What is Susceptibility?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a concept we use in homeopathy called susceptibility.

The basic gist is this: we all live in a dynamic environment that presents challenges constantly, from fluctuating temperatures to germs to work stress and other bad nasties. But only some of us respond with illness. For example, every time there is a big temperature change, my partner gets a cold. I am fine. Same environment with a completely different outcome.

Most of us think about this through the lens of the immune system, which we tend to picture as a sort of static, protective shield, like a castle wall that’s either strong or crumbling. But susceptibility points to something much more interesting and, honestly, much more useful. It points to the ways our highly dynamic, messy, deeply individual human selves are either in tune or out of tune with our environment at any given moment.

It reminds me of a little-known debate from the 19th century between two French scientists. You probably know Louis Pasteur. He invented pasteurization and championed germ theory. You may not know Antoine Béchamp.

Pasteur believed that pathogens—the germs, the fungi—were the ultimate enemy, and we had to wage war on them. Béchamp, on the other hand, argued that germs were basically just opportunists. They only caused disease if the host’s internal environment, their infrastructure, was already hospitable.

Anyway, I mention it because I recently had a client who was stuck in a frustrating loop with a horrifying case of athlete’s foot. They’d apply a topical anti-fungal cream and the symptom would retreat. And then, a few weeks later, it would come roaring right back.

In homeopathy, we try to be a bit more like Béchamp. Instead of waging more war on the foot, we found a homeopathic remedy that matched not just the peeling and the itching, but the entire systemic pattern of their life at that moment. We gave the body the precise energetic information it needed to self-correct.

And then something quite remarkable happened. My client messaged me shortly after:

“I don’t believe in miracles but this might have been one. I get horrifying athlete’s foot and this has been the worst. But literally within minutes of taking the remedy, my feet stopped itching!”

We’re not saying it’s magic. But we’re not not saying it.

I don’t really believe in miracles either. I just think it feels like magic because we’re so used to the slow, grinding friction of symptom management as trench warfare.

It makes me wonder how often we are treating our bodies like the enemy. We go through massive life transitions and then when our energy gets stuck we try to suppress.

If you are stuck in a similar loop, whether it’s recurring physical pain, terrible sleep, or something else, and you want to look at building your internal infrastructure, I’ve set up a really straightforward way for us to do that at ultradilute.com, to see if it's a good fit.