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Homeopathy: Medicine For The People Miranda Castro FSHom, CCH. What is Homeopathy?. Homeopathy is an effective, elegant system of energy medicine that harnesses the innate healing power that resides within each and every one of us … that acts as a catalyst for a person’s own healing.
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What is Homeopathy? • Homeopathy is an effective, elegant system of energy medicine that harnesses the innate healing power that resides within each and every one of us … that acts as a catalyst for a person’s own healing.
Homeopathy’s Basic Principles • Homeopathy is based on several fundamental principles: • Treating ‘like with like.’ • The minimum (infinitesimal) dose. • The single remedy. • The whole person. • Susceptibility. • The vital force.
How Old is Homeopathy? • Homeopathy was developed 200 years ago by Samuel Hahnemann, a German doctor, who became disillusioned with the treatments of his time (purgings & leaches etc.)
Homeopathy Around the World • Homeopathy spread rapidly throughout europe and the rest of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries as people sought effective, non-toxic ways to deal with their health care needs.
India (2007) • India: Mainstream Medicine • 307 Homeopathic Hospitals • 165 Homeopathic Medical Schools • 10,000 students each year for 4-6 year full time homeopathic medical training programs • Over 300,000 Practitioners
Europe • UK: Incorporated into the National Health Service in 1947 • 5 Homeopathic Hospitals • Treatment available on demand • Over 3000 professional homeopaths • Approximately 40% of French & English doctors refer patients to homeopathic specialists.
Elsewhere • Popular in Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Austria. • Spreading rapidly throughout the rest of Europe in the past 10 years. • Accepted in New Zealand, Australia, and many South American countries
South America • Highly respected in many South American countries. The following have many thousands of homeopathic practitioners: • Mexico • Argentina • Brazil
United States • At the beginning of the 20th century (1900) homeopathy was more popular that anywhere else in the world: • 15-20% of all doctors were homeopaths • 20 homeopathic medical schools • 100 homeopathic hospitals • 1000 homeopathic pharmacies
What Happened? • Homeopathy faltered and fell due to: • A concerted effort by the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical companies. • In-fighting between the classical homeopaths and the ‘routinists’ or combination prescribers.
Coherent Philosophy • Homeopathy has a coherent set of principals governing every aspect of practice. • These are the most important, defining principles of homeopathy:
Like Cures Like • A substance that causes a particular set of symptoms in a healthy person (that makes a healthy person sick) can cure a person with a similar set of symptoms. • AKA the Law of Similars.
The Minimum Dose • A substance that is diluted and shaken vigorously (succussed), becomes stronger curatively the more it is repeatedly diluted – but only if it is also succussed. • Substances that have been diluted without the vigorous shaking have no curative value, and are inactive medicinally.
Single Remedy • Remedies are tested one at a time, and therefore should be administered singly. This is maybe the most difficult aspect of homeopathic treatment – the selection of a single remedy.
Incredibly Energetic • Homeopathic remedies or medicines are diluted by a method that releases their energy: potentization. • They are diluted beyond Avogadro’s number. • Simple dilution does not work.
The Whole Person • Homeopathic principles take the whole person into account (dismissing nothing). • Homeopaths do not treat single symptoms or parts of single symptoms. • They take the bigger picture into account. • The best remedy is the one that matches the whole symptom picture of an individual person.
The Vital Force • Homeopaths describe the energetic component that ‘enlivens’ us, that literally gives us life - as the vital force. • AKA Chi (Chinese Medicine) • AKA Prana (Indian Medicine)
Summary • Like cures like (law of similars) • Minimum dose (potentized remedy) • Single Remedy • Whole Person • Susceptibility • Vital Force
Tested on Humans • Homeopathic remedies are tested on healthy humans to determine their ‘symptom complex’. • They are then ‘verified’ on sick humans presenting with a similar symptom complex.
Healing Effects are Not Placebo • You do not need to believe in homeopathy for it to work. • Homeopathy works on animals and babies, and people who are sleeping or unconscious.
Resourcefulness • Remedies are made from the widest possible range of sources, from anything and everything including: • Plants • Metals, minerals, chemicals • Animals • ‘Imponderables’
Remedies • Over 3500 substances have been tested and are available as homeopathic remedies. • Most homeopaths use 100 – 500 remedies on a regular basis. • Home prescribers use 10 – 50 remedies.
Ecologically Sound • A single vial of a potentized remedy can medicate hundreds of thousands of pills. • The planets precious resources are preserved. • There’s no waste: the active ingredients last indefinitely.
Affordable • Single remedies cost around $6 • Home prescribing kits cost around $90 for a 50 remedy kit (less than $2 a tube).
Non Toxic • Therefore there are no side effects. • The integrity of the organism is not damaged in the process of cure. • There are no perceived ‘bad’ agents (viruses or bacteria etc.) to destroy.
Non-Species Specific • Homeopathy is easily applied to all living beings. • It is increasingly popular among veterinarians and farmers • Some farmers have shown it to work even on plants.
Treats All types of Complaints • Emergencies/First Aid • Acute (self-limiting) Complaints • Chronic (recurring) Complaints • Mental and Emotional & Physical
Empowering • Acute and First Aid treatment can be learned fairly easily and used safely by most people at home for a wide variety of everyday injuries and complaints. • The more you know, the more you can do.
Types of Homeopathy • Acute prescribing can successfully be learnt by home prescribers and health care practitioners • Constitutional treatment is complex and should be practiced only by trained homeopathic professionals.
