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What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a unique holistic medical system with its own health philosophy, medicines, and method of treatment. It works by encouraging the body's natural healing response using minute doses of medicines derived from plants, animals or minerals that produce similar symptoms to your particular illness. The following information will give you a good understanding of the medical art and science of homeopathy.

Symptoms as defences

During times of stress, illness, or grief, you develop unique symptoms that are an essential part of your body's efforts to restore health. Symptoms are not the disease itself, but rather a response to an underlying cause. They are the body's efforts to defend itself against stress or infection and can occur on the mental, physical or emotional level. Homeopathy seeks to stimulate your symptoms rather than to suppress them. Instead of opposing your body's natural responses, it works by strengthening the constructive aspect of your immune system to restore health and balance.

The law of similars

The word homeopathy means "similar suffering", and is so named because of its primary principle of like cures like. First acknowledged by Hippocrates in 4th century B.C., the law of similars means a substance that provokes symptoms in a healthy person can cure similar symptoms in a sick person. Homeopaths, therefore give a remedy that causes the same symptoms in a healthy person as those seen during illness.

For example, in a condition where the symptoms of redness, swelling, burning, and stinging pains predominate, the homeopathic remedy of the honeybee, Apis mellifica, would be helpful. It is an excellent remedy for tonsillitis, conjunctivitis, and allergic reactions because it causes symptoms that are often associated with these conditions.

Homeopathic drug provings

To understand a substance's effect, scientific experiments called drug provings are carried out on healthy individuals by homeopathic researchers. In a drug proving a person is given a substance until a reaction is provoked. The subject meets frequently with the homeopath and together they record every single event, in terms of not only physical but also mental and emotional symptoms. Once the drug is proven on many healthy people, the collected findings of the effect of the substance constitute a complete "remedy picture" and are documented in the Materia Medica, one of the main texts used by homeopathic practitioners.

To date, thousands of substances from plants (e.g. Belladonna, deadly night shade), animals (e.g. Lachesis, bushmaster snake), minerals (e.g. Graphites, black lead) and diseased tissue, or nosodes (e.g. Psorinum, human scabies vesicle) have been tested in a homeopathic proving.

"Poisons kill. Poisons cure. It depends on how you use them" - Indian sage.

Method of preparation

Homeopathic remedies undergo a meticulous pharmaceutical process. This process, called "potentization," refers to the method of serial dilution, using succussion, or shaking, at each stage, which diminishes the drug's poisonous properties, while increasing its healing effects. Criticism of homeopathy is centred around its pharmaceutical preparation, since most homeopathic medicines are diluted so highly that little of the original substance exists.

Too harmless to do any good?

Sceptics argue that homeopathic remedies are too harmless to have any therapeutic value. While it is true that homeopathic medicines derived from even toxic substances can be taken safely, it is does not follow that because a medicine can't kill, it therefore can't cure. People who are sick are usually more sensitive to changes in their environment than healthy individuals. For example, a person who has a headache may be less tolerant of noise and light compared with a person with no headache. Sick people are much more sensitive to a homeopathic medicine, one most similar to their illness, than a healthy person is, so a minute dose is sufficient.

"Nature uses as little as possible of anything" - Johannes Kepler, astronomer

Different remedies for different people

While we may think that our fever, indigestion or depression is just like everyone else's, upon closer look this is not the case. For example, one feverish person may feel chilly, have plenty of perspiration, and be very thirsty, while someone else with a fever is incredibly hot without any perspiration and little thirst.

Everyone suffers differently, even of the same illness. Homeopaths want to know how people are individually affected by disease. That's why, in homeopathy, there are no definite medicines for particular diseases. Instead, a remedy is chosen for you based on your individual symptoms, not your diagnosis. In homeopathy it is common for people with the same illness to take different remedies.