HOMEOPATHY

HOMEOPATHY, a system of medicine developed by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann in the 1790s, was introduced in the United States in the 1820s by Hahnemann's colleagues and students. One of these, Constantine Hering, founded the world's first homeopathic medical school in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1835. With Hering and his students in the vanguard, American homeopathy became the world leader in the field for the rest of the nineteenth century. After falling into relative obscurity after the 1910s, homeopathy has enjoyed a significant revival among consumers and medical professionals since the 1970s.

Homeopathy is based on an ancient medical principle, the law of similars, from the observation that a sub-stance that causes a particular set of symptoms in a healthy person can cure those symptoms when they arise in the process of an illness. Homeopathic medicines are investigated in provings, standardized trials in healthy human subjects; information from accidental overdoses and poisonings and from verified clinical cures is also included in the profile of a medicine's sphere of action. A second fundamental principle is the minimum dose: homeopaths have found that the most effective medicinal dose is the smallest one capable of causing a curative response. Homeopathic medicines are manufactured by potentization, a process of serial dilution and agitation that produces microdoses of the natural substances from which the medicines are derived. A final principle is holism and individualization: the medicine is selected on the basis of the total symptom picture of the particular case.

Professionalizing early through the establishment of schools and hospitals, homeopaths formed the first national medical organization in North America, the American Institute of Homeopathy, in 1844. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, homeopathic medical schools in Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and cities as far west as San Francisco produced a steady stream of practitioners, with a high of almost 500 graduates in 1897; on average, 12 percent of graduates were women. Resistance from orthodox physicians continued throughout the century in the form of professional ostracism, although by 1902 it was estimated that 15,000 licensed American physicians included homeopathy in their practices.

Homeopathy's success in the nineteenth century can be attributed to several factors. Its efficacy in epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and influenza as well as in the treatment of chronic and intractable diseases was striking and converted many physicians; its adaptability for home care attracted mothers, who carried it into their communities; and its perceived affinities with Swedenborgianism, a mystical Christian philosophy, made it popular among the intellectual and social elite. Many prominent figures used homeopathy, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, James Garfield, and the family of William and Henry James.

Historians have argued that ideas derived from homeopathy influenced the direction of conventional medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the concept of the minimum dose encouraging the turn away from the drastic treatments of conventional medicine and the law of similars leading, in a creative misreading, to the development of vaccination. The assimilation of certain aspects of homeopathy by orthodox physicians is one factor cited for its decline, others being controversy among homeopaths about therapeutic techniques, the growing acceptance of empiricist laboratory science and especially bacteriology as medical authority, and the economic dominance of the orthodox medical-pharmaceutical industry. The 1910 Flexner Report on American medical education may have hastened the closing of some homeopathic colleges. It seems clear that the homeopathic medical schools, employing orthodox practitioners among their faculty, produced a hybrid profession that could not maintain a separate identity in the face of an increasingly powerful orthodox medical system.

Homeopathy's eclipse during the twentieth century is measured by a steep decline in its number of practitioners and by the homeopathic colleges' closing or conversion to conventional training. Still, professional organizations provided education for practitioners and consumers, and a handful of physicians kept the discipline alive. In the 1970s, disenchantment with the conventional medical system led consumers and practitioners to explore homeopathy among other forms of alternative and complementary medicine. Since then the shift from crisis intervention to preventive medicine, the concern over increasingly prevalent chronic disease, the search for cost-effective treatments, and the rejection of materialist philosophies in health care have fueled homeopathy's swift growth in popularity.

Developments since the 1980s include the establishment of postgraduate and comprehensive training programs throughout the United States; the 1991 founding of the Council for Homeopathic Certification, a profession-wide board that sets standards and conducts testing of practitioners; and the steady growth of membership in the National Center for Homeopathy, an educational organization for consumers and professionals. An increase in the amount of legal action against practitioners has paralleled the rebirth of the profession, as some licensing boards consider homeopathy to be outside their licensees' scope of practice. However, leading medical journals have published articles on clinical and scientific research in homeopathy; the number of medical schools offering some exposure to homeopathy is increasing; and many states have moved to license naturopathic physicians, making homeopathy more widely available. Its cost effectiveness has attracted some insurance companies' attention, but homeopathy's ultimate position in relation to the conventional medical system remains to be seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coulter, Harris. Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in Medical Thought. 4 vols. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1994. See especially vols. 3 and 4 for treatment of homeopathy in the United States.

Rogers, Naomi. An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Winston, Julian. The Faces of Homeopathy: An Illustrated History of the First 200 Years. Tawa, N.Z.: Great Auk Publishing, 1999.

Ann JeromeCroce

See alsoMedicine, Alternative ; Swedenborgian Churches .

homeopathy is a system of treatment evolved by a German physician, Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843). Hahnemann carried out tests on himself with extracts of cinchona bark, which contains quinine, and found it caused fever. From experiments of this kind he formulated the major principle of homeopathy, ‘similia similibus curantur’ (like cures like) — that is, agents which cause symptoms in a healthy person will cure the same symptoms in a sick person. It is worth considering how such an unlikely hypothesis came to be made, especially when something as essential as a simple clinical thermometer was not available to measure body temperature. Hahnemann's idea is actually very old, with ‘the hair of the dog that bit you’ hypothesis for treatment going back to the time of Hippocrates. Also, Jenner, who was contemporary with Hahnemann, had shown that cowpox could provide immunity against smallpox, and Hahnemann may have misinterpreted this finding, by failing to realize that vaccination recruits the immune system to achieve its effects.

