The Intersection of Homeopathic Care and Implicit Bias in Modern-day Case Receiving
By AnnMarie Rian, LM/CPM, Classical/Neoclassical Homeopathic Practitioner
Homeopathic medicine has the capacity to be a transformative healing force for the 21st century and beyond. Offering individualized care, understanding that illness stems from a dynamic or spiritual disturbance, employing careful evaluation of the totality of symptoms with a principle for swift and gentle return to health, possessing the potential for decentralized and low-cost medicines and care, working toward complete healing rather than a suppression of symptoms — this system of medicine has much to offer.
However, at present, the use of homeopathy in the United States remains limited in its scope and outreach. Approximately 2% of the US population accesses homeopathic care, with the majority of users being white, female, and highly educated.1 The demographics of practitioners mirror this pattern.1,2,3 While external factors such as the dominance of western allopathic medicine and a lack of visibility play important roles in this limitation, there are also internal self-limiting factors, including the presence of implicit bias. The following piece examines the presence and impact of implicit bias on the practice and education of homeopathy in the United States. Can homeopaths truly be the Unprejudiced Observer when internal implicit belief systems remain unexamined and unchallenged?
The seeds of this conversation lie in our collective past, present, and future. In addition to completing homeopathic studies and beginning my own classical and neoclassical homeopathic practice, I am a licensed and certified professional midwife of 19 years with a passion for building a more just and equitable system of health care. I am a midwifery teacher and mentor focused on growing a more diverse community of midwives. I have witnessed the impacts of implicit bias in the field of midwifery and notice similar patterns in the practice of homeopathy. I invite self-reflective conversation to foster collaboration and collective growth.
Implicit bias is defined by the American Psychological Association as “a negative attitude, of which one is not consciously aware, against a specific social group. Implicit bias is thought to be shaped by experience and based on learned associations between particular qualities and social categories, including race and gender. Individuals’ perceptions and behaviors can be influenced by the implicit biases they hold, even if they are unaware that they hold such biases. Implicit bias is an aspect of implicit social cognition: the phenomenon that perceptions, attitudes, and stereotypes can operate prior to conscious intention or endorsement.”4
Well-known frameworks for implicit bias include the centering and elevation of whiteness, male sex and masculinity, heterosexuality, class, and Judeo-Christian belief structures; other common dimensions include physical ability, power and authority, wealth, thinness, and education level. Unsurprisingly, many people hold an implicit bias in favor of allopathic medicine. Discussion of bias in this article involves terms such as racism, white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia, as well as the acronyms BIPOC and LGBTQIA. For readers who are unfamiliar: BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color — a term that centers communities most impacted by systemic racism while acknowledging the distinct histories of Black and Indigenous peoples. LGBTQIA stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual/Aromantic. Both terms are used in their established social justice and healthcare equity contexts. If these frameworks are new, the resources listed in the final section offer accessible entry points.
While explicit bias is conscious and actively expressed, implicit bias shapes behavior without deliberate intent. These unconscious patterns often lead to negative interactions with the person viewed through a biased lens; within racial contexts, this is known as aversive racism.5 Examples include holding purses or wallets closer when seeing a person of color; altering speech patterns or remarking to a BIPOC person that they are “so well spoken”; underestimating the capabilities of people with physical or mental disabilities; assuming a person with gender dysphoria is mentally ill; bypassing job, school, and rental applications based on the applicant’s name; identifying and punishing “bad behaviors” in Black children as compared to their peers; and failing to recognize or adequately treat pain in Black and Indigenous people, particularly in hospital settings. These patterns are well established in research, individual testimony, and personal experience, and have been assessed at scale through the Implicit Associations Test, developed at Harvard by Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz.5,6
Many homeopathic practitioners point to §6 as evidence that bias cannot exist in homeopathy. The mere existence of this directive does not erase lifetimes of internalized bias. Colonial exploitation, white supremacy, homophobia, and sexism are parts of our shared and inherited national history.2,3,7,8,9,5,10,6 Countless scholars and authors have offered both evidence and frameworks for addressing this; BIPOC, LGBTQIA, female, and disabled individuals offer personal testimonies in formal and interpersonal forums. The existence and impacts of implicit bias within systems of care are well established in research, literature, and communities seeking social justice and collective liberation. The evidence is substantial: a 2017 systematic review found implicit bias present across healthcare professions in proportion with the general population and linked this to disparities in health outcomes.11 A search of PubMed for the impacts of implicit bias in healthcare clarifies this further.
