What Homeopathy Can Do
You could say in a few words, that homeopathy can do everything that orthodox medicine can do, and more in certain circumstances. Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, became aware of the homeopathic principle, that what a medicine in certain forms and doses can cause, it can also cure by experimenting on himself.
He discovered the effect that cinchona bark, quinine, had when he developed symptoms like those of malarial fever, after drinking a quantity of the alcoholic bark extract. Because quinine was used for treating malaria, he realized that what a drug in certain circumstances can cause in healthy people it can also cure in sick people. The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are very much like those of cholera, so in certain forms and very minute doses, arsenic can be used as a treatment for cholera. This principle was the cornerstone of modern homeopathy. Before Hahnemann people did have ideas on these lines, but they never brought them out in a very well-developed form. This experiment with the cinchona bark was a very monumental event in the history of medicine, not just homeopathic medicine, but in the orthodox medicine of Hahnemann’s day.
Hahnemann’s ideas greatly influenced the course of medicine not only in the field of drug therapy, but some of his other ideas, particularly putting emphasis on the patient as an individual, on hygiene, on diet, and so forth. You could say that what the falling apple was to Newton or the swinging lamp to Galileo, was the cinchona bark to Hahnemann.
After experimenting with cinchona bark he tested other medicinal substances on himself and others, taking them until disease-like symptoms appeared. Testing medicines on healthy people by homoeopaths is referred to as a “proving”. Today when provings are conducted, they are done on a very strict scientific lines- demonstrating the scientific element in homeopathy. People who know and have studied homeopathy can see it, not as a strong left-over from the last century, but as the only strictly scientific system of medicine applicable to human beings.
The people who are taking part in a proving are examined medically to start with since no one is strictly ‘healthy’ – blood sugar levels, blood count, blood pressure, general medical history is taken down. These tests are also taken during and after the proving. Then they are given medicines to take without being told which medicine it is, in fact it might only be a placebo (some are given just to see how effective the real medicine is in altering people). The provers then record the changes that they feel or see taking place under the influence of the medicine.
It is preferable to have a wide range of people – ranging in age and sex. Provers shouldn’t be able to communicate with each other. Provers’ diaries are collated then the symptoms, that all of them have experienced, can be attributed quite reliably to the medicine. These are not just vague aches and pains, but quite definite, clear things, often unusual, of which there is no doubt that the medicine has caused.
Having found this, that what a medicine can cause in healthy people, then when a sick person appears complaining of the same symptoms that the provers had, that now medicine can be given to him with confidence to its safety, and the physician giving it can be almost certain that it will be curative, or, at the very least, palliate. What other medicines are tested so thoroughly? White mice can’t tell us their head aches, or they have ringing in the ears, their dreams, etc – that’s the defect in orthodox medicine. It is possible to induce in experimental animals an infection – symptoms fairly closely resembling human disease , and medicines can be tested on the animals and the disease be alleviated or go away, but the side effects are only found out by the time it is transferred to experiments and trials on human beings, or when the medicine has been released onto the general market.
But in homeopathy there is no such thing as a side-effect. Every effect is a known effect. It is impossible to take a homeopathic medicine and get something that is really an unknown, rare and strange side-effect. If the medicine has been proved properly, someone else has done all the testing for you – you’re not a guinea-pig at all. Homeopathy has thousands of medicines that have been tested, some of them more thoroughly than others – perhaps 400 medicines have been tested extremely well ; and all these medicines are ready lying in wait for any kind of illnesses. Not matter how strange or peculiar someone’s collection of symptoms can be, there is very likely to be a homeopathic medicine for them. You don’t have to wait until someone else in the world with those strange symptoms appears and several medicines are tested on them until the right one is found – no, the medicines are already there just waiting for the patients to come along and match them.