Hahnemann found that some of the remedies when given in large doses may aggravate the symptoms they were designed to eliminate, and formulated a further principle, that of reducing the doses to minute proportions. It has been suggested that the reason for this was to reduce the likelihood of adverse effects, following litigation by dispensing chemists who feared for their livelihoods. Whatever the reasons, the use of dilute preparations has become part of the methodology of homeopathy. To prepare homeopathic remedies, the medicament is diluted with an excipient — usually lactose (milk sugar) for solids, or water for liquids — and triturated in a mortar (solids), or decussed (shaken) (liquids). Usually 1 part of drug is used to 100 parts of diluent. The resulting mixture is then diluted again as before, the whole process being repeated up to 30 times. It is claimed that the more dilute the preparation the more potent it is.

These unsual claims need further comment. Simple calculations, making use of Avogadro's number, confirm that in the more dilute preparations there is likely to be only one molecule of the medicament in a sphere the size of Saturn. The standard reply of homeopaths to this criticism is either that, in the process of preparation, special energies are released, and retained in the diluent, or that the molecules of the active principle leave their imprints on the diluents. These imprints, which are complementary in shape to the medicament molecules, may be the active moiety, as they counteract the effects caused by the medicament itself. These improbable mechanisms are not supported by any evidence, but if true would mean that most of what is known about the chemistry of molecules would have to be rejected. Homeopathic remedies often have fancy names going back to Hahnemann's time, when much of medicine was obscured by use of dog Latin. For example, some enormous dilution of Nat. mur. is a common remedy for a variety of simple complaints even today. Nat. mur. is short for natrium muriate, the sodium salt of muriatic acid, commonly known as ordinary salt. Body fluids contain around 150 mM salt, and most foodstuffs contain some salt, so the administration of an odd salt molecule as a form of treatment is surely nonsense.

Homeopaths claim to treat the whole person, so the prescribed treatment will depend on the totality of the person as well as the disease condition. For this reason there have been very few properly constructed clinical trials of homeopathic remedies. There is no scientific basis whatsoever to support homeopathy as a useful form of treatment. Most people get better from most things most of the time, and merely the belief that one is being treated can, through the placebo effect, at least cause the sense of feeling better. But if recovery is coincident with taking a homeopathic remedy then a causative relationship may be claimed, and knowledge of the magical properties passed on to others. Homeopathic remedies continue to be popular, as a result of concerns about side-effects of conventional, allopathic drugs, and patronage from prominent persons. While allopathic remedies require licensing by regulatory bodies, showing both safety and effectiveness, there is no such legislation for homeopathic preparations. The safety of these latter, because of their dilution, is not an issue, but their effectiveness is questionable.

Alan W. Cuthbert

homeopathy , system of medicine whose fundamental principle is the law of similars—that like is cured by like. It was first given practical application by Samuel Hahnemann of Leipzig, Germany, in the early 19th cent. and was designated homeopathy to distinguish it from the established school of medicine which he called allopathy. The American Institute of Homeopathy was founded in 1844, and the practice of homeopathy was popularized in the United States by the physician and senator Royal S. Copeland (1868–1938). It had been observed that quinine given to a healthy person causes the same symptoms that malaria does in a person suffering from that disease; therefore quinine became the preferred treatment in malaria. When a drug was found to produce the same symptoms as did a certain disease, it was then used in very small doses in the treatment of that disease. U.S. medical schools do not presently emphasize the homeopathic approach, although it has become popular among some physicians in European and Asian nations and is widely used by the public in over-the-counter medications.

Bibliography: See N. Robins, Copeland's Cure: Homeopathy and the War between Conventional and Alternative Medicine (2005).

ho·me·op·a·thy / ˌhōmēˈäpə[unvoicedth]ē/ (Brit. ho·moe·op·a·thy) • n. the treatment of disease by minute doses of natural substances that in a healthy person would produce symptoms of disease. Often contrasted with allopathy. DERIVATIVES: ho·me·o·path·ic / ˌhōmēəˈpa[unvoicedth]ik/ adj. ho·me·o·path·i·cal·ly / ˌhōmēəˈpa[unvoicedth]ik(ə)lē/ adv.

homeopathy (homoeopathy) (hoh-mi-op-ă-thi) n. a complementary therapy based on the theory that `like cures like'. It involves treating a condition with a tiny dose of a substance that in larger doses would normally cause or aggravate that condition. The substance is diluted in purified water, then activated by shaking in an exact way. Homeopathy was developed by a German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), in 1796.
—homeopathic adj. —homeopathist n. www.homeopathy-soh.org Website of the Society of Homeopaths

homeopathy Unorthodox medical treatment that involves administering minute doses of a drug or remedy which causes effects or symptoms similar to those that are being treated. German physician Christian Hahnemann popularized homeopathy in the 18th century.

homeopathy •Cathy •Iolanthe, Xanthe •McCarthy • breathy •healthy, stealthy, wealthy •lengthy •heathy, Lethe •pithy • filthy •bothy, frothy, mothy, wrathy •toothy •polymathy, timothy •apathy • telepathy • empathy •antipathy • sympathy •encephalopathy, homeopathy, osteopathy •Dorothy • earthy