Healing with homeopathy: coaxing the body to restore itself - Healthy Remedies

Vegetarian Times, Oct, 1996 by Luise Light

PAT COLE, M.D., CONSIDERED her options. Despite a healthful lifestyle, she'd been diagnosed with high blood pressure and now faced a prospect that had confronted her patients over the years: taking medication for the rest of her life. Observing the worry lines spreading across her face, Cole's physician suggested first trying an alternative therapy, such as acupuncture or homeopathy. They couldn't hurt, Cole's physician advised her, and in fact, they had helped a number of patients.

Cole, a medical educator who directs the family-practice residency training program at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, considered herself an open-minded physician. She was willing to try innovative therapies if they promised to be both safe and effective, but homeopathy was virgin territory. She was dubious because she knew nothing at all about it, but the recommendation of a trusted colleague carried a lot of weight. She decided to give it a try.

At her first visit, the homeopath conducted an interview that lasted more than an hour, covering everything from the effects of weather on her body to feelings about her boyfriend. After this lengthy discussion, the homeopath concluded that Cole's high blood pressure stemmed from grief over the sudden death of a younger sister, three years earlier. The homeopathic remedy that was just right for her symptom picture was Natur mur., little sugar pills impregnated with a highly diluted amount of sodium chloride.

Cole took the prescribed doses of the seemingly useless pills and returned to the homeopath every three months for a year. Despite her initial skepticism, Cole stuck with the program because her blood pressure steadily declined. When we interviewed her, she expected it to normalize within six months. Had Cole taken conventional medication, she says, her blood pressure would have been controlled as long as she took the drug, but she probably would never be free of medication.

Was it the homeopathic remedy that made the difference? "On the face of it," says Cole, "it makes no sense medically. In fact, it has all the earmarks of quackery. But I'm a pragmatist, and my experience tells me it worked for me. I don't know how or why it worked, but let's face it, science can't explain everything."

A NEW/OLD KIND OF MEDICINE

HOMEOPATHIC MEDICINE is built on the idea that the body seeks balance--physical, mental and emotional--and is capable of self-healing. Like practitioners of other forms of natural medicine, such as acupuncture, chiropractic or herbalism, homeopaths read symptoms as signs that the body is struggling to correct an underlying imbalance. Rather than suppress symptoms, homeopaths seek to identify the deeper problem and then stimulate the body to correct the imbalance.

An 18th-century German physician named Samuel Hahnemann developed the core concepts underpinning homeopathic medicine after he became disgusted with the standard medical approaches of purging, bleeding, blistering and cauterizing. Convinced that these therapies weakened and killed patients more often than they cured them, he quit his successful private practice and translated healing-arts papers from around the world.

While translating a medical book by Jesuit missionaries from Peru, Hahnemann was intrigued with their explanation that cinchona bark, a source of quinine, was effective against malaria because it was bitter. Curious, Hahnemann tasted some of the bark and found it produced fleeting symptoms of a malaria attack. This experience set Hahnemann on a 20-year odyssey leading him to develop the fundamentals of homeopathic medicine.

Hahnemann, his family and students evaluated hundreds of natural substances from plants, animals and minerals. Based on these experiments, Hahnemann established the "law of similars." According to this principle, substances that produce symptoms of specific diseases in healthy people can kick-start healing in patients suffering from these diseases, provided they're administered in very dilute form. For example, Nux vomico, a plant that causes vomiting when ingested, is the homeopathic remedy for nausea.

Paradoxically, Habnemann found that the more dilute a homeopathic remedy, the fewer adverse reactions patients suffered and the stronger and more lasting the effects. In fact, some remedies are so dilute not one single molecule of the original natural substance can be detected in them. The extremely weak remedy is created by a series of carefully controlled steps.

First, an extract is made of a plant, mineral or animal substance (5 percent of remedies come from animals), which is then mixed with alcohol to create a tincture. One drop of this tincture is mixed with either nine drops of water, called an X potency, or 99 drops, a C potency, and vigorously shaken, called "succussion." This process is repeated multiple times to create the different potencies seen on remedy labels, anywhere from 20X to 200X or 20C to 200C; a 20X potency, for example, means the remedy has undergone 20 dilutions. Next, small sugar pills are impregnated with the solution, or the solution is packaged in bottles with droppers. Low-potency remedies (those below 200C) are sold in retail stores; high-potency remedies are used by trained and licensed homeopathic practitioners.