We Started Teaching Chapter Twenty Before Chapter One

Six years ago, during lockdown, I helped set up an online acute homeopathy clinic called First Response Homeopathy with five other wonderful homeopaths.

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.

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.