Homoeopathy

Homoeopathy is a combination of natural healing and medical science. It embraces the knowledge of orthodoxy but rejects its method of drug prescription. There are three basic elements, the belief that like cures like, the high potency of a microdose and treatment of the patient rather than the disease. It considers disease as the outward manifestation of the body's struggle to overcome antagonistic forces. Consequently rather than attempting to reduce the disease, it encourages it. The theory is that if you put into the body more of the disease it is exhibiting, then you are encouraging the body's healing mechanism and the natural defences are fortified and supported. What something can cause, it can cure, say homoeopaths, in much the same way the vaccines immunise by stimulating natural resistance to a particular disease.

   Great emphasis is placed on diagnosis and history. The physician tries to build up a multi-dimensional picture, based on personality and emotions as well as the medical history of the patient and his or her family.

   Remedies are prepared from pure animal, vegetable or mineral sources. They are given in highly diluted doses, easily absorbed by the sick body. What is often deadly in large quantities can be valuable in small. Iodine, for example, added in minute amounts to a diet lacking the essential minimum, is most beneficial - though clearly marked poison.

   The system is to put one drop of the actual substance in 99 drops of spirit or water. This is mechanically and violently shaken to produce a distribution of properties. Then one drop is taken from this, further diluted and shaken. Then one drop is taken from this, further diluted and shaken. The process is repeated many times until the actual amount in solution is infinitesimal. It is claimed that the more diluted the material becomes in the ultimate dose, the greater its effect on the vital force.

   Homoeopaths use herbs and botanical medicines. They also use drugs, again in a highly diluted form so they are no longer poisonous, but beneficially effective.

   Homoeopathy was established over 150 years ago by Samuel Hahnemann, from Saxony. He had trained as an orthodox doctor and had done considerable research in pharmacology. The cruelty and ineffectiveness of medicine at that time forced him to look for another way to help the sick. He believed the patient's life force was usually sufficient to cope with illness, if the doctor could give it some help. He also reasoned that as the patient's life force mattered most, any treatment had to consider the nature of the patient as well as the disease.

   He came to the conclusion that illness was a process of purification, a form of cure in itself. His theory of 'like cures like' was revealed to him while testing the effect of quinine on a healthy person - himself. Quinine was used to cure the ague - malaria, and to Hahnemann's surprise he discovered that it produced in a healthy body the same kind of feverish symptoms. He reasoned that it was only by their power to make the body sick that drugs cured sickness, and that a medicine could only cure such conditions as it produced when tested on a healthy body. If the ague - malaria, were the body's way of fighting malaria, not malaria's way of fighting the body, a drug which produced the same kind of feverish symptoms could serve as an ally - as did quinine.

   It was a whole new approach to disease and he set out to demonstrate the principle, subjecting all drugs he used to intensive 'provings' on healthy people before they were tried out on the sick. His remedies were all single compound substances and most of them have remained in the homoeopathic materia medica that is used today. Hahnemann also found that by decreasing the amount used in a dose its effect was not decreased - in fact quite the opposite, even when diluted almost to undetectable levels.

   Compared with allopathic treatments, homoeopathy does not give a speedy cure. It often seems slow, but the microdoses put the patient on a gradual road to recovery. It is an alternative and complementary method to the orthodox one. Usually homoeopaths are trained first in the traditional way, including surgery, they are not against orthodox treatments but object to the belief in a different drug for every disease.