Why Getting Rid of Symptoms Isn’t Healing
Last week, as I was walking down the block, I noticed a narrow stream of water running along the edge of the street. At first, I assumed someone had left a sprinkler on, but as I got closer, I realized it was coming from a small crack in the pavement—just a steady trickle bubbling up from beneath the surface.
When I passed it again twenty minutes later, three neighbors were standing around it, pointing, debating what to do.
“Just throw some cement over it,” one said. “Simple fix.”
Another shook his head. “You’d need to dig up the whole street to find where the pipe burst.”
The third just shrugged. “It’ll dry up on its own. Not worth the hassle.”
I stood there watching this familiar dance, and all I could think was: This is exactly what we do with our bodies. Every single day.
Something surfaces – a symptom, an eruption, a discomfort, something that disrupts the smooth flow of our lives, and our first instinct is identical. Patch it. Suppress it. Make it disappear as quickly as possible so we can get back to what we were doing. And if it’s small enough, if it doesn’t seem “serious,” we might even ignore it altogether, hoping it’ll sort itself out.
But here’s what those neighbors didn’t understand about their little street leak: the water doesn’t disappear when you patch the crack. The pressure underneath keeps building. The source remains untouched, unseen, unfixed. And when you seal off its only outlet, that water becomes more determined. It finds another route, maybe in a less obvious place, likely causing more structural damage along the way.
That’s suppression. And unfortunately, suppression has become the foundation of so much modern healthcare—yes, even “natural” healthcare and protocols.
When the Body Finds Another Way to Speak
The saddest conversations I have are with parents who thought they’d solved their child’s problem, only to watch it resurface somewhere deeper.
I remember an eight-year-old girl with eczema so raw it had taken over her beautiful face and caused relentless itching on her legs. Her mother felt helpless. They’d tried everything—creams, specialists, protocols, and even resorting to steroids. Every practitioner had a new theory, but nothing helped.
When I reviewed her case, the timeline became crystal clear. It all began after four rounds of antibiotics for recurring strep throat. Round after round, until her exhausted body, silenced in one area, found another way to speak. Her skin became the messenger.
But rather than ask why the skin was screaming, everything they’d tried focused on quieting it. Steroid creams to suppress the inflammation. Antihistamines to block the itch. More protocols to “control” the flare-ups. No one paused to consider that her body wasn’t failing, it was compensating. It was doing everything it could to express an imbalance that had been driven underground.
When she received the correct homeopathic remedy—chosen not for her rash, but for her whole being, her sensitivity, her history, her entire story—something shifted. Her eczema didn’t just vanish, her entire being healed. Her immune system stopped being on high alert and her chronic fatigue was healed as well. For the first time in two years, her body finally exhaled. Just one remedy, given just once but it worked deeply because it treated the child, not the symptoms.
This pattern repeats endlessly. The toddler whose eczema “disappears” with steroid cream, only to develop asthma months later. The woman whose migraines vanish with daily medication, but now she’s foggy, exhausted, dealing with anxiety she “can’t shake.” The child whose ear infections stop after multiple antibiotic rounds, but now struggles with gut issues, low immunity, and emotional volatility.
These aren’t coincidences. They’re the body finding new ways to tell the same story.
The Smoke Detector Fallacy
We’re conditioned to believe that symptoms are the enemy. That making them disappear equals victory. That the absence of pain means the presence of health.
It’s like yanking the batteries out of a smoke detector and proudly announcing, “Look, the alarm stopped!” You might have peace and quiet for a while, but somewhere in the house, something is still smoldering.
I think of the young woman who came to me after months of relentless sleeplessness. Night after night, she would lie awake until 5 a.m., her body exhausted while her mind stayed wide awake. By morning she was depleted, barely functional, dragging herself through the day on caffeine and sheer willpower. She wasn’t just tired. She was unraveling.
She had tried everything she was supposed to try. Magnesium. Valerian root. Melatonin. Herbal teas lined up on her kitchen counter. Meditation apps. Breathing exercises. Screen restrictions. Diet changes. Cutting sugar. Cutting caffeine. Emotion Code. Somatic practices. Carefully designed evening routines meant to calm her nervous system. None of it helped. Her body simply would not let go.
What no one had really paused to explore was what had changed in her life before the insomnia began. She had recently gone through a divorce. On the surface, she spoke about it with clarity and composure. She believed she had worked through it. She told herself she was strong, happy, resilient, and moving forward. But her body was telling a different story.
