About Us

Classical Homeopathy,
The Long Journey

When I was a small child I was fascinated with animal behavior and medicine. In the fourth grade, much to my teacher’s surprise. I gave a stimulating book report on the topic of leprosy. Each birthday I would tightly squeeze my eyes shut and wish for the gift of a pony as I blew out the candles of my birthday cake. Of course, living in urban Los Angeles made this impossible and I had to make due with a goldfish and a tiny toy poodle.

I graduated from Chiropractic college in 1981 but, having my first baby at home, I became involved with the home birth movement in Santa Cruz, California and worked as an assistant midwife, attending births for a number of years. Concurrently my husband and I studied Craniosacral therapy with John Upledger, D.O. as we grew in our practice and added to our family.

In 1988 I decided to take up the study of homeopathy and enrolled in the International Foundation of Homeopathy Professional Course. After beginning my studies, I unexpectedly became pregnant with our third child. Our baby was born six weeks early with a moderately serious birth defect, tracheoesophageal fistula; his esophagus ended in a blind pouch that was not attached to his stomach. Thankfully this was surgically corrected on his first day but he did not grow and develop normally, and still resembled a newborn baby at seven months of age. Every night he would begin to cough at 2am, and clear frothy mucous would form in his mouth. To keep him from choking, we slept with him held upright on our chests while he coughed all night. We took our child to neonatologists, pediatricians, acupuncturists and osteopaths, but he continued to wake at night with this strange cough and failed to develop. A colleague from Southern California urged me to take our baby to see an experienced homeopath who lived in Santa Barbara. At first my husband was very skeptical. After a long and careful interview, the homeopath gave me a single dose of a remedy and assured me that children who respond to the remedy that most closely matched the symptoms of my son tended to be “late starters.” Twelve hours later our child ceased coughing at night and he had already made significant developmental changes by the time of our first follow-up appointment at six weeks after the initial dose.

Undertaking the study of Classical Homeopathy is a lifetime pursuit and involves a sympathetic and thorough understanding of human nature and behavior as well as a scholarly knowledge of homeopathic remedies—the material medica. I was extremely fortunate to have been mentored for nine years by the master homeopath, Ananda Zaren, who had successfully prescribed for my child. For seventeen years I have studied homeopathy with colleagues in Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. I continue to actively seek to broaden my education in homeopathy. I am very grateful to my current teacher, Henny Heudens-Mast and to my patients who continue to astonish and teach me through their earnest transformations in healing.

Early on, I began treating animals and I have written of a few of my experiences on the Case Histories page. In my adult life I have finally achieved my dream of living with horses. Horses are uniquely honest and generous creatures, but they have survived for thousands of years because nature endowed them with a very hefty dose of “react and flee.”

For this reason they are prone to accidents when their natural flight urge collides with human structure or body. I have carefully designed the HorseHomeopathy emergency kit to give horse owners a gentle and effective tool in handling accidents and injuries that can affect both the horse and rider.

I have begun to plumb the depths of constitutional prescribing for horses and relay some of the stories on the Constitutional page. When the horse begins to trust the human he will reveal his inner character to the careful observer. There is little difference in prescribing homeopathic remedies for humans or horses. In both cases the prescription is individualized and takes into account both the physical symptoms and the mental and emotional attributes of the animal. Constitutional work with horses is outside the scope of the emergency kit but it is deeply gratifying to utilize homeopathy to provoke healing responses in our equine partners.

Karen Bilgrai Cohen, D.C., CCH

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