How to Use Homeopathy Treat Domestic Violence

Over the past several years, we’ve seen the popularity of natural and herbal remedies steadily rise, coinciding with the explosion of demand for organic foods and natural household and personal-care products. Consumers have come to a greater understanding of the unwelcome side effects and dangerous properties of many common products, and many lack trust in ingredients that we are commonly told are safe. This phenomenon has led even those who have traditionally placed their faith in modern science and medicine to seek natural alternatives for conditions such as anxiety and depression.

If you follow this blog, you know about homeopathy and other natural treatments for anxiety, but in the course of your research you may have heard about something called homeopathy. Today we’ll take a look at whether or not homeopathic remedies for anxiety are safe and effective.

Homeopathy Basics

Homeopathy is practicing worldwide, especially in Europe, and in India, where it is considered one of that country’s national systems of medicine. This medical philosophy was born for much the same reason that so many of us today are seeking alternative medical treatments. In the late 1700s, German physician Samuel Hahnemann was appalled at how medicine was practiced in his day, which at that time included blood-letting and the use of poisons. He created the practice of homeopathy based on the belief that “like cures like” – that is, that you can actually cure disease with very small amounts of the same substances that in high doses cause disease.

These very small amounts are the source of controversy and skepticism for many in thescientific and medical community (more on that later), but homeopathic practitioners and proponents believe that ultra-high dilutions are what make the remedies effective, as they are supposed to trigger the body’s natural healing response, while the very low concentration of the active ingredient makes the medicine non-toxic.

The active ingredient in homeopathic medicine is typically a plant or mineral. The remedies are prepared in special pharmacies using a process of dilution and a type of vigorous shaking called succussion. These preparations are most commonly found in liquid solutions or in pill form, and are typically “prescribed” by trained homeopathic practitioners (called homeopaths), though the remedies are available over the counter without a prescription. Homeopathy proponents say that the remedies work immediately and recommend taking only one dose and waiting to see if symptoms are relieved before taking any more of the medicine.

Homeopathy for Anxiety

There are a number of purported homeopathic remedies for anxiety. Homeopaths tend to tailor their treatment plans to each individual patient’s circumstances, and the remedies themselves are also very specific in their indications. Rather than a few homeopathic remedies known for their general anxiety-fighting properties, there are nearly a dozen homeopathic preparations commonly used to treat highly specific types of anxiety and anxiety symptoms. Just a handful of these include:

Argentum nitricum: This is prescribed for those who are feeling a sense of uncertainty in their lives, perhaps in the lead-up to a big event such as wedding. These people experience a great deal of “what-if” thoughts and often crave sweets.

Calcarea carbonica: This is prescribed for patients who feel overwhelmed and fear having a breakdown – typically structured people who crave routine. They are often sluggish and fatigued.

Gelsemium: This remedy is given to those who have weak muscles, often as a result of performance anxiety. It is given to those who tend to be paralyzed by anxiety, and is used to treat agoraphobia.

Kali phosphoricum: Those who are prescribed this treatment tend to feel overwhelmed, exhausted, overworked, and oversensitive.

Phosphorus: This is prescribed to social and excitable people who fear of being alone and who are highly empathetic, which often drains them of energy.

Homeopathy Controversy

Homeopathy is one of the most controversial alternative medical therapies. It was developed by Samuel Hahnemann and is based on three main principles:

the principle of similars, the vital force principle, and the principle of potentization, the last causing the most questions about whether homeopathy actually works. Double-blind randomized trials have been performed to test the efficacy of homeopathic treatments, but these give mixed results and are problematic for a variety of reasons. But however dubious, science, particularly quantum theory, gives potential reasons for why homeopathy does work well enough to keep it from being completely dismissed, despite serious efforts to do so.

The principle of similars employs the practice of using substances which in a healthy person would cause the symptoms experienced by the ill person.

The vital force is the life force which is attached to any complex living organism. This principle also takes a person’s mental and emotional aspect into account, these being considered as important as the physical symptoms. When physical, emotional, and mental states are in disharmony vital force is diminished and disease springs up; when in balance, disease cannot thrive. Potentization is considered the most controversial of all three principles. When a solution is potentized, it is drastically diluted and shaken forcibly between each dilution or succussion. The controversy arises because often none of the molecules of the original substance are still present in the solution. This implies that the healing occurs as a result of the placebo effect, and while more impressive than healing through medicine, for the intent of a trial the results are insufficient to say one way or another.

