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The What, How, and Why of Homeopathy


What Is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a medical science that uses natural substances to mimic illness and stimulate healing. It is based on the idea of "like cures like."
Any substance that can produce symptoms in a healthy person can cure those same symptoms in a sick person.

Here are several examples of this principle:
a. An onion is a substance that makes your eyes water and your nose burn. So if you are having an attack of hay fever with watering eyes and a burning nose, a few doses of homeopathic onion can relieve it.

b. Poison ivy causes redness, small blisters, intense itching, and stiff muscles. Homeopathically it has been used for everything from herpes and burns to eczema and arthritis.

c. Coffee can overstimulate the mind and trigger insomnia. Homeopathic coffee can help restore sleep disturbed by an overactive mind.

d. When you are stung by a bee you feel a burning, stinging pain,
and the tissues surrounding the area swell up. Some relief is obtained from applying cold to the area. If you had swollen tonsils with burning and stinging pain relieved by cold, homeopathic bee sting could cure.

Over two thousand substances are now used as remedies to treat everything from colds and cough to arthritis and cancer.

Why Turn to Homeopathy?

1. When antibiotics fail, homeopathic remedies will still work.
Germs can never develop a resistance to homeopathic remedies.

The remedies do not kill the germs directly, but rather,
they stimulate the immune system to do the healing. For the last two hundred years, homeopaths have cured meningitis,
endocarditis, pneumonia, nephritis, tuberculosis, plague, and venereal diseases using homeopathic remedies alone.

Homeopathic remedies are effective against viruses, but antibiotics are not. In 1918, the worldwide influenza epidemic killed over twenty million people, and over five hundred thousand in the United States. At a time when survival rates were 70% with conventional medicine, they were 98% with homeopathy.

Some other viral diseases are Ebola, hantavirus, viral pneumonia,
viral hepatitis, yellow fever, polio, rabies, viral meningitis,
viral encephalitis, dengue fever, mumps, chickenpox, measles,
herpes simplex and zoster, and mononucleosis.

2. Homeopathy is affordable-homeopathic remedies cost about eight cents per dose. Thousands of people could be treated during an emergency for just a few dollars. The antibiotic used to treat sepsis infections costs $4,000 for one day's treatment.
The equivalent homeopathic remedies cost 8¢ per dose.

3. You can begin prescribing without a diagnosis. Homeopathic remedies are prescribed based on the person's symptoms. You don't have to know the name of the disease. This is especially important when new or exotic diseases arise.

4. Homeopathic remedies are extremely safe and free of chemical side effects. By following a few simple rules, any intelligent person can use the remedies without danger. Prescription drugs, on the other hand, are not safe for amateurs. In fact, they are quite dangerous even when used by doctors. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (April
15, 1998) concluded that prescription drugs, properly prescribed and properly taken, are between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death in the United States (after heart attack, stroke,
and cancer). The study found that prescription drugs kill over one hundred thousand Americans a year.

5. Homeopathic remedies can be used prophylactically, much like vaccines. Thousands of people could be inoculated quickly and cheaply if an epidemic threatened. A remedy made from the chick pea (Lathyrus) has been used with great success during polio epidemics.

6. People who are allergic to antibiotics and other drugs can still use homeopathic remedies. Homeopathic remedies can substitute for almost all conventional drugs.

7. You can heal faster. Conventional drugs can relieve pain or reduce inflammation, but they don't speed healing. All homeopathic remedies, when properly selected, speed the healing process.

8. You can sometimes avoid surgery. Polyps, tonsillitis, hemorrhoids,
ulcers, abscesses, gall bladder problems, and more, often yield to homeopathic treatment. Surgery is always an option,
but when possible, why not try a less invasive method first?

9. Homeopathic remedies remove toxins from the body. Conventional drugs increase the toxic load.

What You Can Accomplish with Homeopathy
If conventional medical care were not available, what could the average person hope to accomplish with homeopathy? You wouldn't be an expert, but you could still prevent illness, relieve pain, and save lives.

