The Flower Essence Transformational Process
Introduction to Homeopathy
Condensed from
What is
Homeopathy?
by Maesimund B. Panos, M.D. and Jane Heimlich
Homeopathy is a system of medicine...[that] seeks to cure in accordance with natural laws of healing and uses medicines from natural substances; animal, vegetable, and mineral.
Homeopathy was "discovered" in the early 1800s by a German physician, Samual Christian Friedrich Hahnemann....Disillusioned with medicine...Hahnemann gave up the practice....and turned to medical translating as a livelihood. But he persisted in his lifelong goal--to discover "if God had not indeed given some law, whereby the diseases of mankind would be cured."
It was while translating Lectures on the Materia Medica by William Cullen, a Scottish professor of medicine, that Hahnemann stumbled on the key to curing sick people. In his work, the author claimed that cinchona bark, or quinine, cure intermittent fever (malaria) because of its astringent and bitter qualities. This explanation did not sound plausible to Hahnemann, who knew of other substances equally bitter, so he did a daring thing: he tested the medicine on himself.
"I took by way of experiment, twice a day, four drachms of good China (quinine). My feet, finger ends, etc. at first became cold; I grew languid and drowsy; then my heart began to palpitate, and my pulse grew hard and small; intolerable anxiety, trembling, prostration throughout all my limbs; then pulsation in the head, redness of my cheeks, thirst, and, in short, all these symptoms which are ordinarily characteristic of intermittent fever, made their appearance, one after the other, yet without the peculiar chilly, shivering rigor. Briefly, even those symptoms which are of regular occurrence and especially characteristic--as the stupidity of mind, the kind of rigidity in all the limbs, but above all the numb, disagreeable sensation, which seems to have its seat in the periostreum, over every bone in the body--all these made their appearance. This paroxysm lasted two or three hours each time, and recurred if I repeated this dose, not otherwise; I discontinued it, and was in good health."
This was the first "proving," a testing of medicine on a healthy person. The symptoms Hahnemann developed corresponded exactly to the symptoms of malaria. Thus Hahnemann reasoned that malaria was cured by quinine, not because of its bitter taste but owing to the fact that the drug produces the symptoms of malaria in a healthy person.
After experimenting on himself, Hahnemann enlisted the help of friends and followers and embarked on an extensive program of drug testing. When he died at age eighty-eight in 1843, he had conducted or supervised provings on ninety-nine substances. More than 600 other medicines were added to the homeopathic pharmacopoeia by the end of the century.
The term homeopathy...comes from the Greek homoios ("similar") and pathos ("suffering" or "sickness"). The fundamental law upon which homeopathy is based is the law of similars, or "like is cured by like"....The law of similars states that a remedy can cure a disease if it produces in a healthy person symptoms similar to those of the disease.
Hahnemann did not claim to have discovered the concept. In the tenth century B.C., Hindu sages described the law, as had Hippocrates, who wrote in 400 B.C.: "Through the like, disease is produced and through the application of the like, it is cured." Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century German physician, reiterated the law. Hahnemann, as an erudite thinker, was undoubtedly familiar with these writings, but he was the first to test the principle and establish it as a cornerstone of a system of medicine.
The second law of homeopathy, the law of proving, refers to the method of testing a substance to determine its medicinal effect. To prove a remedy, each of a group of healthy people is given a dose of the substance daily, and each carefully records the symptoms experienced. Conforming to the standard double-blind method used in pharmacological experiments, approximately half of the test group are used as controls and given an unmedicated tablet or pill (placebo).
When the proving is completed, all the symptoms that the provers consistently experience are listed as a characteristic remedy picture in the Materia Medica, a prescriber's reference.
In standard medical practice, drugs are first tested on animals because so many drugs have been found to cause dangerous reactions, even cancer. Homeopaths do not use animals as subjects for testing medicines, since they do not react to chemicals as human beings do. Furthermore, we consider subjective symptoms to be important. And we have no concern about testing homeopathic medicines on healthy human beings because homeopathically prepared remedies are not toxic. The first proving was carried out in 1790, and use of the procedure has continued to the present day. There has never been a report of a lasting adverse drug reaction as the result of a proving.
