WHAT IS HOMEOPATHY?
Homeopathy is a system of natural health care that has been in worldwide
use for over 200 years. It treats each person as a unique individual with the
aim of stimulating their own healing ability.
Homeopathy is recognised by the World Health Organisation as the second
largest therapeutic system in use in the world. It is estimated that over thirty
million people in Europe, and millions of others around the world, benefit
from its use.
The name homeopathy, coined by its originator, Samuel Hahnemann (1755-
1843), is derived from the Greek words for ‘similar suffering’ referring to the
‘like cures like’ principle of healing. Hahnemann was born in Germany
almost two hundred and seventy years ago. At this time the old world-view
was being challenged, it was the time of revolutions across Europe and the
Age of Reason. Samuel Hahnemann was a medical doctor and an
alchemist, as chemists were called back then. He had a very successful
practice in Dresden and was respected by his peers. However, shortly after
becoming a father he went through a sort of “midlife crisis”, or at least that’s
what it looked like initially, but I like to think that becoming a father changed
his outlook on life and made him a more compassionate & resourceful man.
Hahnemann’s problem was that, although established and professionally
successful, most of his patients didn’t get better. In hindsight this is hardly
surprising: the most common treatment was blood-letting with leeches,
heavy use of mercury in its crude form and other nasties that we wouldn’t
touch with a barge-pole these days. At the time the high death rate of
patients, short life expectancy and child death rate was just a fact of life and
widely accepted, but that was not good enough for our doctor.
So, what did Hahnemann do? He stopped practicing and went back to his
medicine and alchemy books, looking for answers. In order to earn some
money, he translated medical texts (he spoke six languages) and one day
he came across a text about Peruvian Bark, what we now know as “quinine”.
This plant was widely used at the time to treat fever and as a generic tonic
and in particular for cases of malaria. While translating this text from William
Cullen’s Treatise of Materia Medica into German, he got curious and
decided to experiment with this remedy on himself and discovered that, in
small doses, this plant would give a healthy man the symptoms of malaria,
while on a person affected by malaria, it had a curative effect. This turned
out to be the first principle of h omeopathy: ‘like cures like’.
Hahnemann, like Hippocrates and Paracelsus before him, realized that
pathologic symptoms are the “language” in which our body, mind and spirit
communicate their dis-ease and as such they have to be listened to in their
totality: body, mind and spirit. Illness comes from within us, it throws us off
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