What is Homeopathy
What is Homeopathy
Homeopathy, founded by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, is a wonderful complete system of medicine whose goal is to stimulate the body's own healing mechanism and re-balance health on physical, mental, and emotional levels of being using minute doses of a remedy. Homeopathy has remedies for people with disease & NOT treatments for the disease. Homeopaths believe that the whole person (physical-mental-emotional) must be treated using the Totality of Symptoms and signs from the person. Homeopathic remedies can assist with many disease conditions and they are non-toxic.
Principles of Homeopathy
Homeopathy means “Similar suffering” and a Homeopath gives a remedy that is “similar to the suffering” of the client, Similia Similibus Curentur, or let disease be helped by similar disease-causing remedies (“Let likes be cured by likes”). Homeopathy works in a different way than conventional medicine. Conventional medicine uses remedies that are different from the “suffering” of patients and are anti [e.g. anti-biotic, anti-depressants, anti-inflammatory etc]. There are several important concepts on which the Science of Homeopathy is based. The 1st concept is the Law of Similars and it simply means that a remedy creates symptoms and conditions in a healthy person, and when given to a person, it will stimulate the body to health when a sick person manifests Similar symptoms. Homeopathic remedies are always tested, “Provings”, on humans and NOT our animal friends as conventional medicine does.
A common example of the Law of Similars principle is the onion. Chopping an onion can create stinging, watery eyes, sneezing, runny nose, coughing, and probable throat irritation from the onion compounds. A Homeopathic remedy called Allium Cepa, made from potentized Red onion, can help when a person has a cold, allergy, or the above symptoms because it will help the body's vital force stimulate a health response due to it being Similar to the person's symptoms.
The 2nd concept is Potentization and Dr. Hahnemann found that giving his early remedies in crude quantities was not the best way as they were too powerful, had side effects, excessive initial reactions, or no reactions at all. He observed that there were individual reactions to each remedy. Hahnemann decided to reduce the dose to a Minimum and to enhance it by Trituration and Succussion. This process gave optimum medicinal power and reduced or avoided the associated harmful crude effects. Hahnemann called this process Potentization. Remedies can come from the plant, mineral, animal kingdoms, or even non-material forms and are made in laboratories.
Potentization starts with a crude substance or tincture and then is subjected to a process of precise serial dilution and each step is accompanied by vigorous shaking or Succussion. Without both steps, the substance is NOT a homeopathic remedy and does not allow for the energetic change to occur. Hahnemann found that progressive succussed dilutions of the substances transformed it into increased curative power and at the SAME time reduced the likelihood of undesirable aggravations of the patient's symptoms. If a substance was insoluble in water or alcohol it was Triturated or reduced to a powder using a mortar and pestle and 99 parts of milk sugar to 1 part of the original medicine. Additionally, the higher the potency the lower the concentration of the original substance. This process removes the chemical toxicities of the crude substance and makes it safer to use in this fashion.
There are many different forms of Homeopathic remedies: Dry=[tablets, pills (many different sizes here), granules, powders], Liquid, Mother Tincture, Cream, Ointments, and Vapour (inhaled). The most popular scale of dilution is the Centisimal scale or [1:100] and typical potencies are 6c, 12c, 30c, 200c, 1000c, etc. There is also the decimal scale where each successive dilution is in the ratio of [1:10] rather than the [1:100] and typical decimal potencies are 6x or 12x etc. Another dilution scale is the LM's (Q or 50 Millesimal) potencies. This scale represents a serial dilution and agitation of [1:50,000].