First Aid
Just as a person can learn conventional first aid, so one can learn homeopathic first aid. This includes treating anything from cuts and sprains to concussions and broken bones. For first aid injuries, you simply look up the type of injury. The book will list the appropriate remedy. For example, bruises require Arnica and burns need Cantharis. It's quite straightforward. You can look up the remedies for first aid in chapter
3, "Ailments A to Z."

Acute Care
This involves anything from colds and coughs to influenza, infected wounds, and pneumonia. If you know the name of the ailment, you can look it up in this book. It involves more decisions than treating first aid problems, because you'll have more remedies to choose from. Match the remedy to the patient's symptoms. Just do your best! You don't have to get it right the first time, or even the second or third time. Trained homeopaths often try several remedies before they get the right one.

You can look up the remedies for acute health problems in chapter 3,
"Ailments A to Z."

Preventing Illness
Homeopathic remedies can also help prevent illness. If there were an epidemic and you had no vaccines available, you could use remedies to help prevent the disease or reduce its severity. This is similar to vaccination,
but without the side effects. You can read more about this and look up the remedies in chapter 7, "Preventing Illness."

Homeopathy's Track Record
You may be wondering what kind of track record homeopathy has for treating serious diseases. A look at the past will establish that homeopathy has proven itself reliable and is often much more effective than conventional treatment. It has also saved countless lives when used preventively.
• The worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918 killed over twenty million people and more than five hundred thousand in the
United States. At a time when when survival rates were 70% with conventional medicine, they were 98% with homeopathy. Most of the homeopathic remedies that were used are the same ones you will have in your kit (e.g., Gelsemium, Arsenicum, and Bryonia).

• During the cholera and typhus epidemics in Europe from the
1860s to early 1900s, people using homeopathy had survival rates
50% or greater than those treated by conventional medicine.
• In an epidemic of typhus in Leipzig in 1813, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann treated 180 cases of typhus, losing only two patients. Mortality rates for conventional treatment were over 30%.
• During the cholera epidemic of 1849 in Cincinnati, with survival rates between 40%-52%, those treated by homeopathy had a 97%
survival rate. These results were published in the local newspapers.
• During the 1831-32 cholera epidemic in Europe, the mortality rate was between 40%-80%. The mortality rate in the ten homeopathic hospitals was 7%-10%. Homeopathy was so effective that the law forbidding the practice of homeopathy in Austria was repealed.
• In 1878, the mortality rate for yellow fever in New Orleans was
50% for conventional care, but only 5.6% with homeopathic care.
• Records from Broome County, New York (1862-64), show diphtheria mortality at 83.6%, but only 16.4% for those treated homeopathically.

Prevention
In the 1957 polio epidemic in Buenos Aires, the remedy Lathyrus was given to thousands of people. Not one case of polio was reported in these individuals.

In a 1974 epidemic of meningicoccal meningitis in Brazil, 18,640
children were given a homeopathic remedy for prevention. Only four cases of meningitis occurred in these children.

In the smallpox epidemic of 1902 in Iowa, the homeopathic remedy
Variolinum was given as prophylaxis to 2,806 patients of fifteen doctors.
The protection rate was 97%.

See chapter 7, "Preventing Illness," for a more detailed discussion.

How Homeopathy Got Started
Homeopathy was developed by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), a
German physician, in the period from 1790 until his death in 1843. In addition to being a physician, he was a pharmacist, and wrote seventy original works on chemistry and medicine. He was also a translator, fluent in seven languages. With his theoretical and practical discoveries in homeopathy, he developed an entire system of medicine.

Hahnemann was ahead of his time in many respects, being one of the first people to promote compassionate treatment for the mentally ill. He used homeopathy to cure many individuals so afflicted. He grasped the principles of contagion long before the germ theory, and wrote about the need for public sanitation.

There is a monument to Hahnemann in Washington, D.C., at Scott
Circle, at the junction of Massachusetts Avenue and Sixteenth Street.
Hahnemann is buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in France, along with other renowned individuals such as Molière, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf,
Marcel Proust, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and Modigliani. He is honored in countries throughout the world.

