The rising profile of homeopathy has produced something of a dilemma in the world of medicine: does it work or doesn't it? If homeopathic medicine is nothing but fraud, quackery and placebo, as many of its opponents would maintain, then a large number of competently trained homeopaths and doctors, with countless thousands of dedicated lay practitioners, have been led up the medical garden path. On the other hand, if homeopathic medicine is effective, then for the first time in more than a hundred years the Western world is on the verge of accepting an entirely new system of medicine.
During its 170 years of existence, homeopathy has been the center of continual and often bitter medical controversy. It has been particularly opposed by orthodox medicine; yet the origins of homeopathic medicine are both honorable and orthodox.
It was developed in Germany by the research of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1834), who as well as being an experienced orthodox physician was also a competent chemist, a good mineralogist and botanist, and an able translator of eight different languages. His research stemmed from a dissatisfaction with the standard medical practices of his time: routine bleedings, heroic purgings with cathartics, and administration of large doses of crude drugs. While translating into German the Materia Medica by William Cullen, a Scottish professor of medicine, he was struck by a hitherto unexplored medical observation, first mentioned by Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.). Cullen had proposed that the notable success of cinchona (an extract of quinine bark) in the treatment of swamp fever was due to its value as a stomach tonic. Hahnemann disagreed, and in his research on the question decided to take a course of the cinchona extract himself. To his surprise, he developed a set of symptoms remarkably similar to those of the swamp fever it was used to treat. All the symptoms disappeared when he stopped taking it. From this Hahnemann produced the first axiom of homeopathy-Let Likes be Cured by Likes, otherwise known as the Law of Similars-and so began his life's work.
His approach to medicine represented a dramatic move away from the established method. Allopaths establish the existence of a particular disease, clarify its symptoms, and then test the effectiveness of various medicines on it, by the use of opposites. An illness accompanied by fever and diarrhea, for example, would call for the combined use of medicines that are anti-febrile and others that normally constipate, and so, in a crude way, a total balance would be found by using a number of appropriate medicines together.
Homeopaths tried the opposite approach: first test a substance for medicinal use, they said, by giving it to healthy volunteers, and carefully noting the symptoms it produces. A substance that produces a runny nose, watery, red eyes and repeated sneezing, for example, would be of great value in treatment of hay fever. The common onion produces just those symptoms (as countless cooks can guarantee) and has now achieved an established place in homeopathic therapeutics. In essence, allopathic medicine embodies the law of opposites, homeopathic medicine the law of similars.
First, the symptoms must match closely before onion will have a therapeutic effect; this is embodied in their Law of the Single Remedy, which states that the most effective result will come from the most similar remedy. The second important axiom for treatment is the Law of the Minimal Dose. This states that the effective dose for a disorder is the minimum amount necessary to produce a response.
The process is known as potentization, and involves a sequence of progressive dilution and a rhythmic shaking, termed succussion. In the normal case, I part of the source substance is added to 9 parts of water and shaken rhythmically. This is known as a Ix (decimal) dilution, or I part in I0. One part of this is then taken and added to another 9 parts of water, again succussed, to give a 2x dilution, or I part in I00. These dilutions can be repeated a large number of times. While the toxicity of such medicines is obviously very low, their efficacy has been seriously questioned, as dilutions above 24x can be dismissed on pharmacological grounds as completely inert.
Logically, one of the first areas to investigate for support (or the lack of it) in homeopathy is the area of pharmacology, or drug action. And, contrary to expectations, some surprising support is appearing.
Ask a pharmacologist about the biological effect of very low concentrations of common substances on living organisms and the answer will be that there is typically very little or zero response. Ask for some theoretical backup, and in short order you will find yourself confronted by one of the pharmacological tools of the trade, the Dose-Response curve. In brief, the curve illustrates one of the rules of thumb in drug use: that an increased dose of drug will give an increased effect.
It is interesting that one of the very earliest laws of pharmacology, known as the Arndt-Schulz Law (see illustration) had already expressed the homeopathic effect. Formulated by Arndt in 1888, the law states: For every substance, small doses stimulate, moderate doses inhibit, large doses kill.
Allopathic medicine, with its emphasis on moderate drug doses, works in the inhibitory part of the scale. The result is seen in the typically inhibitory medicines produced: antihistamines, antibiotics, antacids, cough suppressants and so on, laying the basis for the so called "suppressant" effect of drugs.
Homeopathic medicine, on the other hand, begins at the stimulatory end of the curve, and moves to the left, into the smaller and smaller dose range. Its emphasis is on the stimulation of the body's natural balancing mechanisms.
Energy storage within molecules in biological systems lies within the realm of biophysics rather than biochemistry. Biophysics is a new field, having become established only within the last twenty years or so. Small wonder, therefore, that the established medical world knows little of its existence, or the promise it holds in explaining the action of the medicines of energy, such as homeopathy, acupuncture, psychic and spirit healing and radionics.
Standing midway between the cooking power of microwave and the destructive power of lasers is vibratory energy. It is in the storage of vibratory energy in water molecules during the succussion (shaking) process that homeopathic medicine places many of its hopes for a scientific explanation of its action. It is proposed that during the collision process, vibratory energy is exchanged between the source drug and the water, and that the water is left with a vibratory imprint of the drug. Further succussion makes the imprint deeper, which explains why the medicines are regarded as acting more strongly as the dilution increases.
As a useful summary of all published trails, an article in the February 9, 1991 British Medical Journal reviewed 107 clinical trails of homeopathy. Seventy-seven percent indicated positive results for such conditions as asthma, flu, hay fever, migraine headache, arthritis, trauma and duration of labor. The homeopaths of the world can now be reassured that what we always knew to be true is at last starting to appear in the research: that homeopathy works.