A Family Guide: Coping With Chemotherapy Using Homeopathy

Review

This book review is reprinted from The Homoeopath with permission from Nick Churchill of The Society of Homoeopaths.

Reviewed by Charles Innes

This is a paperback of almost 300 pages, whose specific theme is the practical homeopathic management of the body's reactions to chemotherapy. It is not about how to treat cancer and also stops short of non-homeopathic advice.

It starts with a contents section, which is one's only guide to the book's subject matter (it does not have, nor really need, an index). The first few introductory chapters take up 33 pages. Then follow 25 short chapters, each one of which deals with a particular clinical problem commonly encountered with patients on chemotherapy. After this is a materia medica section, covering some 70 relevant remedies. At the end is a bibliography of useful basic materia medica (Morrison, Vermeulen, Phatak etc).

Laura starts with the story of the book. While a homeopathic student her husband was diagnosed with lymphoma, one of the most chemo-responsive malignancies. Study and experiment led to many successful homeopathic prescriptions as he combined orthodox and complementary treatments. The book was written to fill a big gap on the shelves for those in the same situation. The straightforward and confident tone is reassuring (especially if you are feeling lost, impotent or hopeless); this is probably due to the fact that the author has the benefit of speaking largely from her own experience.

She explains the idea and practice of homeopathy succinctly, with enough guidelines for the newcomer DIY prescriber to get going. After telling us a bit about the practical side of chemotherapy she moves onto the clinical section.

This list of common clinical 'side' effects of chemotherapy is relevant and fairly complete, comprising as it does sections on pre and post operative care, the prevention of toxicity, anaemia, anorexia, diarrhoea, mouth ulcers etc; I was however, frustrated by the lack of a chapter on headaches, a deficiency which was brought to mind when I was presented with a patient who was suffering from this common effect of chemotherapy. Several remedies, each with a keynote description, are suggested for each condition. The remedy lists and descriptions are more as you would find in any basic book than the personal testament I was hoping for, but clearly a lot of work has gone into editing them down and the level of information given seems about right.

The next section is the materia medica, which comprises descriptions of almost all the remedies already referred to in the clinical section. Once again, we find standard, concise drug pictures, edited down from other books. Each description is arranged under the headings of Keynotes, Mind, Generals, Physical, Better and Worse. As in the 'Clinical' section, I found the amount of information good; full enough without being confusing.

I was interested by a brief discussion about symptoms arising from chemotherapy. The author seems to view these as primary effects of the medication, whereas I see many of these symptoms as 'secondary' bodily attempts at detoxification. In this context suppression is good, to an extent, if you want the chemotherapy to hang around to do its job; for suppression is what you are doing, if your treatment palliates the diarrhoea or rashes that arise from chemotherapy. This is an interesting area for homeopathy to deal with. This 'non purist' application is a reminder of the robustness of a system that can take on the Goliath of chemotherapy and also suppress strategically the results of suppression.

Laura Fanton's book fulfils its task admirably, being a practical guide for those involved in caring for someone on chemotherapy. She has succeeded in filling a niche in a practical and important area. She assumes no knowledge of homeopathy and explains enough without coming across as unreasonably biased towards it.

It is quite likely that those reading it will want to find out more about homeopathy, so it would have been nice to see some recommended reading on the philosophy, not just a selection of materia medica. On the whole though, I do think the book's scope is cleverly right, as it would have been easy for the author to wander outside her remit, or to fill the pages with information that is widely

available elsewhere.

Patients undergoing chemotherapy suffer and often feel powerless, so this is a good book to recommend both to them, and to their care-workers also. Homeopaths might value it mostly for its collation of salient information, but the remedy descriptions are also good in themselves. I feel fondly towards my copy and imagine it as a little ambassador for our cause.