Obligatory 'What is Homeopathy?' Post

Samuel Hahnemann

Since this Substack is going to be talking about homeopathy, it seems only right that we start off explaining what it is. If you were to ask a random sampling of people on the street what homeopathy is, you’d probably get a range of answers from “some type of herbalism” to “snake oil.” The number of people who know about it is going to vary on the country you’re in, of course, with places like the UK, France and India having a long history with its use as a recognized form of medicine. But in North America it hasn’t received the recognition it deserves and your average person on the street doesn’t know much about it.

What follows is a quick explanation of what homeopathy is. For the sake of brevity, I’ll be glossing over a lot of stuff that is going to get further attention in future posts. The point here is to give an overall picture of the nuts and bolts so that the real meat of the discussion can be delved into in the future.

To start off, I think it would be illustrative to recount how Dr. Samuel Hahnemann discovered the principles behind homeopathy (I’m using Dr. Luc de Schepper’s Hahnemann Revisited as the source for this, but this story has been retold in multiple publications). Hahnemann was a German physician who lived from 1755 to 1843. In his early doctoring years, he had grown disillusioned with the barbaric medical practices of the time, which he was quite sure weren’t helping patients, and had moved on to translating medical texts to earn a living (keep in mind, this was a time when the use of bloodletting, dangerous substances like mercury, sulphur and lead were used extensively in medicine - barbaric indeed). He spent some of his time pursuing his passion: researching more effective methods of healing.

A Surgeon Letting Blood from a Woman's Arm, and a Physician Examining a Urine Flask | Photo credit: Wellcome Collection

As the story goes, in 1791, Hahnemann was translating William Cullen's A Treatise on the Materia Medica and came across his entry about Cinchona bark (a tropical plant used as a quinine source). Cullen attributed Cinchona’s anti-malarial properties to it’s bitter and astringent qualities. This didn’t make much sense to Hahnemann, since other bitter and astringent herbs are ineffective against malaria. So he did what any logical person would: he took some Cinchona bark to see what would happen.

What he discovered was that, when taking the herb, he started to develop the symptoms common to malaria. So he must have been like, “yo, if this herb can cure malaria, but it causes the same symptoms in a healthy person, maybe that’s the reason this herb can cure malaria!” (I imagine that’s how people spoke in 18th C. Germany). Hence, the major tenet of homeopathy was discovered - “like cures like,” or The Law of Similars. Hahnemann went on to do ‘provings’ of multiple substances on himself, his family, his friends and eventually his adherents, carefully cataloguing the symptoms the substances would cause in healthy subjects in order to determine the same symptoms they would cure in the sick.

Many of the substances Hahnemann was testing on his subjects were toxic plants, metals, disease discharges and other substances the average person wouldn’t want to ingest, even in the name of science (weak, I know). So he started diluting the substances in a mixture of alcohol and water in order mitigate the toxic effects. This lead to the discovery that the more diluted the substances became, the more pronounced their effects: The Law of the Infinitesimal Dose.

Now Hahnemann was no fool. He was actually a published chemist and quite good at mathmatics on top of being a doctor. He was well aware of the fact that once a substance was diluted enough, none of the original substance would theoretically be present. Yet even past the point at which it seemed impossible that any substance would remain, Hahnemann continued to get more potent remedies (Avogadro’s constant was not determined until 1860, 17 years after Hahnemann’s death, but it still seems likely he could have figured out when he was past the plausible limit of a substance being present in a dilution).

So we’ve got a type of medicine that cures on the base of similars, matching the symptom pattern in the sick as closely as possible to the symptoms caused by a remedy given to a healthy patient. And we’ve got the remedies themselves which are often diluted well beyond the point any known physical substance could have a physiological effect. But there’s still a missing piece of the homeopathy puzzle: succussion.

In the making of homeopathic remedies, between each level of dilution, the remedy is shaken vigorously, often by banging the solution bottle against a firm surface with some give to it (like a big heavy leather-bound book, for instance). This is called succussion and was part of Hahnemann’s dynamization process. I’m going to be exploring this concept a lot more in future installments, because while it might seem like a lot of hocus pocus, it’s actually integral to the creation of the remedies. Legend has it that Hahnemann discovered this by observing that he got a lot better results in patients who came in to see him from outside of the city who rode on horseback or in bumpy carriages when taking their remedies home with them, thus succussing the remedies by accident. Many homeopathic historians dispute this particular legend as a load of bunk, but it makes for a great story, no?

So there you have it. Homeopathy is a system of medicine in which the symptoms of the patient are matched to the symptom picture of the proven remedy and given in diluted doses which have been succussed a whack-load of times. Makes perfect sense.

While I sense that I may have lost all 2 of my readers at this point, stay with me here. As this series continues on I’m going to be exploring how the cutting edge of current science is laying the groundwork for a firm theoretical framework for how homeopathy actually works. Because it does work, despite the protestations of closed-minded.