The third law of homeopathy, the law of potentization, refers to the preparation of a homeopathic remedy. Each is prepared by a controlled process of successive dilutions alternating with succussion (shaking), which may be continued to the point where the resulting medicine contains no molecules of the original substance. These small doses are call potencies; lesser dilutions are known as low potencies and greater dilutions as high potencies. As strange as it may seem, the higher the dilution, when prepared in this manner, the greater the potency of the medicine.
In 1800, when the process of potentization was devised, the idea that medicine containing as infinitesimal amount of matter could be curative was inconceivable. In this nuclear age, the power of minute quantities is all too well established. The dose of vitamin B12 used to treat certain anemias contains a millionth of a gram of cobalt. Trace elements, present in barely measurable amounts in the body, are essential for its development and functioning. The human body manufactures only fifty to a hundred millionths of a gram of thyroid hormone each day, yet a small excess or deficiency in this already "infinitesimal" amount can seriously affect the health of the individual.
The power of the infinitesimal dose is not clearly understood, but neither is the actions of aspirin and many other drugs. The process of potentization makes it possible to use substances such as certain metals, charcoal, and sand, which are inert in the natural state, as medicines. A potentized remedy does not contain sufficient matter to act directly on the tissue, which means that homeopathic medicine is nontoxic and cannot cause side effects. In over 150 years of use, no homeopathic remedy has ever been recalled.
Numerous theories have been offered as to why homeopathic remedies work. Dr. F.K. Beilokossy of Denver compares the process of potentizing a homeopathic drug -- shaking a dilution or grinding powdered dry materials -- to magnetizing a glass rod by rubbing it. "We thus produce electric fields around every particle of the powdered drug, and the more we triturate [grind], the stronger electric fields we produce and the more potentized becomes the triturated material."
Dr. William A. Tiller, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University writes:
"As humankind evolves, the individual becomes a more integrated and finely tuned system and more sensitive with respect to changes in subtle energies. Our future medicine will proceed towards the development of techniques and treatments that use successively finer and finer energies....In my modeling, homeopathic remedies treat at the etheric level of substance ["Etheric" mean not directly observable via our physical sense of instruments.] Since the method of treatment is already in use and is easy to practice, I expect it to flourish in the near future while allopathic [standard] medicine declines...."
The homeopath believes that the body is always striving to keep itself healthy, or in balance, just as a keel boat attempts to right itself in the water. The force that acts in this protective manner is called the vital force. When the body is threatened by harmful external forces, the vital force, or defense mechanism, produces symptoms such as pain, fever, mucus, cough. These symptoms, although unpleasant for the patient, have a purpose: to restore harmony or balance. Pain is a warning that something is wrong. Fever inactivates many viruses that attack the body. Mucus is produced in the respiratory tract to surround and carry off irritating material. A cough expels the mucus that would otherwise hinder breathing.
A homeopathic physician regards symptoms as a healthy reaction of the body's defense mechanism to harmful forces; such symptoms need to be supported rather than interfered with. Standard medicine takes a different view; it regards symptoms as manifestations of the disease, to be opposed or suppressed. Aspirin or other anti-fever drugs are given to lower fever, antihistamine to dry up nasal secretions, cough syrup to suppress a cough....
Because symptoms that reflect the body's condition are constantly changing, homeopaths regard disease, or disharmony of the body, as a dynamic condition. We treat the patient according to the symptoms, no according to the "disease." This is contrary to the standard view of disease as an entity unto itself. The allopathic doctor elicits the patient's symptoms and attempts to group them under a know diagnosis. He or she then prescribes the treatment established for that disease....
In the battle raging between the body and the invading forces, the homeopath is not primarily concerned with identifying the enemy--the type of bacteria. Our aim is to strengthen the body so it can resist these harmful organisms. In standard medicine, on the other hand, the goal is to identify the invader and select a powerful drug to destroy the specific germ....