At night, when the noise of the day faded and there was nothing left to distract her, her system stayed on high alert. The sleeplessness wasn’t random. It was her organism refusing to power down, signaling that something unresolved was still asking to be acknowledged. But she wasn’t ready to look there yet. So she kept trying to patch it. Supplements. Techniques. Therapies. Anything to push the symptoms down far enough so she could function and keep going.
She didn’t need another protocol. She needed to be seen. Heard. Understood.
As she spoke, a pattern became clear, not only about sleep, but about who she had learned to be in order to survive. I prescribed a classical homeopathic remedy based on that deeper picture. That very night, she slept—for the first time in weeks. She has been sleeping deeply every night since. Equally striking was her report that her mental and emotional state had improved in a way she’d never experienced.
Her remedy didn’t merely treat sleeplessness. It treated the woman who had been so determined to overcome her life circumstances that she had quietly suppressed parts of herself in the process. And when that deeper imbalance was addressed, the sleeplessness disappeared. Not because we forced it to, but because it no longer needed to be there once the correct homeopathic remedy enabled her organism to rebalance itself.
The Body That Never Lies
Then there was the mental health professional who came to me at 60, a woman who helped others heal for a living but couldn’t stop her own tears. For over a year, she’d been crying daily, sometimes for hours. It was affecting her work, her relationships, her sense of self. She’d tried everything: therapy colleagues, meditation retreats, exercise regimens, dietary changes. She was about to see a psychiatrist for antidepressants when someone suggested she try classical homeopathy.
“I don’t understand it,” she said during our consultation. “I help people through grief every day. I know all the techniques. But I can’t seem to help myself.”
I asked her a simple question that no one else had: “When did this start?”
Her face changed. “Right after my mother passed away.”
A few more questions revealed the pattern. She described feeling like her emotions were “stuck in her throat.” She had this overwhelming need to sigh, to breathe deeply, as if she couldn’t get enough air.
The picture was clear: Ignatia amara. The classical homeopathic remedy for acute grief, especially when emotions feel stuck.
She called me the next day, her voice different. Lighter. “I need to understand something,” she said. “Yesterday was the first day in over a year that I didn’t cry. Not once. How is that possible? What just happened?”
This is classical homeopathy. Not treating symptoms, but treating the person. Not suppressing the tears, but supporting the woman who had not had the strength to fully grieve.
The Conversation We’re Not Having
Classical homeopathy offers something radically different: respect for the body’s intelligence.
Instead of asking “How do I make this stop?” we ask “What is this trying to tell me?” Instead of declaring war on symptoms, we enter into conversation with them. Because behind every rash, every migraine, every recurring strep episode, every digestive issue, there’s a person. A story. A body doing its absolute best to communicate.
This doesn’t mean we ignore suffering or avoid intervention when needed. Sometimes you do need to put out the fire before you can rebuild the house. But true healing, the kind that lasts, requires more than suppression. It requires curiosity instead of panic. Support instead of force. Listening instead of silencing.
Classical homeopathy treats the person, not the diagnosis. It doesn’t chase symptoms from organ to organ. It asks: What’s your story? What’s your body trying to tell you? And it responds not with force, but with support, stimulating the body’s own capacity to resolve the issue from the inside out.
The body always speaks the truth, even when that truth is inconvenient. Even when it disrupts our schedules or challenges our assumptions. Even when it asks us to look at parts of our lives we’d rather avoid.
The Real Choice
I often think about that water leak on my street. By now, someone has probably poured cement into the crack. The surface looks fine. The neighbors can walk by without concern. But underground, the pressure remains. The source stays untouched. And eventually—maybe in a week, maybe in a year—the water will find another path, likely causing much more extensive damage until it can find another way to get our attention.
That’s the choice we face every day with our health. We can patch the leak and hope for the best. Or we can ask deeper questions: Where is this coming from? What is my body trying to protect? What does it need from me?
Real healing doesn’t promise instant results. It doesn’t offer magic bullets or quick fixes. But it offers something more valuable: the chance to understand your body’s wisdom. To work with it instead of against it. To address the source instead of just managing the symptoms.
Classical homeopathy shows us that healing isn’t about silencing the messenger—it’s about understanding the message. And when we finally stop fighting our bodies and start listening to them, something remarkable happens. We don’t just feel better, we become more ourselves. More whole. More alive.
The water always finds a way to speak its truth. The question is: are we ready to listen?