The nature of implicit bias rests in its pervasiveness and invisibility. Ask any medical doctor whether bias plays a part in their decision-making, prescriptions, care, or outcomes. On an individual level, the answer reflects genuine internal belief: no, of course not. The Hippocratic oath is, after all, to first do no harm. Yet research and data reiterate what BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and female patients report from their lived experience: implicit bias is pervasive within healthcare systems and among individual providers, and it negatively impacts health outcomes. Health outcomes improve markedly when individual providers and institutions acknowledge implicit bias and actively collaborate to address it, and when patients are cared for by providers who reflect their lived experience. To state it plainly: the existence of more BIPOC, LGBTQIA, differently abled, and female medical providers improves health outcomes for BIPOC, LGBTQIA, differently abled, and female patients. Individual development of awareness around implicit bias likewise improves care and outcomes.12
Consider the teachings of §§3–5, leading up to §6. §§3–5 propose the framework for what is needed to accurately provide the cure:
Perceiving the disease
Understanding the corresponding medicine
Perceiving the underlying cause
Understanding the person before you
§6: “[The Unprejudiced Observer] sees in any given case of disease only the disturbances of body and soul which are perceptible to the senses: subjective symptoms, incidental symptoms, objective symptoms, i.e., deviations from the former healthy condition of the individual now sick which the patient personally feels, which people around him notice, which the physician sees in him.” (Emphasis added.)13
Implicit bias can impact each step toward fully embodying the role of the Unprejudiced Observer. If implicit bias impairs the practitioner’s ability to accurately see, understand, and treat the person before them, or if it leads to reenacting the harms that may underlie the presenting cause, how can the practitioner be unprejudiced? How can a client seek healing in that space? Consider each element within the context of race.
Perceiving the disease: The client describes their suffering, and the practitioner determines what needs to be healed. The disease state manifests as hypertension. Yet this may not be the full picture. White practitioners are often less able to accurately hear and translate their client’s words when the client is not white. Clients are less likely to disclose candidly to a provider whom they perceive as unable to understand their lived experience. Is hypertension simply the safest and most accessible common ground? Can the provider accurately perceive the disease?
Perceiving the underlying cause: Care providers who do not directly experience the negative impacts of racism are likely to overlook those impacts. Acknowledging when an underlying cause is rooted in generational white supremacy, institutionalized and codified discrimination, and daily microaggressions is essential. American wellness culture places significant emphasis on personal responsibility, diet, and exercise while failing to acknowledge that access to “self-improvement” through diet and exercise is not equitable. Wellness culture also fails to understand that modifications to diet, exercise, wealth, or education are insufficient to counteract the negative health impacts of racism. This misses fundamental exciting causes while reinforcing prejudices underlying the entire interaction.
Understanding the corresponding medicine: Once the totality of symptoms has been assessed, consider the medicines themselves. Much of current materia medica and established rubrics are written in old Eurocentric language, rooted in provings conducted on limited populations. Deeper source information on remedies is commonly overlooked. For example, Thea sinensis not only embodies British tea culture; it also encompasses the history of colonialism, occupation, and violent possession of other peoples by the British Empire. Alternatively, consider Hering’s proving of Psorinum — a nosode collected from pustules on a “young and otherwise healthy negro” in Surinam in 1831, at a time when 91% of persons of African heritage in Dutch Surinam were enslaved, with the majority of the remainder living in enclaves with others who had escaped enslavement.14 Given this context, it is very likely the person from whom the specimen was obtained was enslaved or had been. How can the willingness to enslave another human being be absent from this remedy’s picture and action? Add to this the primary crop grown by enslaved people was sugar cane — and yet this dimension of Saccharum album is rarely considered as contributing to the nature of that medicine. These aspects could be informing and deepening our use of these remedies.
