15/04/2026
Today's offering during Homลopathy Week is a personal one. I often joke that my family and loved ones could keep me working full time; in truth, they were my first willing trial subjects while I was studying, and for that I remain grateful.
Towards the end of my nursing training, my Dad's health took a serious hit. For someone who was never sick (or simply masked it well) he was struck hard: a heart attack, suspected embolism, and osteospondylosis, all at once. I watched him fade before me.
This medal-winning athlete and bodybuilder was shrinking, visibly and fast. At one point he could barely move his head; doctors had told him his x-rays showed all his cervical vertebrae had crumbled, and it was only his neck muscles holding his head in place. As the atrophy progressed, they estimated he'd be in a wheelchair within three years and paralysed shortly after.
We were frantic. I told him to try a faith healer; weโd begun watching programmes like Healers, Quacks & Mystics, but I knew conventional medicine had nothing safe to offer that might actually work. So off he went to the only other healer he knew: the local naturopath. These were still the days when I believed all alternatives were firmly b-a-d, but he was determined. She told him it would take around six months to repair what he'd been hiding for years.
He was back at work in six weeks.
My trajectory changed irreversibly from that moment. She became a mentor of sorts. I attended every workshop she ran and, while still nursing, began working through shorter courses; herbalism, organic farming, iridology, massage. This is when my nursing peers began turning on me one by one.
I eventually walked away from medicine after a particularly difficult confrontation in a remote Kimberley hospital, followed by an acute vaccine reaction that nearly claimed my niece's life. Interestingly, out of a nursing staff of 11 in one remote hospital, 3 of us were studying natural health by correspondence; that is impressive and reflects how many nurses were disillusioned.
Thatโs when I dove headfirst into homลopathy, and then acupuncture. And Dad was my most willing test subject. The spondylosis had returned with a vengeance. Old malaria raised its head again, as did gout and by then, his naturopath had retired. I was friends with the local GP, so while he prescribed mild sleeping tablets and analgesics to get Dad through the day, I began developing formulations for both the malaria and the spondylosis.
At one point he couldn't lift his arms. I gave him daily acupuncture; the remedy now known as Nexus was developed for him, alongside what became Urica, for the gout and malaria.
It was a long road. You'll know the principle I've shared, one month of healing for every year the symptoms have been present. Thankfully he proved that wrong again.
As it turned out, like many soldiers of his generation, Dad had been given trial medications in the army during the 1950s, men quietly encouraged to volunteer. He'd also had dengue fever and malaria, sustained multiple injuries, and being the man of his era that he was, had simply pushed through all of it. Sickness wasn't something you acknowledged.
Then one day, we were both called into the GP's surgery to look at something โimpossible'. The doctor was beside himself. He placed two x-rays side by side and asked me to look closely. I asked if he'd mixed them up. He hadnโt; both carried my father's name, just different dates.
The first showed barely any spinal tissue at all; what appeared to be soft, indistinct matter where bone should have been. The second showed a fully formed spinal column. The only anomaly: slight thinning of a few discs, the result of falls from height; he was a builder, and had come down badly more times than I care to count, the worst a twenty-five-foot drop onto his tailbone mid-stride, trying to stay upright.
"This simply cannot happen. Bones do not regrow like this.โ But he wasn't dismissing it, he was elated. Dad's malaria had gone completely. After thirty years of regular attacks, not another one for the rest of his life. His heart remained weakened but was measurably stronger than before. He was working as hard as ever, and still bodybuilding.
From the day he first walked into that naturopath's clinic, having been given a matter of years to live, he went on to pass away thirty-four years later, aged ninety, working a physical job right up to and including the day he passed. He had an extensive kit set up on his kitchen shelf along with his daily supplements, and a stack of both medical and natural health text books for reference and reading. By the end of his life I would say he knew as much about health as I did.
I would argue that without his constant challenges, both with health and to my thinking, I would never have come close to where I have reached in my work. Knowledge seemed to arrive effortlessly for him; he possessed what one might call an eidetic memory (photographic), recalling details with remarkable clarity, while I had to labour diligently for every fragment of mine. Yet it was precisely those questions and quiet tests, that shaped the path. I sense his presence with me every single day. ๐