LEWISTON – Stephen Kottler spent a career helping people get their due in court.

Now, he wants to heal them.

In a shaded office behind a Main Street mansion, Kottler helps people fight toothaches and back pain, sleeplessness and poor energy.

Since June, the lawyer-turned-homeopath has been seeing clients here, aiming to find out what makes them tick and, hopefully, what makes them feel better.

Shelves weighted with books on homeopathic remedies line his office. Bottles with an array of diluted cures fill an adjoining room. A running computer on his desk links to other homeopaths, all sharing the latest fixes.

It’s a long way from a law library’s leather-bound world. And that’s the way he likes it.

“I’m doing what I want,” said Kottler, 58. “It felt good to stop practicing law.”

In 2003, he took down his law shingle, leaving the law after 23 years in Lewiston. Much of his time was spent on personal-injury cases, either researching or writing briefs.

“I felt like I was doing the same thing and the same thing and the same thing,” he said.

Kottler first worked as a social worker, but he soon tired of telling people he was unable to help. Before the 1970s ended, he graduated from law school in hopes of doing what he couldn’t as a bureaucrat.

“It resonated with me: working with people and helping people,” he said.

He opened a private practice in 1980, taking on a wide variety of cases. A few years later, he joined a local firm, Hardy, Wolfe & Downing.

By 1990, most of his time was spent in a library rather than a courtroom. And he realized he had a talent for sifting through rules and finding the relevant bits. He researched and wrote.

The work helped people.

“There were really good people who were up against it,” he said. “I helped them get a fair shake.” But too many days were like the last.

And he was getting deeper into homeopathy.

Kottler started seeing homeopaths in 1987, traveling to Massachusetts because there was none locally.

Immediately, he started feeling better. And his curiosity took over.

The basis for homeopathy comes in a pair of concepts. One treats a problem by prescribing a remedy which, in a healthy person, actually causes the problem. In practice, an herb that makes someone nauseous might stop nausea if given in very small doses.

The other is a counter-intuitive leap that says a cure grows in power as it is diluted, Kottler said.

Soft-spoken, fit and clear-eyed, Kottler seems younger than his 58 years, despite a shock of gray hair.

He credits homeopathy.

“We don’t treat the disease,” he said. “We help the whole person.”

When he meets with a client, he often spends an hour or more learning about the person, he said. The initial discussion includes a medical history and a personal inventory that goes from changes in someone’s life to their demands and whether they have enough energy.

Someone’s marriage or work life can have a huge impact on their health, Kottler said.

It’s a lesson Kottler learned when he quit the law on Good Friday in 2003. He began taking classes in homeopathy and working part time at the Lewiston Public Library.

“It was a leap of faith,” he said. His wife, Jane Weed, backed him. So did friends, many of whom he’d help with a remedy now and then.

“They’d say, ‘You should really be doing this as a career,'” Kottler said.

Now, he does.

Slowly, he’s building a list of clients.

“Everybody you get to know is different and surprising,” he said. The June morning he opened his office was his triumph.

“You know how sometimes the universe lines things up for you,” he said. “It just felt perfect.”