Homeopathy Explained: How Nature’s Remedies Stimulate the Body’s Healing Power

Homeopathy is a safe, effective and gentle 200 year old practice of traditional medicine that uses highly diluted naturally occurring substances to treat health conditions.  In its arsenal of remedies, the most commonly used medicines come from plants, animals, and minerals.  The World Health Organization (WHO) describes homeopathy “as approaching the patient holistically…,  stimulating the spontaneous defence mechanism of the body, and using a minimum dose of the active agent.”Unlike conventional drugs, which act via biochemical means to bring about a local effect, homeopathic “medicines are intended to stimulate the body to fight the disease.” Homeopathic medicines are more complex, causing an individualized adaptive response so the body can reverse disease.  It should be noted that homeopathy is not an umbrella term to describe “natural” healing methods such as herbal medicine, aromatherapy, and Chinese medicine. It is its own therapeutic system, based on a prescribed set of principles governing its practice.

The WHO states that “traditional and complementary medicine … is an important and often underestimated health resource with many applications, especially in the prevention and management of lifestyle-related chronic diseases, and in meeting the health needs of ageing  populations.” It recommends that traditional and complementary medicines, including homeopathy, be incorporated with conventional medicine to provide adequate access to health care around the world. Today, homeopathy is one of the most widespread alternatives to conventional medicine in the world, along with traditional Chinese medicine, herbal medicine and osteopathy. It has been integrated into the national health care systems of many countries, including India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, to name a few.

Homeopathy’s roots can be traced to a German physician and chemist, Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843).  After seeing the terrible side effects and outcomes with medicines and procedures of the day, Hahnemann sought a gentle way to cure his patients and family.  He massively diluted and forcefully agitated (succussed) naturally occurring materials, some of which could be fatal or cause bad reactions if taken in raw form. Then, he experimented on himself, family and friends, testing over 100 of these diluted substances, starting with Cinchona (a type of tree bark).  After taking it repeatedly for many days, he developed symptoms of malaria, which disappeared when he stopped taking the concoction.  He reasoned that if homeopathically prepared Cinchona could cause symptoms of malaria in a healthy person, it could cure the same symptoms in a sick one. He was right.  Homeopathic Cinchona cures symptoms of malaria.  It contains minute amounts of quinine, a conventional medicine used to treat malaria, but without side effects.  Modern conventional pharmaceuticals are often used in this same manner.  For instance, Digitalis (the plant, Foxglove), used to treat heart arrythmias, causes arrythmias if taken in too high a dose.  Ritalin, a stimulant, is used to treat hyperactive children.  And when desensitizing allergic patients, doctors often give minute doses of the substance that causes the allergic reaction.

There are over 7,000 homeopathic medicines that have been tested to date on people in controlled studies to determine the symptoms they produce and are capable of curing.  The difference between these homeopathic medicines and conventional pharmaceuticals is that homeopathic doses are so diluted that toxic side effects are avoided.Through a process known in science as “hormesis,” small amounts of a normally toxic substance trigger the body’s innate healing mechanisms.^]  Research shows that after dilution and succussion to the level of 24X or 12C (potencies found on health food store shelves), what remains are nanoparticles of the original substance that the body recognizes as foreign and responds to in its natural effort to maintain a state of health.  When taken, the body responds in a gentle, natural, healing manner, “modulating the biology of symptoms and healing via functional changes in neural, immune, and inflammatory pathway networks and mediators…. These adaptations are all in the service of optimizing the individual’s fitness to survive…” 

Homeopathy is different than allopathic conventional medicine.  In order to find the right medicine, homeopathy is “based on individualized treatment for each patient…. It is only by understanding each patient’s totality of characteristics and peculiarities” that an appropriate medicine can be effective.  That is, ten people with cold symptoms could need 10 different medicines depending on how the illness affects them.  It is the nature of the symptoms, not the diagnosis, that indicates the remedy.   Allopathy, on the other hand, differs in that prescriptions are made based on the diagnosis (cold, tonsillitis, hepatitis, etc.), rather than how the disease uniquely affects the person as a whole.