Then how is that possible given that the patient is not actually ingesting anything? It is believed and suggested by experiments, that water has a sort of memory. This implies that although the original substance may have been diluted to where all molecules has disappeared, the water has been imprinted with its essence and is therefore able to carry forward its healing properties. This is similar to how people who have meaningful interactions change one another even when they are no longer in each other’s company. Then, given that water is the most easily absorbed solution, the energy of the substance is then directly transferred into the cells changing their energy and it is this change of energy that creates the healing.

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THE BIRTH OF COMPLEMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE

The essence of the change was a rebellion against orthodox medical science as taught and practised in the teaching hospitals, and the introduction of a series of radically different but all-embracing beliefs on the nature and treatment of disease. The empirical quack continued in the background and still exists today, although in an attenuated form. But the new irregulars—the literate ‘book-reading’ practitioners—were usually educated men and often medically qualified.

They were therefore not so much quacks (although frequently derided as such) as practitioners for whom the terms ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ is more appropriate. Indeed, supporters of CAM have good reason to object to the term ‘quackery’ being linked in any way with such practices as homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture and herbalism. It would be impossible to review the history of all the current forms of alternative medicine, so I am confining this paper to one of the earliest and still the most frequently used unorthodox system: homeopathy.

HOMEOPATHY

While it can scarcely compare in antiquity with Chinese or Indian medicine, homeopathy is the longest established CAM to have arisen in Europe.7 It was founded by Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), who grew up in Meissen in Germany, received his medical degree in Erlangen in 1779, and died a millionaire in Paris in 1843. During his first fifteen years as a physician Hahnemann struggled desperately to make a living. One day, however, he made a discovery. He started to take regular doses of cinchona or ‘the bark’ (i.e. quinine). This, he said, produced all the symptoms of intermittent fever (malaria) but to a mild degree and without the characteristic rigors of that disease. This led Hahnemann to an idea which was published in 1796 as Essay on a New Principle for Ascertaining the Curative Power of Drugs, which was followed in 1810 by his famous work The Organon of the Healing Art.1

Hahnemann believed that if a patient had an illness, it could be cured by giving a medicine which, if given to a healthy person, would produce similar symptoms of that same illness but to a slighter degree. Thus, if a patient was suffering from severe nausea, he was given a medicine which in a healthy person would provoke mild nausea. By a process he called ‘proving’, Hahnemann claimed to be able to compile a selection of appropriate remedies. This led to his famous aphorism, ‘like cures like’, which is often called the ‘principle of similars’; and he cited Jenner's use of cowpox vaccination to prevent smallpox as an example.

The differences between orthodox medicine and homeopathy could hardly be more vivid. From its beginning homeopathy always began with a long consultation, lasting at least an hour, in which all aspects of the patient's illness and life were discussed—homeopaths like to stress that they practise ‘holistic medicine’—and the appropriate treatment chosen. In contrast, during the first half of the nineteenth century, when homeopathy was becoming established, orthodox medicine was immersed in the belief that advances in understanding disease could only come from a detailed correlation of symptoms and signs of the sick patient on the ward, and the findings at autopsy: clinico-pathological correlation. As Bichat famously put it put it at the very end of the eighteenth century:

‘For twenty years from morning to night you have taken notes at patients' bedsides... which, refusing to yield up their meaning, offer you a succession of incoherent phenomena. Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not dispel.’8

Clinico-pathological correlation demanded the understanding of a very long and complex collection of diseases accompanied by heated debates between the contagionists and the anti-contagionists. This was way beyond the comprehension of the general public. Moreover, medical treatment was to a large extent crude and ineffective, consisting largely of potentially dangerous polypharmacy, purging, and profuse blood-letting.

Hahnemann showed no interest in detailed pathology, and none in conventional diagnosis and treatment. He was only interested in the principles of homeopathic medicine which he used to name the illness.2 Classical homeopathy was therefore seen by its supporters as an attractively safe system, simple, easy to understand, and centred on the patient as a whole and not on pathological lesions. This goes a long way to explain why homeopathy was popular.9

But there was one aspect of homeopathy which, from the time it was first announced in about 1814, led to open warfare between orthodox medicine and homeopathy. This was the result of Hahnemann's belief that drugs should be given in a dose which only just produced the slightest symptoms of the disease which was being treated. To achieve this aim, Hahnemann diluted his medical preparations to such an astonishing extent that if one assumes that that the substance he employed was completely soluble, by only the fourth dilution the ratio of the medicine to the solution would be 1:100 000 000. The physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) in the USA, always a master of ridicule, said that Hahnemann's dilution would take ‘the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas.’1 But Hahnemann insisted that homeopathic medicines retained their therapeutic power provided you shook the preparation violently during the process of dilution—a process Hahnemann named as ‘potentization’ by which every homeopathic medicine not only retained or even increased its therapeutic power, but persisted as a ‘dematerialized spiritual force’. To orthodox practitioners this was sheer nonsense.10 Hahnemann claimed that by his methods he could cure all or nearly all acute diseases. To make matters worse, he announced in 1828 that all, or nearly all, chronic diseases were caused by ‘the itch’ (scabies).

