This is from a series I wrote when I was blogging as a homeopathic health coach. It is basic information that I wanted to leave available for free but may not pertain to my most recent blogging venture :).
Understanding dosing will help you be successful in providing relief from minor ailments at home.
Dosing How-to
One dose of a remedy is always 1-2 pellets regardless of age, weight, and if you’re pregnant or nursing. (Please note that homeopathy is not approved by the FDA for use in pregnancy.)
The only difference that I do accommodate for is for very sensitive people. This includes people who are simply sensitive to everything, the elderly, or babies age 6 months and younger. This accommodation, however, only changes the potency, not the number of pellets.
1-2 pellets is always sufficient, but more than that does not increase the “amount” you are getting. In homeopathy if you want more medicine you dose more often, not with more pellets.
When you purchase remedies, they can come as hard or soft pellets and the size can be anywhere from a poppy seed to BB size. Regardless of the size or texture (and regardless of what the label says), the dose for remedies is always the same. Dosing for cell salts, however, is not the same as dosing remedies, so you can follow the label instructions for cell salts.
Taking pellets right out of the vial and sucking or chewing on them is called taking the remedy “dry”. You can also take a few pellets and put them in a glass dropper bottle and add chlorine-free water to the dropper bottle. This is called "wet" dosing and one dropper-full equals one dose. You have to store this bottle in the fridge or put a couple droppers of vodka or Everclear in the water to keep it from getting gross. BUT this greatly extends the life of your pellets. Remember to always, always, sanitize the bottles when you’re done so you don’t accidentally mix remedies!
Another thing you can try is wearing a remedy. It is a much slower and gentler process than taking them. You can put the whole bottle in your pocket or put a few pellets in a small envelope in your pocket. Because the remedies work even when you’re wearing them, try not to keep a remedy in your pocket for too long that you don’t need. You might start to experience symptoms from that remedy (a proving)!
You can also buy cute little pouches on Etsy to put remedies in while you wear them. Some of them even have an EMF protection layer that you could use to put remedies in while you travel. Carrying remedies in a bag with EMF protection should also protect you from the remedies inside if you don’t want them acting on you while you carry them around, plus it should also protect the remedies from your phone if you want to carry both your remedies and your phone in your purse.
Dosing Tips
Remember that 1-2 pellets is all that is needed and that if you get more, that’s okay too. To take a remedy, start by putting some pellets into the lid of the vial.
For plastic vials, you usually have to twist the lid while holding it upside down. Twist it enough times to get 1-2 pellets out.
With the glass vials, you just tap the pellets into the lid. If you touch a pellet or it falls out, do not put it back in the vial to make sure you don’t contaminate the whole thing. If the pellets only touch the lid, it’s okay to dump them back in and try again.
When deciding how often to dose, I like to remember the Rule of 3s. Pick your remedy, take up to 3 pellets, up to 3 times, spacing the doses 30 minutes to 3 hours apart. After every dose, re-examine how you feel or how your loved one looks and acts. If there is any improvement, wait until the positive effects start to wear off -- about 30 minutes to 3 hours -- and dose again. If there is no improvement, try 2 more doses (for a total of 3) before picking a new remedy to try.
If, after 3 doses, the remedy only helps a little, you can decide if you'll continue with the same one or try another remedy. If the remedy helps, continue dosing until you forget about your ailment or until symptoms are very much better. If at any time your symptoms change, then you need to change the remedy to match your symptoms.
Can I Dose too Much?
Of course, this is a somewhat complicated question. You can definitely take a remedy too many times. If you are finding relief and seeing steady improvement, there is no cause for concern.
If you don't actually need the remedy you're dosing -- you can know this by observing no improvement in symptoms -- you can easily take too many doses. This typically results in a proving, which we'll talk about in post 6 of this series.
However, there is this interesting thing that happens when you dose more often. The remedy may actually "cancel out" its own aggravations by dosing more often. I think this is why Banerji protocols tend to work so well. When you dose high potencies consistently, often twice a day, the second dose of the day will often calm down any aggravations of the first dose of the day.
This is also true in acute situations. If you pick a remedy that causes an aggravation, often administering another dose will speed up the recovery process and appear to have a calming effect on the initial aggravation. This takes some courage to try in the moment, but it's worth a shot.
The problem with "over-dosing" comes when you continue to dose a remedy that is showing no changes or improvements. The whole point in homeopathy is to observe reactions to the remedy. If you ignore your or your loved one's body's responses, you are more likely to go wrong with dosing. If you simply observe and use a little common sense, dosing is really quite simple.
Next post in series: What is a Proving?
Back to Homeopathy 101.