Homeopathy (or homœopathy, as it is more correctly spelled) is a therapy that is defined by its employment of what is called the “law of similars” or “like cures like”. According to the law of similars, the most effective medicine is one that creates the most similar effect to the illness in question, and the degree of healing will be proportional to the degree to which the medicine is similar. I.e., the more similar a medicine is to the illness, the more curative to that illness. This law of cure was systematized by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, starting in 1790 and he termed his new method of healing “homœopathy” (in Greek, the word literally means similar (omoion) suffering (pathos)). In practice, this means giving something that makes a healthy person nauseous to someone who is nauseous, or something that causes burning pains for burning pains.

The law of similars or homeopathy may seem counter-intuitive or surprising, but its a technique that has been recorded for thousands of years, and the literature is filled with cases of this technique working well. Warm water for burns has been shown to improve healing in a study on rats, but also was recorded as early as 1787 when the physician Benjamin Bell wrote “a considerable degree of ease may be procured by plunging the injured part suddenly into boiling water, or any other fluid of nearly and equal heat” (A System of Surgery, p360) This technique is also applied (usually by accident) in medical disciplines. In herbalism, Arnica montana is often given for bruising. Arnica montana when eaten by a healthy person, will cause pains that feel as if the person has been bruised. Ritalin – a stimulant – is given to people with ADHD and somehow it calms them down. ADHD patients will also often self-medicate with coffee, which is also a homeopathic self-prescription. Digoxin (aka Lanoxin) is a pharmaceutical product given for heart failure or arrythmias. It is an extract from the plant Digitalis, which if eaten causes heart failure and arrythmias. Ambien (zolpidem), has recently been found to be helpful in waking people from comas at low doses, whereas in high doses it causes sleep. So although we do not understand the mechanism, applying the law of similars does indeed seem to help heal disease.

The practice of homeopathy involves determining which remedy is most similar to the illness a patient presents with. This is no small feat, as over 2,500 remedies have been entered into the homeopathic literature to date.

The examples to the left might make it look like a remedy is selected that is most like one of your symptoms, but that is not true in practice. In homeopathy, the whole of the disease is defined as the collection of all morbific changes in an organism. So the remedy prescription is not only based on your single complaint (e.g. low back pain) but on ALL of the discomforts or changes from health you experience. If someone has low back pain that feels stiff and achy unless they are moving, they will need a very different remedy than someone who has low back pain that is worse from moving and only better from warm compresses. In this way, homeopathic prescriptions are truly individual and wholistic. Similarly, changes in body temperature, thirst, cravings, emotions can all be considered as part of the whole disease process in the body.

The data used to determine prescriptions come from toxicological reports and homeopathic drug trials – called “provings” (an English-ism of the German word Prüfung, meaning test). Provings are done in a different manner than pharmaceutical drug trials. They are done on healthy individuals and no specific outcome is looked for. In other words, healthy people take a substance, and all manner of physiological effects of the substance are noted, not only a few. In this way, homeopathic trials or provings are more thorough than the drug trials with narrowly defined end points or subjects of study.

A couple of well done provings have yielded information that our modern drug trials have also independently found (although, as with any study/trial/test, not all are created the same- some provings are very poor quality, and some are very high quality). Strontium, for example, was investigated by homeopaths in 1831 and by a pharmaceutical company in 1993. The pharmaceutical company used it as an osteoporosis drug until 2017 when it was taken off the market, likely due to reports of high rates of strokes and heart attacks (these effects were not found before the drug hit the market). The homeopathic proving had shown evidence of strontium’s effectiveness in bone pathologies as well as evidence of it causing strokes and heart attacks over a hundred year before the pharmaceutical company had started its testing. Only a couple homeopathic trials were done (unclear how many exactly, but in the ballpark of 1-5) and the pharmaceutical company had done over 900. Another example: Digitalis provings, a common remedy and pharmaceutical used for the past couple hundred years, found side effects of digitalis that were only discovered by conventional medicine hundreds of years later. The external verification of these provings to me shows that they are indeed highly accurate and complete sources of data.

You do not need a formal diagnosis of your complaints for a remedy to work because remedy prescriptions are primarily based on your subjective experience of your complaints. If you say the entire world looks purple to you, a homeopath does not need to know why that’s true or what the formal diagnosis would be; knowing that it is how you experience the world is enough to find a remedy.

By focusing on your subjective experience, a homeopath never needs to speculate on theories of why you are ill or what is going on with your physiology. The homeopath simply focuses on the facts at hand – your experience, objective signs of illness (e.g. you are flushed or pale, restless or not) and matches those facts to the facts known about medicines. Facts to facts. Zero speculation.