Who Can Benefit? • Anyone but particularly the very young, babies, infants and children. • Any complaint especially those the medical profession gives up on or has few answers for: • CFS, PMS, migraines, menopause, stress-related complaints, behavioral problems, autism, hyperactivity, autism etc. etc.
What Does it Cost? • $150-$500 for an initial visit depending on the length of time and the experience of the practitioner. • $50-$120 for follow up visits. • Time between visits: 4-6 weeks or as needed depending on the practitioner.
The Homeopathic Interview • The first consultation includes a tremendous number of questions that range across the whole of a person’s life: • emotional, physical, general, family, work, history, inherited – everything.
The Client’s Response • After an initial consultation the most common comment is “I have a sense of me as a whole – it’s a wonderful feeling. I made connections I have never made before.”
Complementary Medicine • Homeopathy works beautifully alongside all other therapies including conventional medicine. • Because homeopathy and acupuncture are so similar it is usually best to choose one or the other at a time.
Where is it Limited • Where something is broken. • Where something is broken beyond repair. • Where information is lost in time. • Where the stressors are severe and on-going.
A Blessed Sense of Well Being • Homeopaths measure health as more than an absence of symptoms • Increased flexibility and freedom on all levels. • Increased sense of wellness, of well-being. • Increased ability to withstand stress. • Increased resilience to acute and chronic illness.
Myths & Misapprehensions “Many homeopaths, believing that the explanation of how homeopathy works is secondary to its success with literally millions of patients, have traditionally refused to reveal the names of the medicines they give. This and the lack of information they have provided about their practice has led to an aura of secrecy in which myths abound.”
‘Homeopathy is a form of herbalism’ • Herbalism is concerned with the known sphere of action of a plant based on its chemical constituents as well as its known healing qualities. • Homeopathic principles of practice are different. • Homeopathic remedies are diluted and succussed, herbal remedies are used in a material dose (as tinctures and teas etc.) • Homeopathic remedies are not solely plants, but are made from poisons, metals, & disease products. • Homeopaths prescribe one remedy at a time rather than the mixtures of plant tinctures of the herbalist. • Homeopathy is a mere 200 years old instead of two or three thousand years of herbal medicine.
‘Homeopathy is safe’ • Because homeopathy can cure – dramatically in some cases – it can also cause harm. • If you take too many homeopathic pills over a (usually long) period of time it is possible to ‘prove’ it, i.e. to suffer from the symptoms that the remedy is supposed to cure. Your symptoms may improve initially, but then worsen if you continue to take them. Worse still, if the remedy was not the correct one for you, you may experience symptoms you never had before. • This is a common danger of home prescribing: it is important to be on your guard against this over-use of homeopathic medicines.
‘Homeopathy is form of vaccination’ • Homeopathy and vaccination have similar concepts and very different practices. Vaccines stimulate the immune system directly to produce specific antibodies as if that person has contracted a particular disease. They must be tested on animals and then on humans to verify their safety, and even then children and adults can suffer side effects. Vaccinations bypass the body’s natural defense system, thereby stressing it in a way that is not fully understood. • Homeopathic remedies affect the energy patterns of a person and stimulate the body to heal itself. They are administered orally in a highly diluted dose as opposed to being introduced directly into the bloodstream,
‘Homeopathic remedies are placebos’ • Or … ‘You need to believe in it for it to work.’ This is ridiculous to anyone who has experienced a homeopathic cure for, a head injury or a middle-ear infection. • Because homeopathic remedies do not always work they are believed by some to be ineffective, but antibiotics do not always work and that doesn’t stop people from taking repeat doses of them. • Because routine prescriptions such as Rhus toxicodendron for rheumatism and Chamomilla for teething babies are freely available, people are wrongly persuaded into thinking that they need not consult a homeopath (or an adequate first-aid book). If the remedies do not work it is assumed that homeopathy does not work; if they do work it is attributed to a placebo effect – some double bind!
‘Homeopathy is unscientific’ • Homeopathic medicines are prepared in a pharmacy or a laboratory and their preparation involves techniques subject to precise and clearly stated controls (it does not involve mysterious and secret processes which put it into the realm of white magic or alchemy). • Harris Coulter ( Homeopathic Science and Modern Medicine, The Physics of healing with Microdoses), discusses this issue at great length and also describes many of the trials that have been conducted over the past fifty years or so using plants, animals and humans as controls to prove the effectiveness of homeopathic medicines.
Homeopathy & Research • Because the premise of homeopathic medicine is so ‘questionable’ in the eyes of the scientific communities, homeopathic research trials are often regarded in a suspicious light. There are plenty of trials and those concerning animals (for e.g. dairy herds with mastitis) are particularly interesting. • Dana Ullman is the best place to go to find out more about homeopathy and research studies: http://www.homeopathic.com/articles/by_category.jsp?id=11
Finally …. • Homeopaths have traditionally justified their practice by their results, without feeling a need to explain how their methods work. • Homeopathic patients mostly haven’t cared much either, have been happy to take any healing they could get often as a last resort i.e. when conventional medicine has completely failed them.
Finally …. • Homeopathic doctrine hasn’t changed since it was formulated over 200 years ago. The rules and principles of practice constitute a unified hypothesis whose validity is tested out empirically – and confirmed clinically, every single day in tens of thousands of homeopathic consulting rooms. The whole world over.
Resources • The Complete Homeopathy Handbook, by Miranda Castro • Homeopathy Simply Explained http://www.homeopathy-soh.org/ • National Center for Homeopathy www.nationalcenterforhomeopathy.com
