Spectrum of Homeopathy 2016-3, Addiction

SPEKTRUM addresses a major contemporary issue in the current issue “Addiction” and presents the practical experiences of international authors with the homeopathic treatment of substance-related and non-substance-related addictions as well as their limits.

Treating addiction is as complex as the phenomena of individual dependence itself. Irish homeopath Declan Hammond, who treated heroin addicts from poor districts as well as unemployed and cocaine-addicted yuppies from the upper class in Ireland, sums up his understanding of this subject with a quote from Canadian addiction therapist Gabor Maté: “Many of us think of drug addicts when we see people unsuccessfully trying to fill the black hole inside them, the spiritual emptiness within us where we have lost contact with our soul or our spirit. Our consumption-, profit-, action- and image-obsessed culture merely serves to deepen this hole and leave us emptier than before. Since all causes of addiction lie within the depths of our soul, all solutions lie there as well.”

Every addiction develops its own dynamic, which ultimately leads to stereotyped behavioural patterns regardless of the type of dependence. Psychologist Johanna Tränkner demonstrates this by comparing the symptoms of drug addiction with non-substance forms such as compulsive buying, workaholism, gambling addiction or sex addiction. Tracing the underlying causes and seeking the solution within the soul is precisely the challenge for the homeopath in this condition.

The causes are as varied as the case histories in this issue of SPEKTRUM: Deborah Collins reports on unbridled anger, Andreas Richter on the insecure attachment of a little love-addicted boy, and Frans Kusse brings many different examples of the relationship between trauma and addiction.

Obviously some groups of homeopathic remedies are indicated more often than others. Jonathan Hardy explains the gnawing feeling of inner emptiness and the urge to fill it using the milk remedies. The drug remedies that can be used as nosodes in withdrawal also play a major role, as Frans Kusse describes for cannabis dependence.

Most promising are remedies with a deep constitutional similarity. Anne Schadde treated a high-powered woman addicted to drugs with Ephedra; Anne Koller-Wilmking can find the similarity of a sex- and alcohol-addicted patient in the picture of Natrium fluoratum; Sigrid Lindemann recognises the addiction pattern of withdrawal, isolation and escape from reality in a case involving Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, the Pacific king salmon.

In Ulrich Welte’s case report the young computer-game-addicted patient received Franciscea, a nightshade plant that is assigned to the syphilitic miasm. The case studies show that homeopathy can make an important contribution to addiction treatment. Good psychosocial support should, however, be ensured in every case. As Hammond writes: “Addiction thrives in isolation”.