Many people think of homeopathy as this funny medicine with little white pills and someone questioning you about your daddy issues. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Although that sometimes happens in an appointment (well, hopefully not the daddy issues questions), homeopathy is truly just putting the law of similars to work.

What’s the law of similars?

The law of similars is the law that states that a substance that causes a certain set of symptoms (e.g. watery eyes from onions) will cure a similar condition (e.g. watery eyes from allergies). Using this law in medicine is the definition of homeopathy.

Can I test it?

Yes!! So a lot of people think you can only test homeopathy with things you ingest (medicines in other words) but this law goes farther than just medicines. Temperature is the easiest way to watch homeopathy at work, but behavior may also be a possible way to see it at work. I also heard a story of a babysitter who threw a temper tantrum when the toddler they were watching threw a tantrum. The babysitter’s tantrum was pretty shocking to the toddler who immediately stopped to stare at the babysitter. The sitter than stopped and said “ok that was fun. Shall we play something else?” and they went off to play a more appropriate game. This is kinda like homeopathy in behavior if you think about it, but I’ll leave it up to you to try if you so desire…

Back to temperature.

Hahnemann, the founder of the profession of homeopathy, wrote often about using hot and cold therapeutically to illustrate his idea of the law of similars. It’s a useful example because all of us have experienced cold and heat. If you feel cold, taking a cold walk outside in the winter will immediately make you feel worse, but overtime you will feel warmer, because the cold temperatures trigger your body’s own heating mechanisms. We now have a fair bit of research on this phenomenon, especially as it pertains to brown fat (which is created in response to cold exposure and warms you up). But this phenomenon is in fact homeopathy. You are cold, so you use cold to warm you up. If you are hot, exposing yourself to more heat will trigger cooling mechanisms (sweating, dilating blood vessels to release heat from the skin, etc).

What about the opposite?

So, if you are cold, exposing yourself to heat will feel great at first (just like putting cold on a burn will feel great at first). But then you will feel even colder afterwards because your natural heating mechanisms have been turned off. Same if you are hot: exposure to cold feels great at first, but the effect will not last long.

Don’t get me wrong, I still take a cold swim in the summer and a hot shower in the cold of winter, but it’s important to understand what the different temperatures will do to your body’s natural ability to regulate temperature.

A faster way to test this idea?

There is one quick way to check this phenomenon out at home. Put one hand in very hot or very cold water (either extreme will work). Keep your hand there for a few minutes (3-5). Then take it out and compare it to your other hand, your “control”, if you will. If you used cold water, the hand that was immersed will start to feel warm after awhile, warmer than your control. The opposite will happen if you use hot water to test: the immersed hand will start to feel colder than your control after awhile. This is homeopathy at work!

Using temperature as a therapeutic:

The most obvious way to put this into practice is with a burn. Burns are something that we all probably have experienced (and will experience again in the future). But a burn is exposure to a high dose of heat. So to treat this homeopathically, we give a low dose exposure to heat, for example warm water from the faucet. You will feel a slight increase in pain from the burn, followed by an amelioration. If you treat a burn with cold (like ice or cold water) then you will feel an immediate amelioration of pain, followed by a worsening sensation of pain.

You can see another pattern here: homeopathic treatment can have an immediate aggravation of your symptoms, but then things feel better after. If you use opposites (cold for a burn) then you feel better at first, but worse in the long run.

​Homeopathy is using the law of similars in any therapeutic avenue. If you look around for examples like temperature, or tantrums, you will be surprised at how useful this can be in everyday life!