Restoring Harmony: The 100th Faculty of Homeopathy Congress
Dr Minha shared her insights on integrative medicine and collaborative care at the 100th Faculty of Homeopathy Congress in Edinburgh, 2024.
In November 2024, Dr Minha joined clinicians and researchers from around the world at the 100th Faculty of Homeopathy Congress, held from 21 to 24 November 2024 at Surgeons’ Quarter, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh’s venue in the heart of the city, under the theme “Homeopathy: Integrative Medicine for a Sustainable Future.” It was a landmark 100th congress for the Faculty of Homeopathy, an organisation whose roots reach back to 1844 and whose patron today is His Majesty King Charles III.
Dr Minha spoke to her own territory: integrative medicine and collaborative care. It is territory she knows from the inside – a registered osteopath and naturopath who trained on into occupational and disability medicine, an NIHR academic clinical fellow in rheumatology and pain, and today Medical Director at Cambridge’s NNEdPro Global Centre for Nutrition and Health and chair of an International Commission on Occupational Health scientific committee. It is a field shaped by a conviction that runs through all her work: that conventional medicine works best when it is joined up – when clinical nutrition, lifestyle and whole-person care sit alongside standard treatment, and when clinicians collaborate across disciplines rather than working in silos.
She gave the talk the title “Restoring Harmony” – a phrase that draws on salutogenesis, a framework she has returned to elsewhere in her work. Developed by the medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky, salutogenesis turns the usual question on its head: where conventional, pathogenic medicine asks what makes people ill, it asks what actively keeps them well. In Antonovsky’s model that turns on a person’s “sense of coherence” – the sense that life is comprehensible, manageable and meaningful – and on their “general resistance resources,” the assets that help them cope, reframing the clinician’s task from fighting sickness toward building health.
It is the same conviction that shapes every consultation at Curaidh Clinic: that taking complex, chronic and often-overlooked conditions seriously means treating the whole person, in the whole context of their life, and working alongside colleagues rather than in competition with them.
The congress had its warmer, human side too. Dr Minha wore her one-of-a-kind “Scottish sari” – an Indian silk sari paired with a tartan blouse, a garment that carries her whole story in a single length of cloth: Indian heritage and Scottish home woven together. There was a neat symmetry to it – a congress built around integration, and a doctor whose own life is a study in integration. It is the same Scottish sari she has worn to other milestones, including the Independent Doctors Federation’s President’s Dinner and Ceilidh.
