Shahrezad Samiuddin is a freelance journalist, does a weekly column for a Karachi-based

English Daily and writes for a number of publications.

I decided to try out Dr. Ahmad Fakir Mohammad after I read about his website in the December 2003 issue of the Spider Magazine. I had been going to other homoeopaths earlier but always ended up with a mixed set of results. There were friends who told me that you had to use allopathic medicine in tandem with homoeopathic. That sounded pretty useless to me. Why bother, since you will never figure out what actually worked?

All the homoeopaths that I had gone to in the past had bottles filled with sugar balls into which they put drops from four different bottles of patent medicine, whose names I would never find out. I had read a bit about homoeopathy and knew that that wasn’t how the medicines were to be administered. And so when I came upon Dr. Fakir Mohammad’s website, I knew that he was somebody who was practicing homoeopathy the way it was meant to be practiced.

I have been going to him for about four years now and my family has had all manner of treatments from him. From boils to allergies to depression to sciatica and more. During these past four years Dr. Sahib has also helped increase my understanding of homoeopathy. He recommended excellent books on the subject and now every time he prescribes a medicine I come home and read up about it in the Materia Medica. His diagnosis is usually eerily spot-on. His patients also appreciate the fact that if he cannot help you, he is upfront and tells you. In informing you about homoeopathy, he also makes you aware of its limitations and debunks many myths (for me that was the ‘belief’ that homoeopathic remedies are always safe –not true).

There has been much debate on the efficacy of homoeopathy with the lack of positive results in experiments being held up as examples of its failure. Unfortunately these researches are inevitably judging homoepathy by allopathic standards. For instance the nature of homoeopathy requires that you cannot give the same remedy to a roomful of people with colds. Each person will require ‘tailor-made’ remedies which is exactly why good homoeopaths spend so much time patiently trying to figure you out, even when a roomful of patients waiting outside threatens to break into a riot! Obviously the men in white don’t have the time to do a detailed profile of their guinea pigs.

Provided it is done right, there are useful alternatives to almost everything in the world. There is solar energy, there is margarine, there is CNG, and so there is homoeopathy:  a safe and healthy cure for many diseases that ail us.

Shaharezade Samiuddin,
Karachi,
shahrezad_samiuddin@yahoo.com