Equilibrium-Healing Centre  

"The orthodox school has witnessed for centuries that nature itself has never once cured any existing disease with another dissimilar one, however intense. What must we think of this school, which nevertheless has continued to treat chronic diseases allopathically, with medicines and formulas that can only cause a disease condition --God knows which --dissimilar to the one being treated? Even if these physicians have not hitherto observed nature attentively enough, the miserable results of their treatment should have taught them that they were on the wrong road." Samuel Hahnemann

Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician who earned his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1779. At the time of his graduation, Scientific advances were beginning to be seen in the fields of chemistry, physics, physiology and anatomy. The clinical practice of medicine, however, was rife with superstition and lack of scientific rigor. The treatments of the day, such as purgatives, bleeding, blistering plasters, herbal preparations and emetics lacked a rational basis and were more harmful than effective. Hahnemann recognized this and wrote critically of current practices in several papers on topics such as Arsenic poisoning, hygiene, dietetics and psychiatric treatment.

While translating William Cullen's A treatise of the materia medica into German, Hahnemann was struck by a passage that deal with cinchona bark, which was used to treat malaria. Cullen described its mechanism of action as a function of its stomach-strengthening properties. Hahnemann did not accept this explanation and took "four good drams of Peruvian bark, twice a day for several days" to attempt to characterize the action of the quinine-containing bark. Hahnemann reported that he began to develop symptoms identical to those of malaria. He concluded from this experience that effective drugs must produce symptoms in healthy people that are similar to the diseases they will be expected to treat. Today this principal is known as the "Law of Similars" and is the basis for the use of the term homeopathy ("similar suffering").

Hahnemann and colleagues began to test various substances to determine the types of symptoms they produced. These results suggested to Hahnemann what the drugs would be useful to treat. Hahnemann reasoned that doses of these substances that produced overt symptoms would be inappropriate for treatment of diseases with the same symptoms. Thus he advocated reduction of the dose to infinitesimal levels by multiple serial dilutions of ten or hundred fold . Soluble compounds or liquids were diluted in alcohol; insoluble materials were serially diluted by grinding with lactose. (more specific descriptions of his reasoning can be found in the "philosophical basis" section. He compiled his results into a treatise called the "Organon of rational therapeutics" which he first published in 1810. The sixth edition, published in 1921, is still used today as homeopathy's basic text. Hahnemann practiced Homeopathic medicine for almost 50 years until his death in 1843.

Today, nearly all French pharmacies sell homeopathic remedies and medicines; and homeopathy has a particularly strong following in Russia, India, Switzerland, Mexico, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, England, and South America.

Samuel Hahnemann's grave at Pere Lachaise in Paris. Bust by David d'Angers.