What is Homoeopathy?
Homeopathy (also spelt homoeopathy) is a form of complementary medicine based on the idea of treating ‘like with like’ (often quoted in Latin, ‘Similia similibus curentur’). When prescribing a homeopathic medicine, a homeopathic doctor looks for a substance which can produce an illness matching the one from which the patient is suffering.
Other key features of homeopathy include holism, constitution, idiosyncrasy and the use of the minimum dose. Holism means that in deciding which homeopathic treatment to use one considers, not just the illness but all aspects of the person who has it, even if there is no obvious link. Constitution means the type of person, including build, personality, general physical features, for instance whether they tend to feel the heat or the cold and susceptibility: the sort of illnesses to which that person is prone. Idiosyncrasy means what is unusual or atypical about the person or the health problem from which they suffer.
This is why homeopaths ask questions which may seem irrelevant: What kind of food do you like or dislike? Are you tidy or messy? Is there any time of day when you feel particularly good or bad? and so on. The homeopathic approach can be summed up as ‘treating people, not diseases’.
What can homeopathy be used to treat?
Homeopathy can be used to treat a wide range of health problems, but it is particularly useful when the disease is ‘internal’, due to internal imbalance rather than infection or injury. Conditions that often respond well to homeopathy include allergies, anxiety, stress and panic attacks, asthma, rheumatism and arthritis, cystitis, eczema and other skin problems, recurrent childhood illnesses such as glue ear, menstrual and menopausal problems, morning sickness.
Although it has a wide range of uses, homeopathy should not be seen as an exclusive alternative system of medicine. It is not the right treatment for every complaint. It can be used as an alternative treatment for many conditions, or as a complement, for instance to help with symptoms of cancer or side effects of treatments for cancer. In any case it is best integrated with other treatments so that everybody involved in the patient’s care communicates and works together.
History
Homeopathy originates in the work of the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), and it was he who coined the word (Greek homoios = same or similar, pathos = disease or suffering). Hahnemann was of humble origins, his father was a painter of the famous Meissen porcelain. This was a brutal period in medicine: ‘lunatics’ were chained and beaten, massive bloodletting was widely used. Hahnemann condemned these practices.
He became so disillusioned that for a while he abandoned medical practice altogether, instead earning his living translating medical books. It was while translating a book by the Edinburgh physician William Cullen that he had his inspiration. Cinchona bark, the source of quinine was something of a wonder drug at the time; it is an effective treatment for malaria, at that time common in parts of Europe.
Hahnemann disagreed with what Cullen said about Cinchona, and experimented on himself. He got symptoms very similar to malaria, and from this starting point developed the idea of similarity. He launched homeopathy with an article entitled 'On a New Curative Principle', published in 1796.
The early homeopaths introduced many new medicines and used some existing medicines in radically different ways. Homeopathy grew rapidly in the 19th century, largely because of its success in treating epidemics. In an infamous cholera epidemic in London in 1854, eventually traced to the Broad Street pump in Soho. The average mortality rate at London hospitals was 52% (over 500 people), but at the London Homoeopathic Hospital (as the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital was then known), the mortality rate was 16%.
Homeopathy is now used worldwide. It is particularly popular in western Europe, 40% of the French people have used it at some time in their lives. It is also popular in the Indian subcontinent and Latin America. It suffered a sharp decline in many parts of the world in the 20th century, but is now growing again. In the USA it almost died out in the 1970’s and 80’s, but sales grew by a staggering 500% in a seven year period in the 1990’s. Currently it is used by 10%, or about half a million Britons, every year, with annual growth of about 12%.
Why is homeopathy controversial?
Homeopathy is controversial because of its use of highly dilute medicines. For the homeopathic practitioner the main problem is to find the medicine which most closely matches the disease and the type of patient. But from the scientific viewpoint the most challenging aspect of homeopathy is the use of so-called ‘ultramolecular’ dilutions.
Homeopathic medicines are made by a process of serial dilution and succussion, sometimes known as potentisation, (succussion means vigorous shaking), in steps of 1:10 (denoted x) or 1:100 (c or cH). Matter is composed of particles (atoms and molecules), so that if you dilute a substance enough, you will eventually dilute it out altogether. The homeopathic medicines sold in most pharmacies in the UK are in 6c and 30c dilutions. While the 6c dilution is likely to contain molecules of the starting substance, it is extremely unlikely that a 30c dilution does. Such dilutions are called ‘ultramolecular’.
This is a problem! But recent scientific work suggests that it may not be an insuperable one. Homeopaths think that their medicines contain information, held by the water/alcohol mixture in which they are made. From the chemical viewpoint homeopathic medicines consist of water, alcohol and lactose (from the pills). But think of a floppy disk or video tape: chemically it consists of vinyl and ferric oxide, but it can store large amounts of information. This information is stored in a physical form (the alignment of the dipoles of ferric oxide), which cannot be detected by chemical analysis. There is now growing evidence that the process of preparation of homeopathic medicines alters the structure of the water and this modification of the structure of water carries information.