We believe that all parts of the body are interdependent, and therefore we treat the patient as a whole person, rather than concentrating on one organ or one part of the body. We do not attempt to separate mental from physical illness; all are symptoms of the individual. Homeopathy is truly holistic, and has been since its inception 180 years ago.
Many people today do not realize that Homeopathy was widely practiced in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In some areas -- New England, the Middle Atlantic States, and the Midwest -- one out of four or five physicians was a homeopath. There were twenty-two homeopathic medical schools and over a hundred homeopathic hospitals. The elite of every community -- the social, intellectual, political, and business leaders -- patronized that homeopaths.
Homeopathy was first introduced in America as a result of its success in treating the victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832 in Europe. It is understandable why the homeopaths immediately attracted patients; they had dozens of different remedies, none of which caused any disagreeable side effects. As proof that the homeopath's sweet-tasting white granules, often called "little sugar pills," were effective, a large number of homeopathic remedies were adopted by the allopaths, and some are still being used today. One of the best known is nitro-glycerin, used in certain heart ailments.
The medical establishment was hostile to homeopathy from the time it was introduced into the United States. In the 1830s and 40s, when the public was dissatisfied with the harsh practices of regular medicine, homeopathy posed the greatest threat to orthodox medicine because its practitioners were licensed medical doctors. It was galling to the establishment that these homeopathic physicians, well trained in orthodox medicine, were critical of the system and had "defected" to homeopathy.
The establishment promptly too strong measures to suppress this upstart discipline. The American Medical Association (AMA) was formed in 1846 as a direct response to the founding of the American Institute of Homeopathy two years earlier. Homeopaths were denied admittance to standard medical societies. A member of such a society who consulted with a homeopath was punished by ostracism and expulsion. (In1878, a physician was expelled from a medical society in Connecticut for consulting with a homeopath--his wife!).
The rise of the drug industry after the Civil War further changed the practice of medicine. As medical historian Harris L. Coulter points out, "The pharmaceutical industry in the 1890s and early 1900s allied with the American Medical Association in [the medical association's] final campaign against homeopathy."
A further severe blow to homeopathy was the Flexner Report in 1910, an evaluation of medical schools by the AMA. In view of the AMA's traditional opposition to "sectarian medicine," it is not surprising that the examiners gave a low rating to homeopathic medical schools, among others, thus denying them a share in the millions of dollars, principally the Rockefeller grants, that were being given to allopathic institutions. One by one, the homeopathic medical schools closed and the homeopathic hospitals were converted to standard institutions. With the advent of the "wonder drugs" in the early 1940s, homeopathy appeared to be obsolete.
This dismal prospect is rapidly changing with the emergence of holistic health, a movement that surfaced in California in the early 1970s. Its practitioners, trained in a variety of disciplines, hold the common belief that medicine has become divorced from natural healing. According to Edward Bauman, coeditor or The Holistic Health Handbook, "Holistic Health is a sympathetic response to the distrust and frustration engendered by specialized allopathic medicine....
Holistic-minded professionals were amazed to stumble upon homeopathy. Here was a "natural" system of medicine that used no toxic drugs, treated the whole person, and, in many instances, cure "hopeless" chronic conditions. Furthermore, the efficacy of homeopathy had been demonstrated by the clinical experience of physicians for over 150 years....
Homeopathy is alive and well in other parts of the world. In Britain, members of the Royal Family have been cared for by homeopathic physicians since the reign of Queen Victoria. There are around 200 homeopathic physicians in Britain....France has nearly 300 homeopathic physicians, and the movement is also active in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
India is a stronghold of homeopathy, with 124 homeopathic medical schools. Central and Latin America [are] also important centers. In Mexico there are three homeopathic medical colleges, two of which are state supported....
Homeopathy is on the rise all over the world, owing to the dissatisfaction of both physician and patient with the medical treatment at their disposal. Both are looking for a safe and effective approach to healing and finding the answer in homeopathy....
ADDITIONAL SUGGESTED READING
Cummings, S. and D. Ullman: Everybody's Guide to Homeopathic Medicine
Ullman, D.: Homeopathic Medicine for the 21st century
Heather Young, BEP
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