Homepath Pat Deacon spoke to VankleekFM Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015 to talk about her training and experience in the practice of Homeopathy and why she and her husband moved to Vankleek Hill where she has opened her new homeopathy office.

Homeopath Pat Deacon sets up shop in Vankleek Hill

By Tara Kirkpatrick
(With permission of The Review)

VANKLEEK HILL – It feels like you are being welcomed into a close friend’s front parlour when you walk through the doors of 124 Main Street, East, in Vankleek Hill and into Pat Deacon’s new homeopathy office.

High-backed chairs are comfortably arranged around a tea service and are surrounded by bookshelves holding the thousands of tinctures used by Deacon in her treatments.

As open and inviting as the space she uses for consultations, Pat Deacon has a warm demeanor and she says that it is her philosophy that a homeopathy office should not be a “clinical kind of thing. When visitors come, we talk. It’s important to have an informal living-room setting to help make them more comfortable,” said Deacon, who has been a practicing homeopath for nearly 20 years.

In her own mission statement, Deacon refers to homeopathy as “a non-toxic form of medicine that draws on our innate healing capacity. A homeopath’s task is to match a person and his/her condition with an appropriate, individually selected homeopathic remedy.”

Remedies can be contrived from nearly any object, whether plant, mineral or animal based.

In order to best determine how to treat what ails you, Deacon first meets with patients for a two-hour initial consultation, during which time she will ask you questions on everything from your occupation, your health and exercise habits, to your in-depth medical history; both physical and psychological.

It is Deacon’s belief that the culmination of your life experiences will have a strong impact on your health.

For instance, Deacon pointed to the example of a woman who might enter her office complaining of migraines and reproductive issues. An initial diagnosis might be incomplete if the patient later reveals that she had been sexually assaulted, or suffered another traumatic injury.

“The homeopathic consultation itself can be a healing experience,” said Deacon, who said that treating patients can be a bit like peeling the layers off of an onion to discover what lies beneath.

Treatment is determined by matching the totality of your symptoms with an element that reflects these symptoms.

“It could be anything. It could be snake venom, a plant, the milk of an animal. It really could be anything,” said Deacon, who explained that the tinctures she uses, which are manufactured by a European pharmaceutical company, are non-toxic and reduced in potency from their original state.

“We take the tincture of the plant, which is no longer poisonous. All that’s left is like a memory of what was once there, but without the toxicity,” said Deacon.

Homeopaths draw on more than 5,000 elements for their remedies and each treatment represents the use of a single ingredient.

The remedies are in a liquid form and they are ingested by mixing them with water or sprinkling the remedy on a sugar pill for easy digestion.

“We continue to improve new remedies all the time,” said Deacon, noting that treatments are tested in a process similar to clinical trials, with blind testing and copious notes on the effects and symptoms of each element.

Deacon, who was born and raised in Lachute, Quebec, said that she was first drawn to homeopathy when she was living in British Columbia with her husband and raising their three children.

Deacon’s eldest son was just a young boy, when he began to suffer from a wide range of allergies that Deacon said seemed to defy conventional treatments.

“The conventional stuff seemed to make it worse and even the unconventional treatments weren’t helping. Homeopathy was the only thing that worked,” said Deacon.

Renowned homeopath Louis Klein treated Deacon’s son, who showed a nearly immediate improvement.

In addition to healing her eldest child, this treatment plan had a dramatic impact on Deacon, who went on to study homeopathy while living in England and opened a practice in England and later in British Columbia.

After moving to Vankleek Hill, Deacon said she made the decision to no longer travel across the country to visit her clients, but to instead draw on telecommunications devices so that she can perform consultations via Skype and FaceTime.

Patients who prefer the more direct approach can arrange to meet with Deacon at her Vankleek Hill office, by appointment. She can be reached by telephone at 613.676.2829 or via email at [email protected]