Whereas Hahnemann claimed that homeopathy could cure all or virtually all diseases, his followers modified these claims in the hope of becoming accepted by orthodox medical practitioners. One of the first institutions devoted to homeopathy was the American Institute of Homeopathy, founded at the end of the nineteenth century, when it seems that ‘a rapprochement between homeopaths and conventional physicians gradually unfolded. Homeopaths adopted new orthodox treatments... while allopaths [regular orthodox physicians] borrowed homeopathic remedies... In 1903, after long antagonism, the American Medical Association... invited homeopaths to join [the Association].’9 The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1939 in the USA allowed homeopathic medicines to be sold openly on the market. Five homeopathic hospitals were founded in Britain, the two largest (in London and Glasgow) having in-patient units. Today the ten most common diseases treated by homeopaths are (in order of frequency) asthma, depression, otitis media, allergic rhinitis (hay fever), headache and migraine, neurotic disorders, non-specific allergy, dermatitis, arthritis and hypertension.

There seems little doubt there has been a remarkable revival of homeopathy since the 1960s and 1970s in many countries, but especially the USA where, in 2002, it was estimated that the number of patients using homeopathic remedies had risen by 500% in the previous seven years, mostly by purchasing over-the-counter remedies. In the USA patients seen by homeopaths tended to be more affluent, more frequently white, present more subjective symptoms, and to be younger than patients seen by conventional physicians.9 In Britain a survey by the BBC in 1999 found that 17% of 1204 randomly selected adults had used homeopathy within the past year (this includes homeopathic remedies bought over the counter) and another survey in 1998 estimated that there were 470 000 recent users of homeopathy in the UK. It is likely that most patients in the UK who use complementary medicine are largely middle class and middle aged.11 One of the well known features of homeopathy is that from the nineteenth century to today it has been firmly supported by royalty and the aristocracy. Edward, Prince of Wales was the patron of the London Homeopathic Hospital, while the Duke of York, later King George VI, gave the title ‘Royal’ to the hospital. He also named one of his race-horses ‘Hypericum’ after a homeopathic remedy. He entered it for the Thousand Guinea Stakes at Newmarket in 1946 and it won.12

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BACKGROUND OF HOMEOPATHY

Like many forms of alternative medicine, homeopathy evolved from its founder's disillusionment with current medicine practices. In homeopathy's case, the founder was a German medical doctor named Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann.

 Although homeopathy is only 205 years old, it is now practiced in a variety of ways, most of which bear little resemblance to what Hahnemann taught. In the public mind the word "homeopathy" has become so vague that for some it means only an "alternative medicine" and for others a combination of homeopathic medicines that you buy in the health food store, one mixture for allergies, another for headache, etc.

Based on his observations, he formulated the so-called PRINCIPLE OF SIMILARITY, which states that a given substance can cure in a diseased person the symptoms that it produces or causes in a healthy person.

Homeopathy is the system of medicine which works on the principle of 'like cures like' (Similia Similibus curanter). This system of holistic healing was founded by Dr.Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician. Hahnemann, who was translating the book on the medicinal properties of drugs, was reading the properties of the medicine Cinchona, when he read that Cinchona cures malaria, because of its bitter taste. Hahnemann was surprised by this statement and when he read on, he found a footnote which said that cinchona poisoning leads to malaria-like symptoms. This set him thinking and he decided to test the medicine of himself. He experienced the symptoms of malaria, by repeatedly taking the Cinchona medicine and after continuing his experiments found that those medicines which cause disease-like symptoms in healthy individuals are capable of curing the diseased individuals. So, homeopathy relies on the Materia Medica - a book containing the properties of medicines, properties which have been proved on healthy individuals. Homeopathic doctors rely on the materia medica as the authority for it contains not empty theories, but details of symptoms which were experienced by hundreds of provers. It is thus a system based on sound principles and as a result of solid experiments.

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