What is homeopathy medicine? The term homeopathy comes from the Greek words homeo, meaning similar, and pathos, meaning suffering or disease. In the late 1700s, Samuel Hahnemann, a physician and chemist in Germany, proposed a new approach to treating disease and illness.

This was at a period in medical history where the most common medical treatments were harsh to say the least!! For example: bloodletting, blistering, purging and the use of mercury (now known to be harmful) to treat various disease states was common place.

There were few truly effective medications for treating ill patients, and knowledge about their effects was limited, you were as likely to die from the treatment as you were from the illness!

Dr Hahnemann was developing a less-threatening approach to medicine: when he was translating an herbal text and read about a herbal treatment (cinchona bark) used to cure malaria. He took some cinchona bark and observed that, as a healthy person, he developed symptoms that were very similar to malaria symptoms.

This led Hahnemann to consider that a substance may create symptoms that it can also relieve illnesses and disease. This concept is called the “similia principle” or “like cures like.”

The similia principle had a prior history in medicine, from Ancient Greece Hippocrates noted, for example, that recurrent vomiting could be treated with an emetic (such as ipecacuanha) that would be expected to make it worse.

Hahnemann tested pure substances on himself and, in more dilute forms, on healthy volunteers. He kept detailed records of his test and he combined these observations with information from clinical practice, the known uses of herbs and other medicinal substances, and toxicology, eventually treating the sick and developing homeopathic clinical practices.

Hahnemann added two additional elements to form what we know as homeopathy today.

Potentization : systematically diluting a substance, with vigorous shaking at each step of dilution, makes the remedy more, not less, effective by extracting the vital essence of the substance. If dilution continues to a point where the substance’s molecules are gone, homeopathy holds that the “memory” of them–that is, the effects they exerted on the surrounding water molecules–may still be therapeutic.

Holistic Treatment : Treatment should be selected based upon a total picture of an individual and his symptoms, not solely upon disease symptoms. Homeopaths evaluate a person’s physical symptoms, emotions, mental states, lifestyle, nutrition, and other aspects of the patient. In homeopathy, different people with the same symptoms may receive different homeopathic remedies and treatment regimes.

Homeopathy is an alternative form of health care that has been practiced in the United States since the early 19th century. Homeopaths seeks to stimulate the body’s ability to heal itself by giving very small doses of highly diluted substances that in larger doses would produce illness or symptoms similar to those the homeopathy is attempting to cure/alleviate.

A Homeopathy takes a different approach from conventional medicine, a key premise is that every person has energy called a vital force or self-healing response. When this energy is disrupted or imbalanced, health problems develop. Homeopathy medicine aims to stimulate the body’s own healing responses.

Research studies on homeopathy remedies and treatments under scientific conditions have been contradictory in their findings. Some analysis have concluded that there is no strong evidence supporting homeopathy medicine as effective for any disease. However, others have found positive clinical effects (statistically significant) from homeopathic treatments.

The positive effects of homeopathy remedies and treatments are not readily explained in scientific terms, multiple explanations have been proposed as to how homeopathy medicines might work. However, none of these explanations has been scientifically verified.