Understanding the person before you: This involves perception and translation; accurately understanding the client, their suffering, and the underlying cause without allowing bias to intervene. It requires a relationship of trust and an environment that facilitates safe disclosure, where clients can be and feel seen for who they are, with acknowledgment of the reality of the shared lived environment. Once those conditions are established, the practitioner must accurately evaluate medicines through materia medica and rubrics, both of which carry their own limitations and embedded assumptions, and are as expansive or as constrained as the people who completed the provings and writings. Without comprehensive context, and with limited understanding of the disease and its underlying causes, the practitioner is likely to misperceive the disease, overlook the exciting cause, select remedies rooted in their own internalized perceptions, and ultimately misunderstand the person before them.
There is an oft-held belief among complementary and alternative health practitioners that holistic care is inherently exempt from these challenges — the nature of the care itself is sufficient to transcend the impacts of implicit bias and internalized systems of supremacy and oppression. As a community-based midwife, I experienced how a majority-white population of skilled and well-meaning providers determined midwifery care was the answer to the problem of extreme disparity in neonatal and maternal outcomes for Black pregnant people and babies, without examining or acknowledging internalized systems of oppression. The desire to provide care did not lead to increased access, improved outcomes, or entry into communities where there was little basis for a trusting relationship. A strong call emerged to train more midwives of color, and to individually and collectively examine assumptions, reactions, and beliefs. Harmful impacts on clients and students stemming from implicit bias were explicitly named. We, as white midwives, were called to see our foundational history honestly — including places where we were complicit, refused to see our role, or speak truth to power. We were called to follow leadership and listen to BIPOC and LGBTQIA families and midwives, to believe colleagues’ and clients’ experiences over our own feelings, and to change our behaviors. It is a challenging, ongoing process and it is important — growing the population of BIPOC and queer midwives and increasing access to competent care for families safely, effectively, and affordably.
While community midwifery is my personal example, the impacts of implicit bias resonate throughout all systems of healthcare so long as they exist within the dominant social framework. Internalized systems of oppression impact allopathic and holistic healthcare alike. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel state it succinctly, and unflinchingly:
Holistic medicine would be a good thing if it did what it promised. But absent an analysis of power and a historical perspective on colonial cosmology, it is shallow. Holistic physicians extol the importance of the gut and soil microbiomes while insisting that white supremacy is “outside their field.” They celebrate regenerative agriculture without contending with land theft or the ongoing genocide of Indigenous people. They counsel immune self-defense without worrying about police violence. Blind to power, holism in medicine has its limits — because to practice it fully would be to indict the invariably white physician in sandals peddling Indigenous knowledge and the wisdom of the East. Truly holistic health must contend with the elements that continue to make all people unwell, locating the disease-causing entities in social structures and the grave misunderstandings that created them. We must reimagine our wellness collectively, not simply as individuals or communities but in relation to all the entities that support the possibility of healthy lives. These relationships, precisely because they are vital for health, are worthy of our care.15
This resonates with §77 of the Organon, in which Hahnemann identifies the persistent exciting cause maintained by ongoing external conditions as an obstacle to cure.16,13. One might argue these social and emotional conditions are the damp cellar of our day.
How do we, the current community of homeopaths, educators, and students, assess ourselves individually and organizationally? How do we create conversation that shifts focus away from blame and shame without allowing people to bypass the important work of introspection and evaluation?
It is absolutely possible and important to care for a diverse client base; it is equally imperative to become competent and conscious of your own abilities in doing so.
