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About Homoeopathy
Homoeopathy
Safe and effective
Way to permanent cure
Majority of the population has been using homoeopathic medicine
occasionally. Many more have heard about it.
Yet, only a very small percentage of the public is regularly seeing
a homoeopath as the first doctor of the choice or using homoeopathic
medicines as a first line therapy of choice.
Why is that so?
This communication addresses the myths surrounding homeopathy and
the facts behind them.
What is homeopathy?
Homeopathy (also homœopathy or homoeopathy; from the Greek ὅμοιος,
hómoios, "similar" + πάθος, páthos, "suffering" or "disease") is a
form of alternative medicine first defined by Samuel Hahnemann in
the 18th century. Homeopathic practitioners contend that an ill
person can be treated using a substance that can produce, in a
healthy person, symptoms similar to those of the illness. According
to homeopaths, serial dilution, with shaking between each dilution,
removes the toxic effects of the remedy while the qualities of the
substance are retained by the diluent (water, sugar, or alcohol).
The end product is often so diluted that it is indistinguishable
from pure water, sugar or alcohol. Practitioners select treatments
according to a patient consultation that explores the physical and
psychological state of the patient, both of which are considered
important to selecting the remedy.
Claims for efficacy of homeopathic treatment beyond the placebo
effect are unsupported by scientific and clinical studies. While
advocates point to positive results reported in high-impact journals
as evidence for its efficacy, the number of such high-quality
studies is small, the conclusions are not definitive, and
duplication of the results, a key test of scientific validity, has
proven problematic at best. Meta-analyses of homeopathy, which
compare the results of many studies, face difficulty in controlling
for the combination of publication bias and the fact that most of
these studies suffer from serious shortcomings in their methods.
Homeopathy is scientifically implausible and "is diametrically
opposed to modern pharmaceutical knowledge." For example, the common
use of remedies that are so highly diluted that they contain no
molecules of the substance being diluted is in contradiction to
mainstream science's basic understanding of how nature works. The
lack of convincing scientific evidence supporting its efficacy and
its use of remedies without active ingredients have caused
homeopathy to be regarded as pseudoscience; quackery; or, in the
words of a 1998 medical review, "placebo therapy at best and
quackery at worst."
Homeopathic remedies are generally considered safe, with rare
exceptions, although homeopaths have been criticized for putting
patients at risk by advising them to avoid conventional medicine,
such as vaccinations, anti-malarial drugs and antibiotics. In many
countries, the laws that govern the regulation and testing of
conventional drugs do not apply to homeopathic remedies. Current
usage around the world varies from two percent of people in the
United Kingdom and the United States using homeopathy in any one
year to 15 percent in India, where it is considered part of Indian
traditional medicine. In the UK, the National Health Service runs
five homeopathic hospitals, and in the 1990s, between 5.9 and 7.5
percent of English family doctors are reported to have prescribed
homeopathic remedies, a figure rising to 49 percent in Scotland. In
2005, around 100,000 physicians used homeopathy worldwide, making it
one of the most popular and widely used complementary therapies.
History
At the time of the inception of homeopathy, the late 1700s,
mainstream medicine employed such measures as bloodletting and
purging, the use of laxatives and enemas, and the administration of
complex mixtures, such as Venice treacle, which was made from 64
substances including opium, myrrh, and viper's flesh. Such measures
often worsened symptoms and sometimes proved fatal. While the
virtues of these treatments had been extolled for centuries,
Hahnemann rejected such methods as irrational and unadvisable.
Instead, he favored the use of single drugs at lower doses and
promoted an immaterial, vitalistic view of how living organisms
function, believing that diseases have spiritual, as well as
physical causes. (At the time, vitalism was part of mainstream
science; in the twentieth century, however, medicine discarded
vitalism, with the development of microbiology, the germ theory of
disease, and advances in chemistry.) Hahnemann also advocated
various lifestyle improvements to his patients, including exercise,
diet, and cleanliness.
Hahnemann's concept
 Samuel Hahnemann conceived of homeopathy while translating a medical
treatise by Scottish physician and chemist William Cullen into
German. Being sceptical of Cullen’s theory concerning cinchona’s
action in malaria, Hahnemann ingested some of the bark specifically
to see if it cured fever "by virtue of its effect of strengthening
the stomach". Upon ingesting the bark, he noticed few stomach
symptoms, but did experience fever, shivering and joint pain,
symptoms similar to some of the early symptoms of malaria, the
disease that the bark was ordinarily used to treat. From this,
Hahnemann came to believe that all effective drugs produce symptoms
in healthy individuals similar to those of the diseases that they
can treat. This later became known as the "law of similars", the
most important concept of homeopathy. The term "homeopathy" was
coined by Hahnemann and first appeared in print in 1807, although he
began outlining his theories of "medical similars" in a series of
articles and monographs in 1796.
Hahnemann began to test what effects substances produced in humans,
a procedure which would later become known as "proving". These
time-consuming tests required subjects to clearly record all of
their symptoms as well as the ancillary conditions under which they
appeared. Hahnemann saw this data as a way of identifying substances
suitable for the treatment of particular diseases. The first
collection of provings was published in 1805 and a second collection
of 65 remedies appeared in his book, Materia Medica Pura, in 1810.
Hahnemann believed that large doses of drugs that caused similar
symptoms would only aggravate illness, and so he advocated extreme
dilutions of the substances; he devised a technique for making
dilutions that he believed would preserve a substance's therapeutic
properties while removing its harmful effects, proposing that this
process aroused and enhanced "spirit-like medicinal powers held
within a drug". He gathered and published a complete overview of his
new medical system in his 1810 book, The Organon of the Healing Art,
whose 6th edition, published in 1921, is still used by homeopaths
today.
Rise to popularity and early criticism
During the 19th century homeopathy grew in popularity. In
1830, the first homeopathic schools opened, and throughout the 19th
century dozens of homeopathic institutions appeared in Europe and
the United States. Because of mainstream medicine's reliance on
blood-letting and untested, often dangerous medicines, patients of
homeopaths often had better outcomes than those of mainstream
doctors. Homeopathic treatments, even if ineffective, would almost
surely cause no harm, making the users of homeopathic medicine less
likely to be killed by the medicine that was supposed to be helping
them. The relative success of homeopathy in the 18th century may
have led to the abandonment of the ineffective and harmful
treatments of bloodletting and purging and to have begun the move
towards more effective, scientific medicine.
For More Details Please Contact Dr. GPS Dhingra
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