A Brief Introduction | More Details on Homeopathy | View All

1. What homeopathy is not
2. What is homeopathy?
3. How does homeopathy work?
4. What is a homeopathic remedy?
5. Is there any research that shows homeopathy to be effective?
6. What happens during the initial visit to a homeopathic physician?
7. Can I continue taking prescription drugs while under homeopathic treatment?
8. Which diseases can be treated with homeopathy?
9. Can a pregnant woman or a newborn baby benefit from homeopathy?
10. How does homeopathy deal with patients affected with problems resulting from emotional trauma, severe grief or the consequence of mood disorders such as anger, depression or anxiety?
11. How does homeopathy address patients with infections diseases?
12. Which conditions are outside the scope of homeopathy?
13. Homeopathy: past, present, and future

3. How does homeopathy work?
To answer this question, we must first understand the basic causes of disease. In general, one can assert that disease is a state of imbalance resulting from the combination of several factors. These factors include external influences such as lifestyle (diet, exercise, and mental hygiene), environmental exposures, microbes (bacteria and viruses), as well as physical and emotional trauma. However, in order for these external factors to actually cause a disease, the individual must also possess some internal, intrinsic, constitutional susceptibility to certain types of illness, often determined largely by heredity. This susceptibility or sensitivity represents a disturbance or imbalance in an individual’s general state of health. If the person’s overall state of health is weak and/or imbalanced, he or she is more susceptible to many of these external factors and diseases, and generally does a poor job of healing.

For example, consider a group of passengers flying on an airplane in the middle of the cold and flu season. Obviously, there is a very high concentration of bacteria and viruses circulating through the air, to which all of the passengers are exposed. Over the next several days, some of the passengers will develop a cold, flu, or bacterial infection, but many will not. Why is it that we can observe this phenomena in nature to be true? The answer lies in the individual’s unique, intrinsic, constitutional predisposition, as well as the overall strength and balance of the individual’s state of health at that time. Some people are simply more susceptible to developing colds than others. Other people may be prone to developing a cold but only when "off-balance" (under extreme stress, during a period of inadequate sleep, etc). Careful observation reveals that these factors of susceptibility and state of health seem to be more important than the mere exposure to a germ, in determining who will actually get sick. This concept of constitutional susceptibility and state of health also explains why it is so that when some people are exposed to physical or emotional stressors they feel fine or recover easily, while others will, for example, develop a headache. Yet still others exposed to the same stressors will develop a completely different pattern of symptoms or a disease that they are more uniquely susceptible to, including, for example: asthma, hay fever, insomnia, depression and anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pain, fatigue, etc.

Symptoms of disease are evidence that the body is trying to overcome the disease but that it is not fully able to do so on its own. As described above, this inability to overcome disease is due primarily to the individual’s inherent predispositions and imbalanced state of health. Homeopathy works by triggering a reaction of the body to correct the imbalance (the disease state), enabling the organism to rebalance itself globally so that the susceptibility to sickness is greatly decreased and the body’s ability to heal is dramatically enhanced, allowing for a true cure. This healing reaction is triggered by the homeopathic remedy, according to the law of similars. This law of similars asserts that bringing together similar patterns – the disease pattern of the patient and the disease pattern of a similar remedy – will result in the destruction of the patient’s disease pattern.

Precisely how the homeopathic remedy actually propels the body’s healing forces into action is still not entirely understood. However, this does not in any way diminish the extraordinary results that homeopaths and their patients have experienced for over two hundred years. In fact, the precise mechanism of action of many conventional medications used today are still largely unknown. For example, how aspirin worked had not been discovered even after decades of use. Unfortunately, there has always been a tendency of scientists to reject new observations if they contradicted a previously accepted viewpoint. This, however, represents a very biased and unscientific way of looking at the world. It is precisely this type of belief system that rejected the idea that the earth was spherical, when everyone at the time “knew” that the earth was flat.

