Homeopathy
EVOLUTION OF HOMEOPATHY
Homeopathy is an experimental therapeutic method to treat
the sick. It uses remedies which, if administered in a sizeable quantity to
a healthy person, can produce symptoms similar to those which need to be
treated.
HISTORY
OF HOMEOPATHY.
La
aplicación es probablemente tan antigua como la Humanidad. Es probablemente
el analogismo mágico, así como un elemental empirismo, lo que sugirió al
hombre primitivo tal conducta terapéutica. La enfermedad, de hecho, se
manifiesta como un elemento natural de defensa contra los múltiples traumas
ambientales. Nada más intuitivo que tratar de imitarla con una enfermedad
artificial parecida, pero más controlable.
The
application of Homeopathy is probably as old as the history of mankind. It
is probably the conception of magic, and the elementary empiricism that gave
primitive man his therapeutic tools. Disease, in fact, manifests itself as a
natural element of defence against multiple environmental traumas. There is
nothing more intuitive than to try to imitate it with a similar but more
controllable artificial disease.
In the work
of Hippocrates, the Hippocratic Corpus (4th century BC), we find references
of two ways of treating disease: by means of opposites (contraria contrariis
curantur), or by means
of that which is similar (similia similibus curantur).
The
patient’s health is the supreme law, to heal in a solicitous, safe and
pleasant way; helping to relieve pain is a divine act; the similar cures the
similar, the opposite cures the opposite. Nothing which may be useful to
help the patient to recover his/her health and relieve his/her pain should
be excluded. In this way, the doctor, can use opposite remedies to relieve
pain (when there are no valid alternatives). The doctor continues to be
"the minister and not the master of nature ".
Classic
examples of homeopathic treatment, in Hippocrates’s time, are the use of
small doses of white hellebore in choleriform diarrhoea and the use of
Spanish fly for cystitis. Such substances provoke toxicologically similar
symptoms to those of the diseases for which they were being used as a remedy.
Galen
took up the Hellenistic tradition, but he stressed the control of pain by
means of opposite remedies. His voluminous works were to become the
reference point for the entire Christian Middle Ages.
The
law of opposite remedies guided medical thought for many years, beyond the
Middle Ages. The intuitions of some great thinkers, especially Paracelsus,
were disregarded.
At
the end of the 18th century, the German doctor Christian Samuel Hahnemann
(1755-1843), born in Meissen (Saxony), had the brilliant idea of
proposing again the application of the law of the similar as the only
correct therapeutic method. Hahnemann, an experienced doctor, realising the
inefficiency and dangerousness of the medicine of his time, abandoned his
profession when he was near 40 years, after having openly confessed his
inability to cure his patients. In order to survive he became a translator,
and one day while translating Cullen's Materia Medica, unconvinced by the
interpretation of the action mechanism of keno bark, which was widely used
in the treatment of malaria, he took a generous dose for several days and
noticed the appearance of symptoms similar to those of malarial fever.
Hahnemann, remembering Hippocrates, hypothesised that it was possible to
treat a given thing with something similar.
To
verify such a hypothesis, he began to experiment on himself, relatives,
friends and finally, his own pupils, to note the effect of several
substances from that time’s therapeutic arsenal, besides other natural
substances and products that he prepared himself. At the same time he was
able to verify the therapeutic effect of his theory in patients who
presented morbid symptoms similar to those he had caused experimentally.
With
the efficiency of the new method of treatment proven, Hahnemann published
its principles in a Section published in a newspaper in Huffeland in 1796.
Throughout his work, Hahnemann applied literally Galileo's method:
observation, interpretive hypothesis, experimental checking, confirmation of
hypothesis, theory.
On
the 14th of May 1796, Jenner practised the first anti-smallpox
vaccination, which showed the efficiency of applying the law of similarity
in prevention. In 1810, Hahnemann published the first edition of the ORGANON, in which the homeopathic doctrine is stated in its entirety
according to the vitalist thought of that time. From 1820 to 1827, the Saxon
doctor devoted himself to producing Pure
Materia Medica, which drew on information from toxicology and on
experiments by himself and his collaborators, and included 67 remedies.
In
1828 all five parts of the Treatise
on Chronic Diseases were published. Here Hahnemann considered the
problem of resistance to correct treatment and of continuous relapse into
illness. His miasmal interpretation opened the way for the modern theory of
diathesis, essentially for understanding the nature of disease.
In
this work several remedies are re-examined under this perspective and others
appear for the first time. He was continually concerned with how to
individualise a single set of symptoms, which might be repeated over time,
by location or in the tenacious and complex patterns of illness.
