What is homeopathy? It’s infinitesimal. It’s powerful. It’s gentle and it’s curative. Homeopathy can alleviate common ailments like PMS, erectile dysfunction, depression, low energy levels, and teething complaints, as well as complicated chronic diseases such as chronic fatigue syndrome, Crohn’s disease, autism, heart disease, cancer and countless symptoms which have no classification. 

Small Doses Activate Built-in Healing Mechanisms

How does it do this? Because homeopathic prescribing is based on the “Law of Similars” – If the disorder caused by the drug is similar to a disease or symptom picture, the drug can cure the symptoms when given in small doses. And each drug causes a specific disorder. For example, the Deadly Night Shade plant, or Belladonna, can produce a disorder that resembles scarlet fever. In minute doses, Belladonna can heal cases of scarlet fever, if the symptoms match.

Homeopathy is a term coined by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann (1757-1843), a German medical doctor and chemist. Homeopathy means treatment with a drug known to produce symptoms similar to the disease. Homeopathy is not a separate system of medicine from allopathy (conventional medicine). Instead, it refers to a precise set of universal principles and guidelines for the proper use of pharmaceuticals (medicines) to bring about a cure rather than merely a palliation of symptoms. These guidelines are conclusions drawn from reproducible experiments on the action of drugs (provings). These conclusions apply universally to the action of all drugs, not merely to those popularly and historically referred to as homeopathic remedies.

The homeopathic rules are in sharp conflict with certain standards of the prevailing allopathic practice of medicine. The main conflict between the two systems is over the methodology required to bring about a cure rather than suppression, and over the use of energy medicines (potentized drugs).

Central to the homeopathic method is the Law of Similars. The principle of similarity had been applied intuitively by traditional healing methods and had been formulated as a universal law of healing by Hippocrates. Homeopathy is the first scientific application of the Law of Similars.

In the late eighteenth century, a time when the science of chemistry was in its infancy and the use of pharmaceuticals was largely based on either tradition or conjecture, most western doctors practiced bloodletting, cauterizing, and administered poisonous doses of arsenic and mercury. Hahnemann was determined to bring enlightened scientific methodology to the healing art. He advanced the hypothesis that a drug cured because it could temporarily induce a similar artificial disease that was stronger than, but similar to, the natural disease. He knew that when a patient who suffered from a mild disease like measles contracted a more serious similar disease, such as smallpox, it cured the milder disease.

Experimenting on himself, Hahnemann showed that there was a similarity of the symptoms caused by the quinine to the disease it was known to cure – malaria. To prove his theory, Hahnemann systematically tested the action of drugs, first on himself and on other healthy subject, carefully recording what symptoms they caused. Then he tried them on the sick who had both similar and dissimilar symptoms. He found the similar substances cured (he called it “homeopathic”), whereas dissimilar substances temporarily suppressed, if their symptoms were opposite the disease (he called this “antipathic”). In 1796, he formulated the Law of Similars: A drug cures diseases or syndromes that have symptoms similar to those the drug can produce.