When Amy Lansky’s son Max was three years old and showing signs of autism, she had no idea that a magazine article would change everything. A researcher with a doctorate in computer science and a career spanning SRI International, NASA, and Stanford, Amy was, by her own account, completely allopathic. But a three-page piece in Mothering Magazine about homeopathy for ADD stopped her in her tracks. As she told me in this very first episode of Homeopathy Hangout, it was less a rational decision than an overwhelming sense of knowing: “I said, this is it.”
That instinct led her to a homeopath who had just set up his first practice in her area. Max was one of his earliest patients. Within less than a week of receiving his first remedy in LM potencies, changes were already appearing. His speech and language therapist, one of the most respected in Palo Alto, was so struck by what she witnessed that she invited Amy and the homeopath to speak at her clinic.
Max is now 30 years old. He studied at USC Film School, has worked as a motion graphics artist in Los Angeles, and is currently pursuing acting. A recent collaborator on a short film told him he is ready to get an agent. Amy describes him as extremely social, very handsome, and someone you would never guess had once been diagnosed with autism.
He does remember his childhood. He remembers a profound frustration at not being able to communicate what he was trying to say. And as an adult, he has had to work through a sense that his condition was somehow a burden to his family. Amy’s response to that: “If it wasn’t for what happened, you gave a gift to the world and our family.”
Amy is careful to note that she is not a practitioner and does not consult or charge for the guidance she offers. What she does do is respond personally to the emails she receives from parents around the world, because she sees it as her thank-you to the universe.
Her first and most important observation is that the situation today is harder than it was when Max was young. Children are dealing with far more environmental stressors, and their cases are more complex. Patience, she says, is essential.
Beyond homeopathy, a few things made a meaningful difference in Max’s early years:
Amy also emphasises the psychological dimension for parents: “I think it’s really important that parents not go into despair, that they have a vision that their kid can get better, and yet at the same time, accept the way their kids are.” Holding both of those things at once is difficult, but she believes it matters.
Because homeopathy is so widely misunderstood, Amy has developed a way of explaining it that sidesteps the usual confusion. In the United States, she notes, people use the word “homeopathy” to mean all alternative medicine, which creates immediate misunderstanding. Her first step is always to clarify: homeopathy refers specifically to those small white pills in the little tubes at the health food store. It is not herbal medicine, not supplements, not diet.
Her favourite way to explain the law of similars uses coffee rather than the more common onion example. Coffee makes you alert, speeds your thoughts, can cause heart palpitations and loose bowels. Those are its symptoms. Now imagine someone with insomnia after a joyful, overstimulating evening: racing mind, elevated mood, heart beating fast. That picture of insomnia matches the picture of coffee. A remedy made from coffee, taken in highly dilute form, can help that person sleep, not by adding more stimulation, but by giving the body an energetic signal that matches its stuck state and prompting it to shift. A different kind of insomnia, say, waking at 3am worrying about work, would call for a completely different remedy. The match has to be precise.
Amy dedicates a significant portion of Impossible Cure to the science of homeopathy, and she walked through several of the leading theories in our conversation.
On the question of nanoparticles, Amy is thoughtful. While she acknowledges that research is progressing in this direction, she personally prefers to think of the action at an energetic rather than a material level. She points to the work of Jacques Benveniste, who found that highly diluted and succussed substances produce a vibrational signal that can be recorded electronically and even transmitted via email and played back into water thousands of miles away, with the same effect. Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize for establishing the link between HIV and AIDS, also became interested in this area of research. Both scientists faced significant resistance, including the loss of funding, which Amy connects to the existential threat that a fully accepted theory of potentisation would pose to the pharmaceutical industry.
After finishing Impossible Cure, Amy continued her explorations and eventually wrote a second book, Active Consciousness, published in 2011. A central theme is synchronicity, a concept developed by Carl Jung to describe the tendency of things with similar meaning to co-occur in time and space.
Amy sees a deep connection between synchronicity and homeopathy. She draws on the work of Christopher Whitmont, a student of Jung who was also a homeopath, whose son Ron Whitmont is a prominent homeopath and physician in the United States today. Whitmont connected the law of similars to Jungian synchronicity: the remedy carries a vibration similar to the patient’s state, and bringing those two together intentionally produces healing. In Amy’s framing, homeopathy might be understood as therapeutic synchronicity: rather than waiting for meaningful coincidences to arise naturally, the homeopath orchestrates them.
This is something I see reflected in my own practice regularly. A client will say something in passing that corresponds precisely to the remedy I am already considering. Or, as in one case I shared with Amy during our conversation, a woman arrived for her first appointment, I decided to prescribe the blue morpho butterfly remedy, and when I told her, she pulled up her sleeve to reveal a blue butterfly tattooed on her arm. Amy’s response was immediate: she has that tattoo because it was healing to her in some way. That is synchronicity at work.
Amy is clear that Impossible Cure is not a how-to guide. It does not tell you which remedy to take for which condition. What it does, and why it is used as a prescribed textbook at homeopathic colleges around the world, is give readers a thorough grounding in everything else: the history of homeopathy, the philosophy of health and disease that underpins it, the science, how to prepare for appointments with a homeopath, and why homeopathy’s view of illness is so fundamentally different from conventional medicine’s.
That philosophical difference is significant. Conventional medicine often suppresses symptoms. Homeopathy holds that suppression drives disease deeper. Understanding that distinction, Amy says, helps patients become far more effective participants in their own healing. She has heard from many homeopaths that they ask their patients to read the book before or during treatment for exactly this reason.
Amy is currently working on a third book, with a first draft already written.
The easiest starting point is amylansky.com, which hosts her blog and links to both book sites. impossiblecure.com includes resources specifically for autism families, as well as several years of radio programmes Amy has recorded on homeopathy. Her second book can be found at activeconsciousness.com.
This conversation was the very first episode of Homeopathy Hangout, and there could not have been a better guest to open with. Amy’s story is a reminder that the most profound shifts in perspective often begin not with a scientific paper, but with a mother lying in bed reading a magazine article and knowing, with complete certainty, that this is it.
Subscribe to Homeopathy Hangout:
Apple PodcastsYouTubePodbeanSpotifyAmazon MusiciHeartRadioPlayer FM
