Homeopathy is the largest form of alternative medicine to have evolved out of Europe in the past several hundred years. Widely adopted in the West, especially the United States, homeopathy is a multi-billion dollar industry, continually popularized by well known figures such as Dr. Mercola. 

Homeopathy is based upon simple ideas that run in sharp contrast to the esoteric foundations of conventional medicine. Patients of homeopathy are often made to feel like they themselves are in the driver’s seat of their own recovery, and are given resources and medical explanations that are simple to comprehend and practice. Often lower-cost than their conventional medicine counterparts, homeopathic cures are seen by some as the most accessible path toward healing and recovery for various illnesses. 

Clearly, homeopathy is popular. But where did homeopathy come from?

Homeopathy was developed by German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755 - 1843). Hahnemann had little luck making a living in the first decade following his medical education. During his early career struggles, Hahnemann experimented with taking small daily doses of quinine, then a common treatment for malaria. He discovered that small regular doses produced symptoms similar to malaria, but with much lesser severity. It was here that Hahnemann cooked up the notion that by treating a patient with medication that produces symptoms similar to those of certain illnesses, the illnesses might be healed or prevented. 

In some ways, this concept was in keeping with standard medical understanding. After all, the entire principle of vaccination is in giving a patient a small dose of some infectious agent, thereby training their immune system to fight off the real thing. However, Hahnemann and his acolytes took the principle much farther. Symptoms were used to fight symptoms, without any deeper investigation into the cause and effect of illness and cure. 

This was a system that anyone could easily understand, and homeopathy quickly became a kind of folk medicine popular among the middle and upper classes. Hahnemann made his system even more widely accessible by incorporating another principle: that homeopathic medications should be given only in the barest minimum dose, so as to produce the slightest possible symptomatic effects, and nothing more. 

To accomplish this, Hahnemann compiled a vast list of illnesses and related homeopathic cures - those medications that produced similar symptomatic effects to one or more illnesses. These medications were then diluted, sometimes only 1 part in 100,000,000 (or more) remaining in the final solution. Hahnemann countered critics by claiming that these medications retained the power of the original drug, and that this potential could be realized by shaking the solutions vigorously prior to consumption. This process was known as “potentization”. 

This, more or less, is the way that homeopathy is understood and practiced today. In addition to the medical aspect, patients are taken through highly personalized journeys, often sitting for an hour or more with the homeopath, examining all aspects of their personal and medical lives. Following these intense sessions, the homeopath prescribes one or more medications, and the patient returns at various intervals to chart progress. 

If you are interested in homeopathic medicine, you can get trusted medications of this sort from Boiron and Herb Pharm. It would probably also be a good idea to sit down with a homeopath for one of these personalized sessions. Much like other forms of counseling, these homeopathic sessions may be therapeutic in their own right. If you choose to take homeopathic medicine, take careful note of the effects you observe, and the frequency and nature of the drugs you choose. If you find something that works, stick to it, and you could be yet another person to benefit from homeopathy.