Homeopathic Care

Introduction

Welcome to this introduction to homeopathy and its practice. Here we'll define homeopathy, present a brief overview of its fascinating history, and introduce you to some of its key principles.

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Homeopathy is a system of treating illness or disease, as manifested by all the associated symptoms, with substances that produce similar symptoms. It emphasizes treating the patient as a whole, based on his or her own experience, as the patient's most meaningful symptoms are not thought to be some standard observed in the population at large, but actually an expression of the patient's own vital force crying out for help. Symptoms are not thought of as something that must be suppressed, but as information or clues to healing the individual's condition. Key to this process is selecting the substance or remedy that is capable of producing symptoms in healthy individuals similar to the profile of symptoms from which the patient is suffering, and administering that remedy in the minimum dose.

Homeopathy was founded in the 1790s by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician working at at time when standard medical treatment included bloodletting and administering doses of mercury, often resulting in the patient's serious incapacity or ultimate demise. Disenchanted with the often harmful, if not deadly, effects of conventional treatment at the time, Hahnemmann quit his conventional practice and began doing his own research. He had known of a plant called quinine (Peruvian Bark) that could cure patients suffering from malaria and, enquiring into how this was so, began experiments on himself taking frequent small doses of quinine, and soon discovered a startling fact: Quinine produced symptoms of malaria, the same symptoms it was known to cure. Over a number of years he performed hundreds of experiments and found that reducing dosages of harmful substances—derived from plants, minerals, and even animals—in dilutions 1 part substance to 10 or 100 parts water/alcohol, succussed, then diluted further, thousands or even millions of times (a process known as "potentization"), gave them profound healing effects on sick individuals suffering the same symptoms those substances were capable of producing in the healthy. This healing principle, the guiding theory of homeopathy, has become popularly known as like cures like.

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Homeopathy comprises the following key principles, based on the Organon of Medicine by Samuel Hahnemann:

1. A vital force or inner organizing and dynamic principle, governs the overall health of the individual.
2. Disease occurs when some outside influence disturbs the vital force, creating an array of symptoms which represent the true nature of the disease and of the individual's suffering.
3. Knowledge of the disease must be gained by documenting the totality of symptoms as is revealed in a case study or history of the individual's condition, and cross-referencing those symptoms to a Repertory of the Materia Medica, which lists the substances or remedies which are capable of producing similar symptoms.
4. Knowledge of the remedy must be gained by reference to a Materia Medica, a compendium of plant-, mineral-, and animal-derived remedies and all their effects.
5. The remedy that will initiate a healing response is that one substance capable of producing symptoms most similar to the individual's suffering and symptom profile (i.e., based on like cures like) and administered, with a potency generally commensurate with the state of the vital force, in the least or minimum dose possible to effect a cure.