Homeopathy

Dr.Samuel Hahnemann

Homeopathy was the brain child of German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843). Hahnemann, disatisfied with the state of medical practice at his time, gave up working as a village doctor, and devoted himself to research into the effect of different chemicals on the human body while earning a living translating medical and scientific texts. His personal experience of fevers caused by taking a preparation of the bark of the Peruvian Cinchona tree, source of the drug quinine used to treat malaria, led him to formulate a theory he called the "Law of Similars".

Hahnemann theorised that substances that could cause certain symptoms in a healthy person might also cure those same symptoms in a sick person. He used specially diluted and succussed preparations of Ipecacuanha root to treat cough, and preparations of Belladonna to treat scarlet fever. Using Belladonna an 80% cure rate of cholera infections was achieved at a time when the mortality rate for cholera was over 80%.

Hahnemann used Belladonna because he recognised a strong similarity between the symptoms of cholera and those of Belladonna poisoning. His idea was to try a very small amount of the poison to see what effect it would have. Hahnemann discovered that the more he diluted and succussed the mixture the more effective it became as a medicine. The practice of homeopathy was thus born.

Other physicians were impressed with these outcomes and became interested in the Hahnemann's novel concepts. Over the next decades a great number of common chemicals, plants, minerals, animal products and so on were subjected to testing by what is known as "proving". In a proving a substance often known to be toxic is given to a group of healthy volunteers and the symptoms produced carefully recorded. The homeopathic researchers were interested particularly in the similarities between symptoms reported by different volunteers. In the early years of homeopathy a vast amount of effort went into finding what substances could be used for medical treatments.

This new medical technology arose at a time when bloodletting was the high profile chemotherapy of the day. Bloodletting probably had about the same success rate as much of modern cancer chemotherapy. There was thus a great deal of interest in finding ways to cure illness that did not involve exsanguinating the patient.

This huge amount of interest continued for many years and spilled over eventually to the Indian subcontinent where the homeopathic repertoire was greatly expanded. Homeopathy remains a widely-practised and popular form of medicine in India today.

The greatest problem facing homeopathy in the past century has been the resistance of the scientific community to the idea that a highly diluted substance could retain any therapeutic value. The writer of this article is currently using remedies made from heavy metals to help remove them from the body. This technique only appears to work if the practitioner selects very high potency remedies that have been serially diluted and succussed many thousands of times. These remedies contain not a single atom of the original substance. This technique can be termed Isopathy or Homotoxicology.

The physics or lack thereof

The problem with Homeopathy is that there is simply no physics to explain how a remedy made from mercury that has been diluted and succussed thousands of times could actually help remove mercury from the body.

Various attempts have been made to explain the scientific basis for homeopathy. Most recently controversial scientist Jacques Benveniste, while a senior director at INSERM the chief medical research establishment in France, embroiled himself in controversy in 1988 by attaching his name to a study that reported that a highly diluted preparation of antibodies, in essence a homeopathic remedy made from the antibodies, was able to trigger the same degranulation reaction by sensitised allergy cells that the actual antibodies could cause(1). The authors suggsted that the effect was produced by the ability of the water to remember the structure of the original molecules. The term "memory of water" became famous and led to a stage play and a rock song(2).

Michael does not believe that this is the correct explanation. Nobody knows what it is. There are also pharmaceuticals on the market for which the mechanism of action is unknown but that does not stop people from using them. Neither does it stop them working and the companies that own these drugs spend millions on promotion to make sure that they are eventually and commonly prescribed by doctors.

The big difference between these drugs and homeopathy is the existence of patents. New drugs have long periods of earning time under patent while homeopathic medicines are difficult to patent as they are relatively easy to make from small quantities of ingredients purchased at often minimal cost.

The term "placebo effect" crops up often in discussions about homeopathy and vested interests have seen homeopathy removed from the health benefits register in many countries on the strength of their claim that it was merely a placebo. Just a few years ago the government of Switzerland responded to the demands of the Swiss people to have homeopathy reinstated under their health scheme. When they reviewed the scientific evidence they found that there was indeed enough there to justify the reinstatement of homeopathy as a valid therapeutic discipline.

The devil in the detail

Michael's perception, after trying to memorise the texts of the homeopathic repertory, is that there is too much information. So much has been discovered about the toxicological profile of thousands of minerals, plants and chemicals that the "symptom picture" of one remedy can easily blur into that of another. For common remedies the text of these symptom pictures runs to many pages in advanced texts. This is true of the poison strychine, the basis of the remedy "Nux Vomica". Small doses of strychnine were taken by dozens of volunteers almost two centuries ago and all the unpleasant symptoms experienced recorded for posterity.

In the early heady years of homeopathy the enthusiasm for research by many thousands of people testing hundreds of different substances was startling. This process produced reams of valuable information that became the basis of texts known as repertories. The repertories grew and grew in size until homeopathy it could be argued became bogged down in its own detail.

That does not mean it should be discarded as a failure - far from it. Many people respond to a particular homeopathic remedy whose symptom picture fits their particular constitution. Homeopaths recognised that there were commonalities between many people in the way that they responded to their environment and the maladies they developed. They described about twenty types of constitution that closely fitted the main symptom picture of twenty different homeopathic remedies.

For example people who are often cross and irritable, prone to skin rashes and dislike washing and bathing might respond positively to a remedy based on the element sulphur. A dose of homeopathic "Sulphur" from time to time makes them feel better. It is well worth visiting a homeopath to have a detailed assessment made of your constitutional type. It may well provide you with a safe and gentle tonic to keep in the cupboard for those days when you feel below par.

Another popular way to use homeopathy is to have a first aid kit in the medicine cupboard at home. These inexpensive kits contains around twenty time-honoured remedies in low potencies for the relief of symptoms of the common cold, stomach upsets, bites and stings etcetera. These kits remain potent for years and can be taken away on trips as they are light and take up little space in your luggage.