A common area of confusion for people is figuring out what is an Acute complaint, and what is Chronic.

This will help!

An Acute issue has been ongoing for a short period of fewer than 4 weeks and usually stems from either a viral or bacterial infection (such as a cold, flu, stomach upset), or physical trauma such as an accident or injury. Acutes are self-limiting - meaning they’ll resolve spontaneously, with or without treatment.

Chronic issues are those complaints that have been ongoing for a month or more. Often there can be multiple issues at once (we call these concomitants in homeopathy) and these are issues that keep coming back, or just cannot be cured, no matter what the patient tries (including conventional medicine).

Homeopathically, when treating Chronic conditions, we are not just looking at the physical symptoms. There’s usually something that happened prior to the condition starting - whether it be a physical/emotional/mental trauma or even a viral issue such as Covid.

Let me give you an example of a client who had been coping with severe migraines for over 5 years. The migraines would come and go, she could go 3-4 weeks at a time without having one, but then she could get two in a month.

During the consultation, she told me the location of the headache, what the pain felt like, what made the migraine feel better and worse etc. I asked her what was going on in her life at the time when these migraines started. At first, she shrugged off the question and said nothing major.

But as we continued talking, she said told me she’d lost her job a month earlier, and she’d also had a bereavement in the family. Now, this young woman had tried everything to get rid of these debilitating migraines. Whatever she tried, would give temporary relief at best.

Based on her overall symptoms, I prescribed her Ignatia 1M (Ignatia is a remedy for grief). To her surprise and delight, after taking the remedy for the prescribed time, her migraines disappeared. At a follow-up 6 months later, they hadn’t returned.

If she had been given an Acute prescription for this, it would’ve looked at her physical symptoms only, and wouldn’t have addressed the deeper underlying trauma, which was the cause of the complaint.

An Acute remedy would be unlikely to resolve this issue permanently - whereas addressing this fully as a Chronic condition (which it was), brought about a lasting cure.

We’ve all suffered trauma to varying degrees in our lives - it is often in our childhoods that deep

traumas occur, with trauma after trauma being piled on top. No one gets through life unscathed - that’s not why we’re here!

It often takes a skilled homeopath to find the trigger - or initial causation - that leads to the breakdown of health. Nothing happens in isolation in the body - the body is a holistic masterpiece - a physical trauma has an emotional impact and vice versa. We cannot bring about a cure without treating the Whole Being

I hope this gives a better understanding of what is an Acute issue and what is Chronic - feel free to share this blog and if you would like help with either an Acute or a Chronic complaint, you can book a consultation online with me here