Despite a proven mechanism of action of homeopathic remedies, several theories have been developed to explain the well-documented results that modern scientific research has confirmed. In general, these theories rely on an underlying philosophy that the body has the ability to heal itself. Homeopathy’s conception of the body’s healing energy is called the vital force, which is similar to the Chinese medicine/acupuncture concept of qi (pronounced “chee”), the Indian medicine/yoga concept of prana, and the chiropractic concept of the body’s innate intelligence. Clearly, under optimal circumstances, the body does indeed have the ability to heal itself, as evidenced by the healing of a cut or wound on the skin, or the body's ability to fight off or resist infections. Because of this ability, homeopathy focuses on treating the patient, rather than the disease. In this way, the vital force can be triggered to react to the disease, so that the body is better able to fight off the disease on its own.

The leading theory that explains how homeopathy works relies upon the phenomenon of homeostasis. Homeostasis is defined as "the state of equilibrium (balance) in the body with respect to various functions and to the fluids and tissues, and the processes through which such bodily equilibrium is maintained." In other words, the body will typically react to outside influences or stressors in an attempt to restore the balance of health, or homeostasis. If the vital force is strong and balanced, it will be able to recover quickly from these outside stressors. However, if it is weak and unbalanced, symptoms will develop as a sign that the body is having trouble overcoming the disease, and a chronic disease may develop.

Homeopathy works by giving the body that is no longer successfully reacting to the disease the help it needs to react in a more complete and balanced way, in order to overcome the disease on its own. When the homeopathic remedy is given, it acts as a new outside influence or stress. The body will, in turn, react to this stressor in an attempt to restore homeostasis. And if the remedy was carefully chosen so that its pattern of symptoms are the most similar (ie, the most homeopathic) to the individual's pattern of symptoms, then the remedy “gains the attention” of the vital force and encourages it to react to the remedy. In reacting to the remedy, the body’s vital force is “tricked” in a sense into actually reacting against the disease at the same time, because the symptoms of the remedy and the disease are so similar. With the help of the remedy, the body's reaction to the disease is optimized, leading to an eventual cure.

Another way of looking at how the body’s healing reaction may be triggered is to compare one’s state of health to that of a pendulum. A healthy state of homeostasis is one in which the pendulum is hanging at its lowest center point, perfectly balanced. As the pendulum reacts to different stressors, it will swing back and forth but eventually will come to rest, balanced at its lowest center point again, assuming that body is operating efficiently, in a state of equilibrium or homeostasis. If not, and the body is in a diseased state, the body could, for example, overreact to an otherwise harmless substance, as is the case with an allergic or inflammatory reaction. The pendulum could swing wildly out of proportion to the stressor, and get stuck, for example, off to the right. The conventional medical approach would be to try to force the pendulum back to the left, in the same way that antidepressants would be used to force the brain out of its depressed state, or anti-inflammatory medications used to suppress inflammation. The homeopathic approach would be to use a remedy to gently nudge the pendulum a bit further to the right, in the same direction as the pendulum’s already distorted position. By introducing a stimulus which is similar to the existing pattern of disease or distortion, the pendulum becomes unstuck and then the body’s vital force, or homeostatic mechanisms, are able to react to this further state of imbalance, bringing it back toward homeostasis.

In contrast, conventional medications are generally given for their chemical effects on the organism, which are opposite to the state of disease. For example, an anti-inflammatory is given to suppress symptoms of inflammation. Conversely, in homeopathy, a remedy is given to provoke a reaction of the organism. This reaction is the healing reaction, not a direct chemical effect. Since only the living organism can truly heal itself, the homeopathic remedy does not do the healing; it is merely an influence used to provoke a reaction of the vital force to bring about recovery. The greater the degree of similarity between the pattern of symptoms that are provoked by the remedy on a healthy person and the pattern of symptoms displayed by the person who is sick, the greater will be the recovery.

Thus, the patient overcomes the disease because of the restoration of the vital force. When the vital force is normalized, the individual's susceptibility to disease decreases over time. In one of our prior examples, the patient becomes less and less susceptible to colds and infections in general. Similarly, under homeopathic treatment, chronic pain, headaches, allergies, and asthma tend to become less frequent and weaker over time, until they eventually just go away. This decreased sensitivity or susceptibility is a common scenario observed during the course of homeopathic treatment of virtually all disease because homeopathy, instead of merely suppressing the symptoms, actually addresses the fundamental cause of the disease. The ultimate result of homeopathic treatment is a true cure, which the body accomplishes naturally. The total health of the individual is fully restored, and the remedy and/or other medications are often no longer needed.