Homeopathy is based on the idea of "like cures like," a principle that was understood by Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Paracelsus, and mentioned in ancient Hindu manuscripts. It was Hahnemann, however, who turned it into a science of healing.

Hahnemann wondered why cinchona bark, from which quinine is derived, was effective in treating malaria. As an experiment he consumed some cinchona bark and soon developed the symptoms of malaria. From this experience, he reasoned that a substance can cure an ailment if it is able to produce the symptoms of that ailment. He concluded that a true medicine is something that can produce the symptoms it is trying to cure. He thus hypothesized the principle of "like cures like." This principle is also called the "law of similars."

To prove this hypothesis he experimented on himself, his family, and friends. Initially, he used tinctures or concentrated doses. Later, in an effort to prevent side effects, he began diluting his medicines. At each stage of dilution, he would firmly tap the bottle of liquid. To his amazement,
this process of diluting and tapping, called "potentizing," increased the healing power of the remedies. The more he diluted and tapped them, the deeper and longer-acting the remedies became. From those experiments, he confirmed two important principles of homeopathy:

Like cures like: A substance that causes symptoms of illness can cure those same symptoms.
Minimum dose: To cure without harm, use the least amount of medicine necessary.

Hahnemann experimented with other substances, learning what symptoms they would produce and, therefore, what symptoms they could cure.
He taught others his new method of healing, and soon homeopathy spread from Germany to the rest of the continent. By 1829, Hahnemann was famous throughout Europe. He produced amazing cures in some of the worst epidemics of the time. During a typhus epidemic in 1813, Hahnemann cured 179 of 180 cases. Survival rates in homeopathic hospitals during epidemics were usually 50%-75% greater than in conventional hospitals. Because of its success in healing the most serious diseases without harm to the patient, homeopathy was soon practiced all over the world.

How Homeopathic Remedies Are Made
The first step in making a homeopathic remedy is to dissolve a substance in water or grain alcohol. It then goes through a process of successive dilutions, either one part to one hundred or one part to ten. At each stage of dilution, the container of liquid is tapped firmly fifty to one hundred times (called succussion). The process of dilution and succussion may be carried out anywhere from three to one hundred thousand times. This whole operation is called potentization. It removes the original substance, but leaves its energy pattern.

The more dilutions and succussions, the stronger, deeper, and longeracting the remedy is. The healing effect of a remedy that has been diluted fifty thousand times and succussed five million times can easily last a year.

The more diluted, the stronger it is? This may seem paradoxical. In fact, for years no one was sure how the remedies worked. But recent research has helped explain it. When something is dissolved in water and then potentized, the water molecules form clusters.The character of the clusters is specific for each substance. Further, these clusters can carry complex information and communicate it to other water molecules.
The energy pattern of the original substance affects the water,
and this effect is transmitted through each dilution.

Homeopathic remedies cure by presenting the body with an energy pattern that mimics the energy pattern of the disease. This triggers exactly the correct healing response.

The remedy does not add any chemicals to your body. Rather, it contains information about how to heal. It is similar to a floppy disc in your computer. People who are not knowledgeable about homeopathy often try to disparage it, saying there is nothing in the remedy. Well, there is no
"thing" or chemical in the remedy, but rather, information. It would be as foolish to say there is nothing in a floppy disc. The remedy gives your body instructions for healing, in the same way the floppy disc instructs the hard drive.

How Does Homeopathy Work? Why Should an
Energy Pattern Heal Disease?
Homeopathy has some basic assumptions about disease and healing.

1. Living beings are alive because they have energy flowing through them.
Hahnemann called this energy the "Vital Force." In India it is referred to as prana, and in China it is known as chi. Wilhelm
Reich named it the orgone. Whatever it is called, this energy is the spark that animates us. Without it, all plant and animal life would be a pile of inert chemicals.
2. Disease is a disturbance in the body's energy. Those things normally thought of as disease, such as fevers, inflammations, blocked vessels, and growths, are the result of disturbed energy flow.
They are the symptoms, signs, and results of disease, but not the disease itself. The disease is the disrupted energy.
3. To cure disease you have to restore the body's energy flow.
4. Since disease is a disturbance of energy, you need an energy medicine to correct it.
Homeopathic remedies are essentially energy patterns.