Learn about systemic and internal biases. Find support and accountability partners. Resources for self-evaluation and learning about systems of oppression are plentiful and widely accessible. Look in your community for book groups, racial literacy gatherings, reproductive justice and health equity advocacy organizations, and cultural competency trainings for health care providers. Deepening Humanity in Homeopathy brings together homeopaths passionate about working for collective justice; their website18 maintains an excellent list of resources. Find a trusted colleague or friend you can learn alongside as you grow and change.
Start Small: Noticing What Arises in Your Own Practice
When caring for people who do not share your lived experience and background, notice what arises during the course of care. Who remains in care? Who leaves? Which of your clients are moving or healing? Is your space welcoming? Examine honestly what enhances and detracts from relationships. Acknowledge your role in this dynamic; re-examine how internal beliefs and biases may be shaping relationships.
When the practitioner cannot see clearly, case receiving cannot be completed. When the client does not feel seen, safe, or heard, the case will not be clear.
When evaluating: create space for another’s narrative to take precedence. Step back from defensiveness and righteousness. Bring your reflections to your accountability partner and accept feedback.
Wider and Longer-Term Community Work
Longer-term community work is also essential to the growth, efficacy, and survival of homeopathy. The following represents a compilation of suggestions, hopes, and aspirations for future work and deeper understanding:
Revisiting materia medica — taking medicines beyond their Eurocentric and patriarchal origins through new provings and client- and community-led evaluations
Revisiting the repertory — expanding the language of the repertory to reflect modern experiences and a multicultural landscape
Actively growing more practitioners from diverse communities. The importance of shared lived experience between provider and patient is expressed consistently and powerfully. This does not propose the segregation of care; it calls for a broader base of diverse practitioners, with particular attention to BIPOC representation.
Examining practitioner, teacher, and student demographics closely. Available data suggest the current body of practice and education remains majority white, female, heterosexual, and highly educated, with Black and Indigenous people significantly underrepresented.17 Are schools attracting, retaining, and graduating BIPOC homeopaths? Are exit interviews available to provide valuable feedback on the student experience?
Examining educational curricula and settings to assess whether schools are addressing implicit bias, committing to identify and dismantle barriers, and addressing racism, sexism, and homophobia in the educational process
Together, begin to ask better questions and listen deeply to the answers.
It is past time for a deep and searching investigation into how implicit bias impacts the practice of homeopathy and the education of homeopaths, to recognize that belief in §6 is not sufficient; that implicit bias may function as an obstacle to cure. This requires individual introspection. Above all, it invites conversation and a re-imagining of what homeopathy can become. Working together through personal and collective growth, we can transform the landscape of healing, and individual and collective experiences of health.
This conversation can be activating, bringing up strong feelings. If you find yourself reacting, sit with it; write it down; notice what is arising in your body. Ask yourself why. Then ask a friend or colleague: what did you feel? Why? And most importantly, how can we work together toward collective growth, transformation, and liberation as homeopathic practitioners, teachers, and human beings?
I am not the most qualified person in the room to facilitate this conversation. I amplify the abundant and growing bodies of work of Black and Indigenous teachers: from the fiction of Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, and Ana Castillo, to the works of James Baldwin, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Prentis Hemphill, adrienne maree brown, and many others. Other homeopathic practitioners have also written thoughtfully on this topic.2,7 I invite each of us to engage in conversation, even when discomfort or disagreement arises, with a willingness to listen, speak vulnerably, learn, and receive hard truths. You do not need to be the most qualified person in the room to begin; simply start listening, reflecting, and then talking. Begin with yourself, bring it to a friend, then bring it to community.
References
1. Dossett ML, Yeh GY. Homeopathy use in the United States and implications for public health: a review. Homeopathy. 2018;107(1):3–9. doi:10.1055/s-0037-1609016
2. Maher P. Considering racialized trauma in homeopathic healing. Am Homeopath. 2024;30:24–25.
3. Mawhinney J. ‘Giving up the ghost’: disrupting the (re)production of white privilege in anti-racist pedagogy and organizational change [master’s thesis]. Toronto, ON: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; 1998.
