and suffering can sometimes show us what was never sustainable in the first place.

But that is not the same as saying the suffering itself was perfect, or that a baby dying was meant to be, or a child chose a debilitating illness. It is not the same as telling a woman in a hospital bed, terrified and in pain, that it is all divinely arranged.

My hospital stay made me question a lot of things - and not in a tidy spiritual awakening kind of way. More in a ‘what the hell is this place that we live in?’ kind of way.

There were moments where the pain was so extreme I genuinely didn’t know a human body could hold it. And on the beds either side of me were the sounds of dementia patients crying out in pain that they wanted to die and go home, and the another patient who was being told her leg had to be amputated, and another being prepped for palliative surgery after having been told the day previously she had advanced cancer with weeks left to live.

Try telling them it was all happening perfectly. And lets not even go to places like hospices for children.

These life events don’t feel like divine perfection.

They feel like hell.

I struggle with the way spiritual language can sometimes float above reality instead of meeting it. I don’t want a worldview that needs me to call everything perfect in order to cope.

I want one that can hold grief honestly.

I want one that can say, ‘This was awful’ without needing to immediately turn it into a lesson.

I want one that allows for free will, human choice, mistakes, rupture, repair, consequences, mystery and grace.

Because if everything could never have been any other way, then where is free will? Didn’t God give human beings free will? And if we have free will, surely not everything that happens is some fixed divine script.

Some things happen because people make choices.

Some things happen because systems are broken.

Some things happen because trauma is passed down instead of healed.

Some things happen because we have created a toxic, disconnected world and then act surprised when bodies and minds start collapsing inside it.

This is part of why I’m drawn to homeopathy. Not because it gives neat answers, but because it starts by listening to the person in front of us rather than explaining their suffering away.

And yes, sometimes good things grow from awful things. Of course they do. Humans are astonishing like that. We compost pain because otherwise it would bury us.

But the flower growing through the rubble does not mean the bomb was holy.

That’s the bit I keep coming back to. I can see how my daughter’s illness changed me. I can see how losing my baby changed me. I can see how nearly dying has made ordinary life feel almost unbearably precious.

But I still don’t think that means those things were meant to happen. Maybe the miracle is not that everything happens for a reason. Maybe the miracle is that we can still find meaning after things happen that make no sense at all.

For everyone who is struggling, this is for you.

Love Lisa

Because from the outside, a 21st century travel kit can look a bit bonkers. X-Ray. Sunlight. Chlorine. Stinging nettle. Sugar. Liver support.

And yet when you understand the way homeopathy thinks, it starts to make sense.

Take Sol, for example. A remedy made from sunlight. Not because everyone who goes in the sun needs it, obviously, but because some people have a very particular relationship with sun exposure. They wilt in it. React to it. Get headaches from it. Become overwhelmed by it.

Then there’s Chlorum, which is one of those remedies that makes you realise how specific homeopathy can be. Not ‘swimming pool remedy’ as such, but a remedy to think about when the chlorine exposure itself seems to be part of the picture.

Urtica urens is another lovely one for holidays because it has that prickly, stinging, nettle-like quality. The sort of picture you might think about around stings, bites, prickly heat or itchy eruptions where the sensation fits.

And then there’s Saccharum, which always makes me smile because anyone who has watched a child after too much sugar on holiday will understand why that remedy might earn its place.

X-Ray sounds even stranger, until you remember that many of us now travel through airport scanners, sit on planes, carry devices and live in a world our grandparents would barely recognise.

This is what I love about homeopathy. It isn’t just ‘this for that’. It asks what the person is susceptible to, what tipped them over and how their body is expressing that disturbance.

Travel often reveals those susceptibilities beautifully because everything changes at once. Food, water, sleep, rhythm, heat, excitement, environment, exposures, routine. And suddenly the body starts talking.

I’ve put together a free 21st Century Homeopathic Travel Guide with some of the remedies I think are worth knowing about when travelling or going on holiday, including how to think about them and how to dose them.

You can get it here.

Lisa x

And yet tonight that’s exactly what’s happening.

Anyone who has walked the long, confusing road of PANS, PANDAS, Lyme, autism, ADHD, chronic mystery symptoms or children who seem to change overnight will probably know Angelica’s book Healing Complex Children with Homeopathy. Honestly, in this world, it has become almost like a bible. Not because it gives neat answers but because when you’re living through complex illness, you eventually realise neat answers usually aren’t real.

You realise some children don’t fit inside tidy boxes. Some cases don’t resolve because you found the ‘right constitutional’. Some people improve… then hit another layer entirely. And suddenly you find yourself questioning everything you thought you understood about health.

I can’t even explain how surreal this feels for me personally because it was actually a homeopath trained by Angelica who helped bring my daughter back from one of the darkest periods of our lives. So to now have Angelica herself joining us tonight inside The Atrium feels incredibly special.

Especially because we’re not talking about fluffy surface-level homeopathy. We’re talking about the stuff that algorithms just don’t like. The reality that illness is far more complex than ‘you caught a bug’. And this is where nosodes become so fascinating.

Nosodes are homeopathic remedies made from disease products, pathogens or affected tissue, depending on the remedy. In crude form, that sounds a bit ick. In homeopathic potency, it becomes something entirely different. Not the substance itself but the information, the imprint, the energetic signature.

And this is why nosodes can be so interesting in complex cases. Because sometimes the story isn’t just ‘this child has anxiety’ or ‘this child has tics’ or ‘this child has rage’ or ‘this child has OCD’. Sometimes the more useful question is: when did this begin? What happened before the child changed? Was there an illness, a vaccine, a trauma, a fever that never fully resolved, a family pattern or a ‘never been well since’ moment?