How Does a Particular Remedy Help Heal a Particular Disease?
The famous physicist Louis de Broglie demonstrated that all matter (living or inert) has wavelength and frequency. That is to say, everything is vibrating.

That includes people, animals, rocks, and homeopathic remedies.
When we are healthy, we are vibrating in a particular way. This changes during illness. A homeopathic remedy that matches the sickness vibration will mimic your disease. This stimulates and guides the healing process.
The symptoms disappear because the remedy corrected the underlying energy problem.

Each remedy represents a different vibration. Since we can't see these vibrations, what we actually match are the symptoms of the remedy and the symptoms of the patient.

The idea that disease is due to an energy imbalance is very different from the conventional view. The conventional view is that disease is caused by a chemical imbalance and needs to be fixed with chemicals.
Rather than a sign of healing, symptoms are seen as the disease itself and are suppressed with strong chemicals, called drugs. The suppression of symptoms is basic to that view.

Treating disease this way has serious drawbacks. Since it doesn't address the underlying problem, symptoms frequently return. This requires ever-stronger drugs, often with dangerous side effects. The ineffectiveness of this approach is quite apparent in chronic disease. Most people with chronic ailments have to take drugs the rest of their lives. It is clear that the problem hasn't been fixed.

Further, suppressing symptoms can make one sicker. When your body needs to rid itself of toxins, you might get a runny nose, watery eyes, vomiting, diarrhea, perspiration, or a fever. These are signs that your body is trying to heal itself. When a drug stops this from happening,
where do the toxins go? The body's natural expression has been thwarted.

According to homeopathy, suppressing symptoms over time can create a deeper and more serious illness. For example, homeopaths have observed that minor skin ailments suppressed with drugs give rise to asthma. What's more, if the asthma is then treated suppressively, it can give rise to colitis, arthritis, heart disease, etc. The proof of this is that the process reverses itself under homeopathic treatment. As the colitis is cured, symptoms of asthma briefly return. When the symptoms of asthma disappear, a skin rash erupts for a day or two. The process is complete.

Occasionally, symptoms themselves can become life-threatening,
such as an allergic reaction to a bee sting. In such cases, it makes sense to suppress. For the most part, however, symptoms represent a healing process.


The Minimum Dose
By using potentized remedies, homeopaths are able to adhere to a second principle, the minimum dose. This principle states that the homeopath should use the least amount of medicine (or energy) needed to trigger healing. Thus, the remedies stimulate the body to make changes,
rather than forcing it to do so. Because they are so dilute, they produce no chemical side effects. This is a very different approach from conventional medicine, which uses toxic doses of chemicals that kill over one hundred thousand Americans a year.

The potentization process allows homeopaths to make perfectly safe remedies from substances that were toxic in their crude form. In fact,
the more toxic something is, the better a remedy it makes. That's because whatever symptoms a substance can cause, it can cure. Arsenic produces many serious symptoms, and therefore has a wide range of healing properties when used homeopathically.

There are currently about two thousand homeopathic remedies.
Most are made from plants, minerals, or elements. A handful of remedies are made from animal substances such as bee sting toxin and snake venom. There are also some remedies made from diseased tissue, such as tuberculosis or diphtheria. Those remedies are called nosodes. You can't catch any disease from them, because they contain nothing but an energy pattern. In fact, nosodes are often used to prevent those diseases during epidemics.

Examples of Substances Used to Make Remedies

Plants: Mountain daisy, sundew, St. Ignatius bean, wild rosemary.
Minerals: Calcium sulfate, potassium carbonate, sodium chloride, sodium sulfate.
Elements: Phosphorus, sulphur, gold, silver, copper.
Animal substances: Bee sting toxin, snake venom, cuttle fish ink.
Disease substances: Tuberculosis, diphtheria, influenza.
The What, How, and Why of Homeopathy 17
Once they have been potentized, they become quite safe and are able to stimulate healing. In this form, they act very differently from the crude substances.

