Homeopathy

[Mika]

I understand the confusion that predominates regarding homeopathy, and the following excerpt, illustrates some of the reasons why.

"We are still living in a world that is largely ignorant on the topic of homeopathy. People still seem to be unable to differentiate between herbal and homeopathic medicines. They still mistakenly use the word ‘homeopathic’ for any form of natural medicine. And they still don’t seem to get it that homeopathy and allopathy just don’t work in the same way, and that you can’t expect the same results from these very different processes.

However we are no longer suffering from too little information as we were a generation ago. No, now we are suffering from too much bad information. Too many websites and individuals that just plain have it wrong. And too many ‘practitioners’ and ‘educators,’ who in recent years came to homeopathy, and seem themselves to be as confused as to the nature of homeopathy and its practice. And computer software has made it all too easy for these guys to just type in the symptoms and let the machine do all the work. Pity that they haven’t realized that these software packages can’t do all the work, that they still have to know how to take cases, and they actually have to type in real, useful information in order to get real and useful results. Hahnemann, and the other fathers of homeopathy had a word for such practitioners. They called them ‘half-homeopaths’ because they practiced a supposed form of homeopathy that failed to follow the rules of homeopathic treatment. But anything that attempts to blend the philosophy of allopathy with the practice of homeopathy invariably falls into the chasm that lies between the two.

Homeopathy asks a great deal from those who practice it. This is because homeopathy is a very complex subject for study. It requires an understanding of the nature of illness and health and the journey that must be traveled between these two poles of the human condition. It also demands an understanding of the nature of medicine and its ability or lack thereof to move the patient from illness toward health. It also requires an understanding of the philosophy of homeopathy – a philosophy that was “some two thousand years in the shaping” before Samuel Hahnemann ever coined the work ‘homeopathy’ in order to codify what so many others had attempted beforehand. Finally, it requires an understanding of the remedies that comprise the homeopathic pharmacy (and there are THOUSANDS) and the ability to recognize the remedy need that ‘each individual patient’ is displaying on the hoof.

Because homeopathy is such a complex subject, it is one that ‘no one’, not even Hahnemann himself, can fully understand or master in a lifetime. To the end of his days, Hahnemann was rewriting, always including new ideas, new possibilities, not only of new additions to the homeopathy pharmacy, but also as to the nature of homeopathy itself. In the two hundred years since Hahnemann, hundreds of others have contributed their thoughts and ideas as to the nature of homeopathy and its practice. Some have, crystallized the truth of homeopathy, while others have moved us further away from the truth. Like politics, like religion, homeopathy is a subject that seems to encourage debate. Further it is a subject that we can only test over a lifetime of study and use, learning and grasping a bit more understanding as we go.

Therefore, no one ‘individual’, book, article, website on the subject of homeopathy can ever tell you the whole story, the whole truth. Indeed no bookshelf of books can do that. Each can only tell you ‘their’ story of homeopathy. The facts as they know them, as they were passed on to them, and as they have experienced them.

Their own truths, Their own experiences."

Quoted from the opening pages of: The Healing Enigma: Demystifying Homeopathy – by Vinton McCabe