Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine that promotes the use of infinitesimal amounts of natural substances to treat and prevent disease. The substance chosen to treat a disease is one that, when given in large amounts to a healthy person, would produce symptoms similar to the disease itself. The act of greatly diluting this substance is purported to stimulate the body into counteracting these symptoms in the diseased individual.
Homeopathy as a discipline was developed prior to or without regard to the modern principles of pharmacology, biophysics and pathology as a reaction to the unscientific and barbarous practices used by European physicians of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
At the basis of homeopathy is the belief that the body is ruled by a spiritual, animating force. Ancient Indians called it “Prana”; the Chinese called it “Chi”. According to Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy :
In the healthy condition of man, the spiritual vital force (autocracy), the dynamics that animates the material body (organism), rules with unbounded sway, and retains all the parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious, vital operation, as regards both sensations and functions, so that our indwelling, reason-gifted mind can freely employ this living, healthy instrument for the higher purpose of our existence....
The material organism, without the vital force, is capable of no sensation, no function, no self-preservation, it derives all sensation and performs all the functions of life solely by means of the immaterial being (the vital principle) which animates the material organism in health and in disease.
Hahnemann believed that the cause of disease is the disturbance of this vital or life force. Disturbances in the vital force manifest themselves as specific symptoms. An illness or disease can be caused by physicl and emotional factors. A negative state of mind attracts disease entities called miasms to enter and/or invade the body. Miasms can be acquired acutely or they can be congenital or latent, until some negative experience or normal aging trigger their appearance as a symptom and then as disease.
Hahnemann argues that specific treatment of such symptoms by opposing their action, as in conventional medicine, is not useful in treating disease because the disturbance in the vital force remains. Only correction of the underlying disturbance in the vital force can cure disease.
“Similia similibus curentur” (Like cures like)
Hahnemann recognized that many natural products produce pharmacological or toxicological effects, which he refers to as symptoms. He believed that substances that produce symptoms similar to a given disease should be used to treat that disease. He states :
The curative power of medicines, therefore, depends on their symptoms, similar to the disease but superior to it in strength so that each individual case of disease is most surely, radically, rapidly and permanently annihilated and removed only by a medicine capable of producing (in the human system) in the most similar and complete manner the totality of its symptoms, which at the same time are stronger than the disease.
He felt that the artificially induced disease (caused by the medicine) would push aside the pathologic disturbance in the vital force and replace it with this new, pharmacologically-induced disturbance in the vital force. The body could then overcome this artificial disturbance and a cure would be produced. In Hahnemann's words :
As every disease consists only in a special, morbid, dynamic alteration of our vital energy (of the principle of life) manifested in sensation and motion, so in every homoeopathic cure this principle of life dynamically altered by natural disease is seized through the administration of medicinal potency selected exactly according to symptom-similarity by a somewhat stronger, similar artificial disease-manifestation. By this the feeling of the natural (weaker) dynamic disease-manifestation ceases and disappears. This disease-manifestation no longer exists for the principle of life, which is now occupied and governed merely by the stronger, artificial disease-manifestation. This artificial disease-manifestation has soon spent its force and leaves the patient free from disease, cured. The dynamics, thus freed, can now continue to carry life on in health.
