What is Homeopathy?
Long before the current global catastrophe of drug resistant illness, German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, (1755–1843) drew attention to the damaging side effects produced by prolonged and frequently repeated use of large physiological doses of drugs and argued for a major rethink of Western medicine.
Dr. Hahnemann put forward the idea that to avoid medicinal side effects and cure disease kindly, only the smallest medicinal doses should be prepared and administered, and old school routine prescribing of the specific medicines for specific diseases should be replaced with individually tailored medical treatment.
For that purpose Hahnemann a man of science, experimented for many years to originate a new holistic medical system the pure homoeopathic healing art, which he named 'Homoeopathy' from a combination of two Greek words: homoios meaning ‘like’ and patheia meaning ‘suffering.’
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann originator of Homeopathy
Hahnemann's pure homoeopathic healing art:
- Is rooted in laws of nature and the accepted rule of science: validation of a hypothesis through experiment, in this instance: Hippocrates’ ancient observation: ‘That which has the power to make the healthy sick, also has the power to make the sick healthy.’
- Centres on assisting, encouraging, stimulating and strengthening, an individual’s instinctive life-preserving vital force of nature to complete the curative process it has started but is unable to complete without help.
- Understands the way people think, feel and live their everyday lives is intimately tied to the years it takes for chronic disease to develop in the body, mind and spirit.
- Considers each illness to be unique to each person and requires individually tailored treatment.
- Cures disease by applying certain fixed fundamental principles in which micro doses of medicinal substances that have proven their power to induce similar symptoms in healthy people to symptoms experienced naturally during illness are selected and administered.
- Uses highly refined dilute, non-toxic, medicinal substances which are administered in single doses as infrequently as possible.
- Rapidly, gently and permanently restores the sick to health, by removing and annihilating the disease in its whole extent, in the shortest, most reliable, and most harmless way so that the patient moves, gently, rapidly, and smoothly along the road to recovery.
- Avoids old school routine prescribing of specific medicines for specific diseases.
- Avoids creating drug resistant illnesses
It is not widely known that Hahnemann understood full well that like all medical systems, for homoeopathy to be accepted as a medical system in its own right it must prove its effectiveness, and to do that it must meet science’s reasonable demand for consistency in methodology.
Therefore, to ensure sceptics and detractors of homoeopathy could not reproach it for not having a normal standard of clinical practice, Hahnemann practised taught and promoted a single doctrine of homoeopathy: the pure homeopathic healing art, and a single method of homeopathic clinical practice, based on rigorous application of certain fixed fundamental principles which he established to govern every aspect of homeopathic practice and ensure its efficacy, and systematically set down in his celebrated work, the Organon of Medicine, Sixth Revised Edition
Hahnemann's pure homoeopathic healing art stands apart from all other prescriber-created methodologies and sets the benchmark against which all other methods of homeopathic practice may be compared. Its practitioners always adhere to Hahnemann's fundamental principles of homeopathic practice which cover the following topics:
The Vital Force of Nature; Inherent predispositions to Illness; Susceptibility: action and reaction; Totality of characteristic individualising symptoms; Smallest minimal dose: dilution and potentiation; Prove the curative power of each individual medicine; The Law of Similars: Likes are to be Cured with Likes; Proper dose: single dose, single substance; The Natural Direction of Cure.
As homeopathy struggles to defend itself from abolition, it is a sobering thought that had all prescribers of homeopathic medicines fully understood, faithfully adhered to and agreed to accept Hahnemann’s original principle-based pure homoeopathic healing art as the universally accepted, normal, single highest standard of homeopathic clinical excellence from the beginning, homeopathy could have easily met science’s reasonable demand for consistency in methodology and there would be a worldwide well-documented reliable body of evidence proving the effectiveness of homoeopathy stretching back to 1796, difficult to refute.
For a brief explanation of each principle go to : Fundamental Principles
Homeopathy sheds not a drop of blood, administers no emetics, purgatives, laxatives etc. but with its own hand gives its own preparations of simple uncompounded medicines, in doses so small, that without weakening, injuring, torturing the sick person in the very least, they just suffice to extinguish the natural disease, and the patient, even while getting better, gains in strength and is cured.
—Dr. C.F. Samuel Hahnemann, (1755-1843) sixth edition Organon of Medicine.