How homeopathy works
To understand how homeopathy works, it’s helpful to know a bit about how homeopathy differs from conventional medicine and to see homeopathy in its historical context.
Homeopathy was once conventional medicine
It’s largely forgotten these days that, until the advent in the early 20th century of patentable and highly profitable orthodox drugs, homeopathy was a major system of treatment that had a sound reputation, and was taught in over 25 per cent of US medical schools as well as being practised all over Europe and the Americas.
With the beginnings of the drug boom, a new supposedly scientific paradigm (worldview) emerged, based on laboratory testing on animals and on clinical trials. Traditional methods were re-framed as ‘not scientific’, and even common-sense reliance on good food, home nursing and rest was increasingly pushed aside in the stampede for newer and better ‘magic bullets’. Suddenly, what mattered was that the symptoms were opposed or pushed from view, and the age-old concept that the body is capable of self-healing, with help, became devalued.
The importance of acute illness
Drugs and surgery have their place, but, sadly, as a result of the emphasis on getting rid of symptoms, rather than encouraging the body to restore balance, many doctors forgot that disease is a natural and necessary part of life. Hippocrates (often called the father of modern medicine) called this ponos, or ‘the bit that hurts’: in fact, acute disease is evidence that the body is throwing off unwanted challenges to health. Usually, this is successful – after all, how often have you felt better after a good cry, a bout of diarrhoea or a discharge in the form of a well done (swift to resolve) cold? However, if we interfere with this natural self-cleaning mechanism, for example by taking suppressive chemicals (like antibiotics or steroids for example), homeopaths believe that we can drive the problem underground, leading to chronic disease.
ME or chronic fatigue syndrome, for example, often called ‘post-viral fatigue syndrome’ tends to arise after a suppressed flu or other virus. During the course of successful treatment, we often see that the chronic illness reverts to the acute form again, and the patient experiences a curative ‘return of old (acute) symptoms’. The prognosis improves when this happens, as long as the returned acute illness is fully expressed by the body.
Homeopathy works by doing the exact opposite of conventional medicine. Instead of suppressing symptoms (the signs of deeper disease), homeopathy mimics and uses the disease process to get to the cure.
Law of similars
Homeopaths do this by employing the ‘law of similars’. For example, substantial doses of poisonous deadly nightshade (Belladonna) produce a clinical picture almost identical to scarlet fever (a once-common streptococcal tonsillitis infection hardly ever seen today, since the advent of antibiotics). The scarlet fever patient has a bright red rash, is burning hot, dry, headachey and perhaps even delerious, with dilated and staring eyes and extreme restlessness. An energised micro-dose or two of homeopathic Belladonna, rather than worsening these symptoms, will often dramatically cure symptoms any symptoms like this that are similar to scarlet fever.
Homeopathic microdoses
The strange thing about homeopathy is that really tiny diluted and energised doses of substances are used as treatment. The more dilute and shaken (to energise) the mixture is, the more powerful the remedy seems to be. This applies even if the original substance is so dilute that there can be no chemical molecules left.
The apparent illogicality of this homeopathic principle has led to great hostility amongst some conventional doctors. They seem to argue ‘it can’t work, so therefore it doesn’t’. But as a 12 year old patient indignantly exclaimed to me once after watching the infamous BBC Horizon tv programme which slated homeopathy: ‘how can they say it doesn’t work? I know it does, I’ve felt it work in my body! And I didn’t even think it would work!’.
The information field
In fact, there’s nothing inherently implausible about homeopathy. It merely requires a shift of scientific model, thinking in terms of substances (no matter how dilute) being part of an information field of energy. The medicine carries a message which knocks out the disease ‘similar’. The medicine gets more effective through dilution because we are diluting out what is technically termed ‘noise’, meaning uneccessary information that interferes with the message we want conveyed to the body’s tissues.
Because we don’t yet fully understand the bio-electrical properties of water, we can only theorise about how this information field is conveyed. Nevertheless, it’s clear that information is passed on in this way. Just because we can’t yet explain the exact mechanism, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. After all, it once seemed impossible that the world wasn’t flat.
