Does cold hurt in the long run and coffee make you tired? primary and secondary effects of medicines
If you put your hand in cold water, you will first notice it become cold, stiff, pale, and any pain you had before in your hand will go away. When you remove your hand, it will become painful, warm, move easily and pain you may have had before in the hand will get worse. In short, you get one effect first, and then the opposite happens. In homeopathy, this is called the primary and secondary effects of medicines (sometimes, confusingly, translated as positive and negative effects).
If you put your hand in cold water, you will first notice it become cold, stiff, pale, and any pain you had before in your hand will go away (this is why we often ice injuries). When you remove your hand, pains you had before will return, the hand will get warm and move easily. In short, you get one effect first, and then the opposite happens. In homeopathy, this is called the primary and secondary effects of medicines (sometimes, confusingly, translated as positive and negative effects).
This phenomenon is true with all substances we put in or on our bodies. There is one effect, and then a reaction that is the OPPOSITE of the first effect. I was super into natural skincare once upon a time, and one concept that was common in those circles was that if you use too much soap (which removes oil, primary effect), more oil will be created in the long run (secondary effect of soap). Therefore, for people with very oily skin, washing with a very mild soap or even oil will be better than soap (oil will have the primary effect of increasing oil on your face, with the secondary effect of decreasing the oil on your face). The same thing happens with coffee. First you feel energized (primary), then 2pm hits and you feel groggy (secondary) and want another cup. Same thing with sugar: I have yet to meet a parent that doesn’t get eye twitches when their kids are high on life after too much sugar, because they know the secondary effect of sugar is a cranky, tired child.
Hahnemann argued that the secondary effects are the body reacting and trying to bring the system into balance. In other words, opium brings the system out of balance by inducing sleepiness. The system then tries to rebalance itself by increasing energy, but overshoots, and so you see an increase in energy, followed by a return to baseline (usually- we won’t go into the special circumstances, but know that I am oversimplifying a bit).
This concept hopefully seems simple, but it’s a vital one. Hahnemann believed you should only prescribe based on the primary effects of medicines. This should make sense to you, since colloquially we talk about substances this way all the time. The primary effects of coffee, as I said before, are to increase your energy and mood. Would you ever say that coffee causes sleepiness and depression? No. Opium’s primary effects are to remove pain and make you sleepy (among others). Would you ever casually say that opium makes you more awake and makes you feel more pain? No. However, you might say that in the long run coffee makes you more tired, or that in the long run opium increases pain, but that is how we colloquially talk about secondary effects of medicines.
Another way to think about it is that if you say to yourself: “I need a medicine that creates an incredible pain tolerance”, then you will prescribe something like opium. Or “I need a medicine that creates euphoria and energy”, then you will probably prescribe something like sugar or coffee.
The way I think about it (which is my way of saying you can definitely disagree, because this is just the way my brain likes to work), Homeopathy is chasing this secondary reaction to substances, whereas all other types of medicine are chasing the primary reaction. Opiates in all other forms of medicine are given to decrease your pain. In other words, they’re prescribed because the practitioner wants to utilize the primary effect. In homeopathy, we prescribe opium when someone doesn’t feel enough pain (think about someone in shock – they should be hysterical or in pain, but feel nothing). We prescribe based on the primary effects, but we want the secondary effect. I think of it as us poking the body towards even more analgesia, and it responds by bringing itself into balance and increasing its ability to feel pain. In the case of coffee, we prescribe it based on the primary effects of energy and euphoria, but we want the secondary effects. In other words we take someone who is manic, push them even farther towards mania, and the body responds (secondary effect) by bringing them back down to earth.
If you want to check this out in action, I did a video where I submerse my hand in ice water (based on a passage in Hahnemann’s article, the Medicine of Experience) and you can watch primary and secondary effects in action!