Provings

How Homeopaths Discovered Which Substances Would Cure
Specific Symptoms

Over the last two hundred years, various plants, minerals, animal substances,
and disease extracts were tested on healthy volunteers to see what symptoms they would produce. This determined what symptoms those substances could cure.

This testing process is called a proving, from the German Pruefung,
meaning test. The volunteers are called provers. They were usually given a homeopathic dose of something, over and over, until their bodies and minds reacted. They reported any changes they experienced to the homeopath, who also recorded his or her observations.

Provers experienced both physical and mental symptoms and changes.
To date, these recorded symptoms number in the thousands and cover about every symptom known to man. Some examples of physical symptoms are headache, sore throat, aching bones, stomach ache, difficulty breathing, irregular menstruation, painful urination, and vision and hearing problems. Also observed were emotional symptoms such as anxiety,
anger, fear, shame, depression, and jealousy. The provers sometimes experienced positive changes in personality, such as going from being aloof to being intensely sympathetic.

Each substance also produced specific feelings of "better or worse from." For example, a prover might have had a headache that was made better or worse from warmth, sleep, motion, eating, time of day, lying down, fresh air, pressure, bright light, or company. These conditions of
"better or worse" are called modalities.

Some modalities of common remedies are:
• Lachesis: worse after sleep.
• Hepar sulph: worse from cold.
• Pulsatilla: worse in a closed room and better from fresh air.
18 The What, How, and Why of Homeopathy
• Bryonia: worse from any movement.
• Rhus tox: better from movement.
• Natrum sulph: worse from dampness.
• Phosphorus: better from company.
• Arsenicum: worse from midnight to 3 a.m.
• Lycopodium: worse from eating oysters.

Many of the substances produced very characteristic emotional and mental states. These turned out to be some of the best guides in choosing the right remedy.

Here are some of the mental states produced by specific substances:
Arsenicum (Arsenic trioxide): Great anxiety, especially when alone, fear of death, restlessness, tendency to be critical, conscientious about trifles,
despair of recovery. Fear of cancer, robbers, poverty, and ghosts.

Aurum (Gold): Exaggerated sense of duty and the delusion that one has failed, accompanied by strong feelings of guilt, severe depression, fits of anger, desire for death, or suicidal intention.

Lachesis (Bushmaster snake venom): Extremely talkative, sarcastic, passionate,
intense, jealous, and vindictive. Great clarity of mind or confusion.
Fear of snakes, of evil, of going to sleep. Aversion to anything tight around the neck.

Lycopodium (Club moss): Extreme lack of confidence, anticipatory anxiety, fear of being alone, claustrophobia, feelings of helplessness,
fear of strangers, becoming easily offended, weeping when thanked,
dictatorial.

Sepia (Ink of the cuttlefish): Anger when contradicted, irritability, aversion to family, aversion to company yet fear of being alone, annoyed by consolation, fear of insanity, hysteria, overwhelming apathy.

Who Makes These Remedies and Where Do I
Get Them?

Homeopathic remedies are made by homeopathic pharmacies around the world. They adhere to very strict guidelines laid down by organizations
The What, How, and Why of Homeopathy 19
like the Homeopathic Pharmacopia of the United States. In the U.S., the remedies are all FDA approved.

Some homeopathic pharmacies sell directly to the public. Remedies are also available at health food stores, some pharmacies, and health food sections of supermarkets. The majority of remedies do not require any prescription. The exceptions are the nosodes, remedies made from diseased tissue. Some homeopathic pharmaceutical companies require a prescription for the nosodes, others do not. Another option is to find a friendly holistic doctor, dentist, or other health professional who can write a prescription for the nosode.

Homeopathic Kits
I highly recommend purchasing a kit. First, they are a real bargain.You can get a modest one for $85 to $200 that will contain between fifty and one hundred remedies. If you bought the remedies individually they would cost a third more. Secondly, the manufacturer has carefully chosen the remedies you will most often need. They will be effective for a wide range of ailments. If the need arises for other remedies, those can be ordered from a health food store or homeopathic pharmacy. I suggest buying a kit with remedies in the "30c" potency. See chapter 12,
"Remedies for Your Home Kit," for a list of recommended remedies.