Ellen Kramer is the inspiration behind Melanie Dupres’s passion.

Both homeopaths, they met as volunteers in Ghana nearly 20 years ago.

To keep pace with demand, Ms Dupres was working long days, travelling thousands of miles between Accra and Kumasi and into the Volta Region of the West African country on behalf of the Ghana Homeopathy Project.

Fortunately, Ms Kramer was there to help.

“She saved my life, if I'm honest,” Ms Dupres said. “I became very, very ill when I was in Ghana and she helped me so much, supported me mentally and emotionally and then with remedies as well.”

Her illness was an expected outcome, according to Ms Kramer, who could see that “the volunteers were very, very stretched in the work that they were doing”.

“This was what wasn't working in the project. I could see that it was a disaster for the volunteers in the long run and that it really did take its toll on Mel, because she was travelling up and down; she was just going everywhere,” she said.

“Travelling in Ghana is very, very stressful. She wasn’t being taken care of. You need to take care of your volunteers, you need to make sure that their needs are met and that they're properly supervised. So I took over, supporting and supervising that. We had a lot of fun as well.”

The relationship stuck. Ms Kramer, a Ghanaian who lives in England, has continued to be supportive of the work Ms Dupres is doing to bring attention to homeopathy here. She is to visit Bermuda for the first time this month to see her friend’s work first-hand.

“The way I look at life is, how do I support homeopaths to get the results that they need with their patients? The patients are the healers; the remedies just enhance that natural healing process. So for me, supporting Mel is very, very important. I think Bermuda really should value her.”

Ms Dupres had been practising for about ten years before she joined the Ghana Homeopathy Project in 2008.

Ms Kramer, who has a house in Ghana, was invited into the scheme by its founder.

“She asked me about setting up the project. I didn't want to get involved. I'm a free spirit and free thinker, so I didn't want to be tied into the way they do things. They asked me to make an assessment of how they were doing, and my report wasn't actually that flattering so they didn't want to ever talk to me again,” Ms Kramer laughed.

What she did do was become part of an outreach clinic Ms Dupres was coincidentally involved in. The Bermudian became fascinated watching the impact Ms Kramer had on her patients.

“She was the only Black homeopath that I had ever met other than myself. So that, first of all, was enticing and, you know, mind-blowing. And then, she's just so dynamic about life and about her approach to health and homeopathy — and fearless. I just really resonated with that, and I learnt so much,” said Ms Dupres, who was thrilled to be face-to-face with people in need.

“You can have a qualification, a certificate, and know all the theory, but until you're out there in the field actually practising and seeing patients … that's when your learning happens.”

She treated people with malaria and people who were malnourished, and helped people who were suffering from physical pain because of “the way they moved their bodies and things they carried on their heads”.

Emotional needs were also looked after. However, the demand was nowhere near as great as it is here.

In the years that followed, the homeopaths kept in touch but the pandemic was when they “really connected again”.

“It was a very, very stressful period for most people so we had to come together and support each other in looking at what’s going on. But most importantly, I was very interested in how to support patients — on a psycho/spiritual/emotional level, but also in recovery,” Ms Kramer said.

“A lot of people were terribly unprepared and very traumatised by the process. As practitioners, we were all shocked too, and traumatised and what I do with Mel is, when she has interesting cases or when I have interesting things that I think are going to help the general community, then I’ll discuss it with her and help her so that she can add to what she does. I’m very interested in her cases and the different results that she gets in those cases because to me that’s more knowledge, and that knowledge helps the whole community grow.”

Although she doesn’t believe in taking life too seriously, the homeopath doesn’t feel the same about health.

“We should take our health seriously and understand why we're doing the symptoms we're doing. It’s very, very fascinating,” said Ms Kramer, who intends to speak about homeopathy privately while here.

“Homeopathy is the most used system of medicine in the world, and that's basically because of India. But the rest of the world needs to get in with the programme because, one, it’s very cheap; two, it’s a very, very safe system of medicine.”

Homeopathy claims to stimulate healing responses to diseases by administering substances that mimic the symptoms of those diseases in healthy people. Western doctors call it “pseudoscientific”, scientists say there is no evidence that it works.

“The people who shout ‘quack’ the loudest are actually the biggest quacks,” Ms Kramer said. “If you know what you're doing, you don't have to call anyone a quack. But when you're shouting someone's a quack, it means you're pointing over there so they don't look at your fraud.”

Her husband’s parents didn’t think much of her career choice but, in her mid-sixties, she says she is healthier than she was at 27.

“I had a health crisis. I was taking so many steroids and my symptoms were getting worse and worse. I was asthmatic, I had allergies, my hay fever was not in control. My husband said to me, ‘You're getting sicker. Why don't you look for something else?’ And I did, and it cured my life. I started my journey in healing, but also to become a practitioner.”

She’s now glad she took the time to “invest in [her] health”.

It’s a way of thinking Ms Dupres would like the public to buy into.

“It's my intent, my intention, to flood Bermuda with this word homeopathy — the concept of what it is and the fact that it's a viable form of medicine — so that people can finally make choices and have good options for their health,” she said.

“There are other modalities, don't get me wrong, I know homeopathy is not the only one, but it's the one that I know and that I'm very passionate about.”

• Introducing Homeopathy The Film will be screened at the BUEI on Friday at 6.30pm. Tickets, $25, are available at www.bdatix.bm