In
1842 Hahnemann wrote the sixth edition of the Organon, which was published
for the first time by Richard Haehl in 1921, and which was translated into
many other languages.
In
the first five editions of the Organon, the preparation of homeopathic
remedies was described in detail by means of successive steps from a decimal
or centesimal to a different dilution, so as to obtain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 30
DH or the CH and other dilutions. Hahnemann’s pupils and all the great
homeopaths of that time worked with such dilutions.
Following
the appearance of the sixth edition, dilutions of one fifty-thousandth
started to be used. It is in fact it was in the last edition of the Organon
that Hahnemann spoke for the first time about such dilutions.
These were
little-used. However, the Korsakovian dilutions became widespread. All in
all, the following observation, by Hahnemann himself after his years of
experience, has been confirmed:
“The increasingly weak dilution of the homeopathic
product does not reduce its action, provided that a careful succession of
the container is made in every phase. On the contrary, the toxicity is
eliminated and even new properties of the medicine become evident,
especially at a psychological level ".
Whatever the
orientations of its different schools, there are three the fundamental
principles of Homeopathy:
The Principle of Similarity
The Principle of Infinitesimality
The Principle of Individuality
THE PRINCIPLE OF SIMILARITY
This is
based on the use of substances that cause, in the healthy individual, the
same symptoms that the sick subject is experiencing.
THE PRINCIPLE OF INFINITESIMALITY
For
a substance to be converted into a homeopathic remedy, it must be subjected
to a periodic succession of dilution and dynamization.
The
concept of succession or dynamization is fundamental, and is a differential
factor in the manufacture of homeopathic medicines. Depending on the degree
of dilution, we can classify homeopathic medicines as:
-
Dynamodilutions: dilutions below Avogadro's number, i.e. 6 ' 023 x 10-23. The limit for the decimal dilutions would be up to 23 DH, and for the centesimal dilutions up to 11 - 12 CH.
-
Dynamisations: these cannot be considered to be dilutions because they no longer contain any molecules. Concentration is greater than Avogadro's number. These are those dilutions over 23 DH or 12 CH.
THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY
The
homeopath’s therapy is based on finding and ordering the symptoms
expressed by the patient, independently of its allopathic nosologic
classification.
Symptomatology
is regarded as the integration of external and internal pathological factors
and the individual’s capacity of adjustment to them. This is what we call
the disease "field". Homeopathy is a medicine based on the
treatment of that field.
Homeopathic
Schools
Since Hahnemann's work several schools have differed
according to their Homeopathic practice. There are four schools of
particular relevance:
1.
The Unicist School:
This has kept closer to the original work of Hahnemann. They are based on
the use of one single homeopathic principle for the treatment of different
ailments in a patient:
"In
no case is it necessary, or indeed tolerable, to administer to one patient
more than one simple remedy at a time, or to mix several different drugs.
Homeopathy is the art of truly recovering, simply and naturally, it forbids
the application of two different medicinal substances to a patient at the
same time. " Paragraph 273 of the Organon.
2.
Kentist School: This is
based on the previously mentioned work of J. Tyler Kent. This school
considers that practically all pathologies are of mental origin. Treatments
are based on an exhaustive exploration of the patient’s psychological
behaviour. It pays special attention to the peculiarities in the way the
disease manifests itself in a patient, regardless of what is common for any
another patient. Kent described the relationship between the symptoms and
the homeopathic remedy in his famous work, "Kent’s Repertory".
3. The
Pluralist School. Nowadays
this is the most common tendency. It accepts the possibility of prescribing
several homeopathic medicines to the individual, though not at the same
time. It is the most open school, and does not exclude the use of
conventional treatments as well as the use of certain complex remedies for
some pathologies. The French Pluralist School is the one we will follow in
this course.
4.
Complexist School: The followers of this school do not
reject unicism. It originated with Johan Gottfried Rademacher (1772-1850), a
doctor following Paracelsus’s theories.
In the Paracelsus’s Spagiria, it is considered
that natural substances correspond to an archetypal septenary classification,
and it is accepted that several substances with the same attribute can be
combined. This is how the complexism was born - by joining several different
remedies with different tendency or tropism in relation to the same
pathological situation.
Knowledge of Dr. Rademacher’s principles was spread by Antoine Nebel, a Swiss homeopath, who incorporated into this practice the concept of drainage, consisting of the detoxification of body tissues by means of complex combinations of low potency remedies.
Since Hahnemann’s time the Complexist Homeopathy has had a large number of followers, notably Rouy, Vannier and Reckeweg.