Why an italian doctor in Houston ends up choosing homeopathy?

I landed in Houston 4 years ago with my husband, 2 children, a degree in medicine and specialization in internal medicine, plus a licence to work as a physician.

There are many opportunities for anyone whishing to work in Houston in the medical research, and doctors from the world over are usually more than welcome to work in this area; but if what you really want is to work with patients and practice as a doctor, you have to pass the USMLE(US Medical License Examination): the dreaded exam any American doctor has to pass to be certified.
As you might have guessed USMLE is a huge task.
The process of doing the USMLE and passing the board for internal medicine seemed  to me overwhelming and pointless:
- Overwhelming because I was not sure how many years we would remain in the US and the preparation can require from 6 months to a year of study:
- Pointless because I had my doubts on why I should devote such an unbelievable amount of time and energy preparing for testing on things I knew already, and others which were not directly linked to exercise the medical profession.
All truth to be told, I did try! For six months I applied myself to study for this monster exam, but eventually could not pull it off: formulas, memo games to remember orders, and on top of it, the everpresent feeling of “it is not fair! - I had done all this already! I want to see patients, not books!”
So I looked for what I could do without the certification. I then probed every corner of the medical field, I tried hard and worked even in the research field. I did my bidding here and there, I left resumes on all the hospital's websites, obtained interviews through personal connections, but after 2 years of a useless research work in the medical field in one of the biggest medical center of the US, I felt I was at a dead end with my medical profession.
So how did homeopathy came into the radar?
There isn't one single answer to why I chose homeopathy (or better why homeopathy chose me ;-), as it was the result of a combination of circumstances and events that took place in close succession.
After my experiences both as a job-seeker and as a regular patient, I draw several conclusions.
My first conclusion: “One thing is clear, I will not be a doctor here!  What's more, I don't like the way the system works!".  Doctors nearly have no time to devote to their patients, they have to attend courses, insurance meetings, lessons about communication with nurses, chiefs, co-workers, huge paper trail... but the time to listen to you, the "Sick" is forever shrinking, as doctors are requirend to see more and more patients in a day.
The second conclusion: as a result of being "on the other side" more often than not and seeing things from a patient perspective (mine or through my children's experience), I had become very critical and my opinion on the medical profession as a whole was changing and quite radically.
The third conclusion: the inescapable fact that I could not work in the regular medical field pushed me to look elsewhere.
This is when a chain of events took place:
First I met a very good friend who has multiple sclerosis who was being treated by an homeopathic doctor and was doing fine enough to be asymptomatic while avoiding taking huge doses of steroids or immunosuppressant drugs. The fact that someone I knew well, with a seriuos disease and risk of  long-term complications like multiple sclerosis, refused regular treatment, and was able to live a good life in satisfactory conditions of health, was a shock to me: as a doctor I did not even think that was possible!
She told me to go seek medical advice for a disturbing cough I had while I was pregnant. In fact I did not want to go to the general practitioner or the specialist (allergologist).  I was sure they would identify allergies as the cause, therefore prescribing anti-histamine and/or steroids for the next months (incidentally this is what they told my husband who seeked advice for his chronic sinusitis), neither of these medications I had any intention of taking while my third baby was on the way.
I went to see Dr. Karl Robinson, the one who treated my friend with multiple sclerosis. Dr Robinson has been an homeopathic practitioner for the last 35 years, possibly one of the most experienced in the United States.
After treating me, seeing my interest in the way this discipline works, he proposed me to study homeopathy, and gave me the opportunity to shadow him in his regular practice, giving me extraordinary strength and learning opportunities.
Well, with homeopathy I discovered an entire new world. It's a highly rigorous system of treating patients, not diseases. It requires studies and long term applications, about 4 to 5 years and at least one year of practice with an homeopathic practitioner. What I like the most about homeoapthy is that it looks at the whole picture, which goes beyond the patient physical complaints and takes into account his mental state, how the illness interferes with his life, how he reacts to it. Homeopathy deals with the patient as a whole person, not seen as a collection of organs, it does not select or treat each organ individually depending on where the symptoms are pointing. When something goes wrong with a person, every part of the whole system is affected. Homeopathic medications seek to resolve the cause and not focus on the physical sypmtoms only.
Homeopathy requires, more than every other “classical” medical school, a constant self reflection, because to understand the patients in front of you, you need to have a deep knowledge of yourself. When you meet a patient for the first time, you need to undertake an extremely careful investigation and explore many sides of the patient's life, some of which are not even taken into account by the traditional medicine. It is a process of learning, and I suppose it goes on for the rest of your life.
So... Why did I choose homeopathy? Had I stayed back in Italy, I might have never stepped outside the beaten paths of medicine and I would have never questioned the world with a new curiosity and new attitude, but an unfathomable path of life and an unpredictable series of events lead me there where I feel there is true healing of the whole individual. After all, isn't this what being a doctor is all about?

Click here if you wish to check Dr Robinson website for more informations about homeopathy, as well as clinical cases and FAQ. Enjoy !!