Rabia Mayet | rabiamayet@radioislam.co.za

13 November 2024

4 minute read

Homeopathy is a holistic form of treatment that explores the aim of patients with regards to specific ailments, giving them all the solutions from a natural perspective to treat those conditions. A visit to a homeopath focuses on your presenting complaint which is the main issue that is bothering you; your general constitution like energy levels, bathrooms habits, sleep, perspiration, diet, lifestyle, and medical history; and the mental and emotional aspect of your personality such as the type of stress you’re under, your emotions, and how you respond to them. This gives the homeopath an overall view of a person’s health, allowing them to make up a treatment specifically suited to the patient.

Dr Zahra Kazi, a homeopath and sleep specialist, and specialist in endocrine disorders, hormonal health, and other female-related health conditions, says that “we’ve become more sedentary than ever before”. Alongside bad food practices and the environmental exposure to things like chemicals and plastics, this has led to an increase in health conditions and disruptions in hormone balances, thus causing sleep disorders.

Homeopathy functions on the premise that “no two people have the same life experiences” so each treatment plan is individualised to fit the patient. More and more people nowadays suffer from sleep disruptions and disorders. While health care practitioners prescribe sleep aids like anxiolytics or tranquilizers for people suffering from sleep disorders to allow the person to “shut down”, homeopathy addresses sleep issues at a much deeper level. These include looking at a patient’s sleep cycle, specifically when a person can’t sleep, if a person is having difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, at what intervals the person keeps waking at night, and the quality and quantity of their sleep.

Factors like lifestyle and stress are also taken into consideration, since stress and hormone imbalances affect a person’s sleep. Most people don’t see the connection between lack of sleep and an imbalance in their body. Progesterone and oestrogen hormonal imbalances in women can put a strain on the liver in the evening, and cause disruptions in a women’s sleep cycle particularly between 1:00am and 3:00am, or frequent waking with hot flushes at any time during the night. High stress causes an increase in cortisol production which leads to more restless sleep, with waking occurring between 2:00am and 4:00am. Peaks and dips in energy levels through the day will be monitored by the homeopath. In terms of insulin resistance, blood sugar should be balanced through the day to make you more insulin sensitive, so that your body goes back to the way it was before becoming insulin resistant.

Food and sleep are co-dependent, as what we consume impacts on our sleep. Going to bed after having eaten a big meal means that you haven’t given your body a chance to digest the food that you’ve eaten. Foods high in caffeine and sugar tend to disturb sleep. Spikes and drops in sugar levels further impact sleep, depending on what a person eats before they sleep.

So how much sleep do we need? Dr Zahra says that younger children and teenagers require between 8 and 10 hours of good quality sleep as they are still growing. Ideally, adults should also get 8 hours of sleep per night. However, where this is not attainable, sleep can be “banked”, with people catching up on sleep lost during the week on the weekends. The aim for patients is to get between 6 and 8 hours of sleep every night. As prescribed in the sunnah, power naps of 20 minutes in the early afternoon are ideal to enhance sleep.

Listen to the full interview on New Horizons with Faaiza Munshi.