Author: Claudia di Bisceglie
Date: 12 March 2026
2 minutes read
Let me tell you about my dad.
Sweet man. Great human, professionally ill.
Now, I don't mean he was actually sick — that's rather the point. I mean he had a particular lifestyle. He was a hypochondriac and he had a companion. A toiletry bag which he called The Green Necessaire.
The Green Necessaire went everywhere. Holidays, dinner parties, Christmas days — you name it, The Green Necessaire came. And inside? Oh. Inside. Medicine for everything. Headaches, backaches, stomach upset, possible stomach upset, theoretical stomach upset, allergies, fatigue, the vague feeling that something might not be quite right. If your body had a complaint — real, imagined, or merely suggested by the weather — my dad had something for it in that bag. And he was proud of this. The way some men are proud of a vintage wine collection or a perfectly maintained car, my dad was proud of his pharmaceutical arsenal.
But the real trophies were the black-label prescription medicines. It wasn't easy to get one of those.
I swear to you, when my dad came home from the doctor clutching one of those, his face lit up like he'd pulled the rare holographic card from a football (soccer) sticker pack. He would place it reverently on top of the sideboard in the lounge. And then he would show it to every single person who walked through the front door.
You might think I'm exaggerating. I am not — I know this because one year, at our family Secret Santa — the edition where you could only give funny presents — his brother gifted him a beautifully wrapped necessaire filled with empty boxes of black-label prescription medicines.
You might think he got offended. Not at all. He genuinely loved it and showed it to everyone too.
Now, sometime in the 90s. Bear with me, because this is my favorite story.
My dad had given me a brand-new computer. One of those early PCs. The kind where you'd connect to the internet, go make a cup of tea, drink it, do the dishes, sit back down, and still be waiting. But I was thrilled. I finally got a connection and called him over, buzzing with excitement.
In walks my dad.
"I can't go near the computer."
"...Why?"
"I've got a virus. And I heard that if the computer catches it, it might never work again."
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
He genuinely believed this. He stood at a safe distance from the monitor, concerned, probably wondering which of his many medicines might be appropriate for a sick Packard Bell. I half-expected him to open The Green Necessaire and start reading labels.
Years later, I decided to actually sit down with him and go through it — The Necessaire, the whole system, the logic behind it all. Partly out of curiosity. Partly because, honestly, he seemed fine, and I wanted to understand exactly what all this medication was treating.
So I asked.
And what he explained to me — without realizing he was handing me the philosophical cornerstone of my entire career — was this: he had a medicine for reflux. But that medicine gave him headaches and stomachaches, so he had medicine for those. And that medicine had its own side effects, so there was something for those too. And on it went, each medicine existing to manage the consequences of the one before it. I'm sure the story wasn't exactly like that and the medicines weren't only there to treat the side effects of the previous one. However, that is the part that stuck with me.
I sat with this for a moment and then asked, gently — in retrospect, probably not so gently: "Dad... wouldn't it be easier not to eat the food that causes the reflux?"
He looked at me as though I had said something faintly offensive.
Then I tried another angle. "What exactly is reflux?"
"Reflux is reflux."
"...Right. But what do you feel?"
"Pain. From the reflux."
"Yes, but — what kind of pain? Where? What does it feel like?"
"What do you mean, what does it feel like? Pain is pain. Don't you know what pain is?"
I later discovered from my mother that his doctor used to visibly brace himself whenever my dad came in for a consultation. Because asking him to describe his symptoms was an exercise in complete circularity. He would give you the name of the diagnosis. Not the sensation, not the location, not the quality, not the context — just the label. Reflux is reflux. Pain is pain. That's your lot.
And this, I realized, is not just my dad.
My dad was a hypochondriac — which is its own special category — but the thing he couldn't do? Most of us can't do it either. Most of us are profoundly disconnected from our own bodies. We know the name of what we've been told we have, or we panic because we google our symptoms and cancer comes up as a possibility. We do not know what our body is actually trying to tell us, where it started, what made it worse, what it's connected to, what layer came first.
We don't want to look that closely. Because doing so means taking responsibility. And taking responsibility might mean changing something — what we eat, how we sleep, how we live — and that feels like a lot more effort than a pill.
My dad didn't want to change anything. I don't even think he ever thought that his lifestyle could affect his health. He wanted a pill that would get rid of any discomfort he had. And then a pill for the side effects of the first pill. And then a pill for that.
He wasn't villainous. He was very, very human.
Here's what I learned from all of this — from The Green Necessaire, from the computer virus, from “pain is pain, don't you know what pain is?” — and what eventually led me to homeopathy:
The body doesn't become unbalanced overnight. It happens in layers, slowly, quietly, each adaptation building on the last as the system tries to compensate, regulate, hold things together. By the time symptoms appear loudly enough to be noticed, there is almost always a long story underneath them. A history of smaller imbalances that got buried, suppressed — or, in my dad's case, medicated into silence while new symptoms quietly took their place.
Homeopathy asks a different set of questions. Not just what it is called, but what it feels like. Not just where, but when, how, what makes it better, what makes it worse, what was happening in your life when this started. It believes in the body's inner power to restore balance. It does not ignore this power, but rather works with it. It wants the whole picture — emotional, mental, physical — because that is how you find the person inside the diagnosis, and how you find the remedy that matches them, not just their label.
It understands that healing takes time, because imbalance took time. That you peel the layers rather than suppress them. That the inner intelligence of the body — given the right support and enough space — has a remarkable capacity to find its way back to balance.
My dad, bless him, was waiting for a pill that would sort everything out without requiring anything of him at all.
I went the other way.
I think I have him to thank for that.
(The Green Necessaire, wherever it is now, would beg to differ. Actually — I might just call my mother and ask if she kept it. Because honestly? I think it deserves a spot on my sideboard.)
Curious whether homeopathy could be helpful for you?
If you have questions about your symptoms or would simply like to understand how I work, you're very welcome to book a free 15-minute conversation with me.
We can talk about what's been going on, answer any initial questions you may have, and see whether a homeopathic consultation feels like the right fit for you.
There's no commitment attached to this conversation.
