Homoeopathy
The term homoeopathy is derived from the Greek word ‘homoios’ meaning similar and ‘pathos’ meaning suffering or disease. Homoeopathy is a system of medicine that treats a person’s symptoms with a diluted, potentised agent (remedy) that will produce the same symptoms or ‘similar’ symptoms if it were to be given to healthy person with no symptoms. Homoeopathy is prescribed according to a patient’s individual symptom picture and is based on the homoepathic Law of Similars – similia similibus curentur – ‘let like be cured with like’. By ‘symptom’ the homoeopath means those changes that are felt by the person (subjective) or observed by someone else (objective), which may be associated with a particular disease, or state of disease, and which are the outward expression of that state.
Homoeopathy uses a very precise system of medicine whereby minute doses of a substance are made potent by a special dilution process so that the medicine is incredibly low in concentration but exceptionally high in energy. It has been also termed a vibrational therapy because of this.
Homoeopathic remedies may be comprised of either a single homoeopathic substance or several substances in one mixture. When prescribed by a trained naturopath, homoeopathy is a safe and effective way to help stimulate the immune system and restore the healthy function of organs and tissues throughout the body.
Homoeopathic remedies act fairly quickly in acute cases. After taking a homoeopathic remedy an improvement should be seen within the following minutes or hours. If not, then the remedy was not well indicated and must be changed, or it may mean that conventional allopathic methods have to be used in a serious case which is not resonding. A lot depends on a homoeopath getting the remedy right straight away in an acute case as there are many remedies that can appear to be the best and it takes skill and experience to prescribe. A remedy is not repeated if symptoms continue to improve, but may be repeated if a relapse occurs. In chronic cases symptoms resolve less quickly depending on how long or deep the illness has become. One must wait two weeks, perhaps one month, sometimes longer before repeating or perhaps changing the remedy.
HOW DOES ILLNESS EVOLVE?
From a homoeopathic perspective we are taught that everything occurring in a single organism is part of a whole and that the different ailments that affect us through time and in different parts of our body, sometimes quite distant from one another, are in fact bound together by a logical thread. Homoeopathic medicines represent this common thread in its material form.
One of the great homoeopaths from a century ago, Constantine Hering, taught us that illnesses are aggravated from the outside inward, from lower to higher, and that they improve in reverse order of appearance. Homoeopathic literature is full of cases where this proved to be the case in the progression towards cure.
For example, a six-month-old baby develops eczema, which is treated with an ointment. At 12 months, recurrent otitis (inflammation of the ear canal) is treated with antibiotics, and later the adenoids are removed. At 20 months, asthmatic bronchitis appears, at two years, febrile convulsions. In an effective homoeopathic treatment we would expect to see the convulsions and asthmatic bronchitis disappear first, followed by the appearance of a few bouts of otitis which we would treat homoeopathically; then the eczema would run its course, starting at the head and making a final appearance on the feet, before vanishing entirely. At this point we could expect to see a child who no longer experiences any of these health problems and is also able to respond effectively to other health challenges in the future.