4. American Psychological Association. Implicit bias. APA Psychology Topics. https://www.apa.org/topics/implicit-bias. Accessed February 5, 2026.
5. Miller J, Garran AM. Racism in the United States: Implications for the Helping Professions. New York, NY: Springer Publishing; 2017:126-128.
6. Project Implicit. Resources. https://www.projectimplicit.net/resources/. Accessed February 27, 2026.
7. Merrill L. Choosing consciousness and remedying injustice: radical reflection and following action to engender optimal and equitable health outcomes. 2019. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6349a82da575491d5e616437/t/66b697ae7fb3fc0e0ce9ab3b/1723242414851/CHOOSING+CONSCIOUSNESS+AND+REMEDYING+INJUSTICE+copy.pdf. Accessed November 20, 2025.
8. Tuck E, Yang KW. Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity Educ Soc. 2012;1(1):1–40.
9. Brown AM. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Oakland, CA: AK Press; 2017.
10. Dolan E. Large-scale analysis confirms Black students disproportionately punished in schools. PsyPost. March 13, 2025. https://www.psypost.org/large-scale-analysis-confirms-black-students-disproportionately-punished-in-schools/. Accessed February 26, 2026.
11. FitzGerald C, Hurst S. Implicit bias in healthcare professionals: a systematic review. BMC Med Ethics. 2017;18:19. doi:10.1186/s12910-017-0179-8
12. Greenwood BN, Hardeman RR, Huang L, Sojourner A. Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020;117(35):21194–21200. doi:10.1073/pnas.1913405117
13. Hahnemann S. Organon of the Medical Art. 6th ed. Decker S, trans; O’Reilly WB, ed. Redmond, WA: Birdcage Books; 1996:60-63, 123.
14. Hoefte R. Free Blacks and coloureds in plantation Suriname: the struggle to rise. Slavery Abolition. 1996;17(1):102–129. doi:10.1080/01440399608575178
15. Marya R, Patel R. Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2021:336–337.
16. Hahnemann S. Organon of Medicine. Los Angeles, CA: Tarcher; 1982: 7, 46.
17. Luketic C, Pracjek P, Gray A, Straiges D. Future homeopaths: the North American homeopathy student educational survey. Am Homeopath. 2024;30.
18. Deepening Humanity in Homeopathy. https://www.humanityinhomeopathy.com/. Accessed November 10, 2025.
Bibliographies and Further Reading
Harris M. History and significance of the emic/etic distinction. Annu Rev Anthropol. 1976;5:329–350.
Shippee TP, Schafer MH, Ferraro KF. Beyond the barriers: racial discrimination and use of complementary and alternative medicine among Black Americans. Soc Sci Med. 2012;74(8):1155–1162. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.01.003
Brown AM. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Oakland, CA: AK Press; 2017.
Corbett S, Fikkert B. When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers; 2014.
Crosley-Corcoran G. Explaining white privilege to a broke white person. HuffPost. May 8, 2014. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person_b_5269255.
Elephant Circle. https://www.elephantcircle.net/.
Hemphill P. What It Takes to Heal. New York, NY: Random House; 2024.
Kaishian PO. Forest Euphoria. New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau; 2025.
Le Guin UK. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. London: Ignota Books; 1986.
McIntosh P. White privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom Mag. 1989;49(2):10–12.
DeWolf TN. Little Book of Restorative Justice and Racial Healing. New York, NY: Good Books; 2018.
Bio:
AnnMarie is a Certified Professional Midwife and a classical and neoclassical homeopathic practitioner. AnnMarie encountered homeopathy during studies of eclectic herbalism, and was gifted to train with mentor midwives versed in homeopathy. She has used acute homeopathic care with resounding success in caring for pregnant and postpartum people, including lactation and newborn care, over the past 20 years. She completed her training at the Prometheus Homeopathic Institute, where she received supervised clinical experience in the Magni-PHI teaching clinic, and individual case work under mentorship. She now supports individuals and families through individualized homeopathic care rooted in classical principles.