A layer the system seems to keep repeating but never completing.

This does not mean nosodes are magic bullets. It does not mean every complex child needs one. And it definitely does not mean we throw them around like fairy dust. But it does mean we have a tool to help ‘stuck’ cases.

Years ago, in my very first Substack posts (which you can read here), I wrote about a homeopathic perspective on contagion and why I don’t believe illness can be reduced down to tiny invading particles attacking random victims.

I wrote this at the time:

‘We all know yawns aren’t caused by a virus or bacteria and yet they are still contagious.’

And honestly, I still think about that all the time. Anyone who has walked into a tense room knows energy spreads. Fear spreads. Panic spreads. Calm spreads too. Trauma spreads through generations.

So why is it considered ridiculous to explore whether illness may also involve something energetic and transmissible beyond the purely physical?

And when you start exploring nosodes and deeper layers in chronic cases, this becomes much more obvious. Tonight is exploring this in more detail in a community that welcomes curiosity, openness and the willingness to ask bigger questions without instantly shutting conversations down.

And honestly? That’s becoming rare now. That’s also exactly why I created The Atrium. Not for recycled Instagram remedy lists but for the conversations you can’t really have anywhere else anymore. The conversations where experienced practitioners can say, ‘Hang on… what if there’s more going on here?’

Tonight’s live with Angelica Lemke honestly feels like one of those conversations. If you’d like to come into The Atrium and join us for tonight’s conversation, you can do that here.

Lisa x

I think it’s more that I’m increasingly aware that some homeopathy conversations simply do not fit very well into a quick post. They need space. They need context. They need the back and forth. They need someone to say, ‘hang on, that bit feels important’ and someone else to ask the question everyone else was thinking but didn’t quite know how to word.

That is hard to do on Instagram.

It is even harder to do when half the words that matter in homeopathy now seem to set off some invisible alarm bell.

Autism. Detox. Nosodes. Homeoprophylaxis. Trauma. Miasms. Vaccine injury. Suppression. Chronic illness. The list goes on.

And yet these are often the conversations people most need to have.

Last night reminded me exactly why I created The Atrium.

For anyone who doesn’t know, The Atrium is my private online homeopathy membership community. It is for practitioners, students and serious home users who want to keep learning beyond books, courses and the tiny snippets we can share on social media. Inside, we have live teaching sessions with respected homeopaths, case-busting sessions, a growing replay library, discussion spaces and access to three of my introductory courses while you remain a member.

It is not a qualification or a course to complete. It is more like an ongoing homeopathy room, where the conversation can keep going.

Last night we had Wren Lloyd join us for a case-busting session and honestly, I came away buzzing.

Wren has enormous experience with autism and complex children, and as she says herself, she is like a dog with a bone when it comes to solving stuck complex cases. Which is exactly what you want really, because these cases are rarely solved by neat little lists or ‘this remedy is good for that’ thinking.

Members were able to bring cases they felt stuck on and ask Wren questions in real time. And the gold was not just in the remedy suggestions, although there were plenty of those. The real gold was hearing how she thinks. What she notices. What she questions. What she does not get distracted by. How she follows the thread when a case is layered, confusing or full of noise.

That, to me, is where so much of the learning happens.

Not in the perfect textbook case where the remedy practically walks in wearing a name badge, but in the messy, real-life cases where someone says, ‘I’m stuck. What am I missing?’

We loved it so much that case-busting is now going to become a regular feature inside The Atrium.

And this is also why I have decided to open The Atrium again.

I had originally planned to keep enrolment to just a couple of times a year. Partly because I like spaces to settle, and partly because I never wanted The Atrium to feel like a constantly open shop door.

But I have had so many emails from people asking when they can join, and after last night’s session it felt slightly ridiculous to keep saying no when this is exactly the kind of learning people are asking for.

So The Atrium is open again.

And it is a rather lovely time to come in because we have some brilliant sessions coming up.

Angelica Lemke and Sarah Valentini are joining us to talk about intuition and nosodes.

Colin Griffith is coming in to teach on the thymus gland, which he calls ‘the black box remedy’, and how it differs from other ‘never been well since’ remedies.

Chris Auckland, the vet from the film Introducing Homeopathy, is joining us to talk about homeopathy for animals.

Wren Lloyd will be back to teach on the darkest remedies.

And there is more coming too.

Members also get access to all the replays already inside The Atrium, including Ton Jansen and Roger Savage on homeopathic detox, Dr Isaac Golden on homeoprophylaxis, Caroline Gaskin, Maggie Dixon, Robert Bridge, Gordon Sambidge, Claire Zarb and many more.

It is quietly becoming a rather extraordinary library.

And while you remain a member, you also get access to three of my introductory courses:

Introduction to Tissue Salts
Introduction to Homeopathic Detox
Introduction to Miasms

Together, these are worth $185.

So yes, I may be a little quieter on social media.

But I am not quieter about homeopathy.

If anything, I feel more excited about it than ever. I am just putting more of my energy into the places where the conversation has room to breathe.

Where we can talk about complex cases properly.

Where we can hear experienced practitioners think out loud.

Where homeopathy does not have to be flattened into a soundbite or carefully disguised so a machine doesn’t misunderstand it.

Where people can keep learning in good company.

If that sounds like the sort of space you have been wanting, The Atrium is open now.

Annual membership is $299 and includes the live sessions, regular case-busting, the replay library, community discussion and access to the three courses while you remain a member.

You can join here:

https://courses.academyintegrativehomeopathy.com/products/communities/theAtrium

See you on the other side!

Love Lisa x

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