Many parents remember the days of infant eczema. Months of creams, mittens, restricted diets and washing everything in free-and-clear detergent. It finally clears, and then, often not long after, the wheezing starts. We learned how to use an inhaler and accepted the label of asthmatic. The doctor probably mentioned that some kids just “grow out of” skin issues and “into” respiratory ones, like it’s a coin flip.
It isn’t a coin flip. It is a progression, and there was even a name given for it in the early 2000s: the atopic march. Eczema, then food allergies, then asthma, then allergic rhinitis. Conventional medicine explains it as an underlying allergic tendency expressing itself differently at each stage of development. But long before that framework existed, Constantine Hering, MD offered a different explanation, in 1845: it isn’t a coincidence of biology so much as a disturbance that never actually resolved. It just moved. He called it “the law of order” in the preface to the classic homeopathic reference, Chronic Diseases.
A direction, not just a location
George Vithoulkas, a contemporary homeopath who’s spent decades refining this model, put it simply: “Signs and symptoms are useful phenomena, which are helping the organism to recover from a stressful state. They should not be interfered with unwisely.”
Your symptom isn’t the problem. It’s the body doing something. Interrupt it without addressing why it’s happening, and you only relocate it.
The skin is an organ of detoxification, and the least vital one we have. So when you shut down a rash without resolving what’s underneath it, whatever was trying to come out through the skin moves inward, toward the lungs. If that gets suppressed too, it moves again. Each move goes deeper into the system where elimination is harder.
Suppression is something that’s rarely talked about in conventional medicine. In its simplest form, it’s taking a pain reliever for an ache. You have no idea why the pain occurred; you just made it go away. You put tape over the “check engine” light.
Suppression runs the opposite way from healing.
Classical homeopathy has always treated the mental and emotional layer as more central than the physical one, which means when suppression pushes far enough, what surfaces isn’t a new rash or a new ache. It’s anxiety that wasn’t there before. Maybe brain fog, or occasional depression.
That’s usually the point someone ends up in my office. Labs come back normal. Nothing to name. And underneath it is a body that’s been asked to swallow some unfinished business for years, as the problem moves further and further from where it started.
If suppression pushes a disturbance from the skin toward the lungs toward wherever it is now, then treating today’s most visible complaint in isolation repeats the same mistake, just at a deeper level. The remedy has to work with the whole organism so the body can finally do what it was trying to do all along: move the disturbance back out, the way it came in.
That observation is what became known as Hering’s Law of Cure. Real healing doesn’t happen randomly. It moves in a direction: from the inside out, from more vital organs toward less vital ones, from the top of the body downward. And symptoms tend to disappear in the reverse order of how they first appeared, the most recent complaint first, the oldest one last.
Why getting better can briefly feel like getting worse
If Hering was right, then healing can occasionally look like backsliding. That old skin patch from childhood might flare once, mildly, on its way out for good. It isn’t a setback. It’s the oldest layer, finally finishing, and the body doing its housekeeping in the correct order.
This is why I often start with something that looks like not much. Before I ask the body to bring anything deeper back out, I need to know your drainage channels are open. Picture a houseplant that’s starting to yellow: you fertilize it, water it, set it in the sunshine, but if the pot has no drain holes, it drowns in its own waste. Sometimes opening those channels is most of the work. The plant was never short on care; it just had no ability to take out the trash.
I say this upfront because I don’t want anyone to panic partway through and assume the remedy failed. It’s usually the opposite. It’s proof the direction is right.
Your body was designed to heal. I’m just the tour guide, letting you know what to expect as we move forward.
If some of this sounds a little like your own history, let’s talk about your particular story and what it would take to finally let it finish.
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