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What Is a Homeopath?

A VETERINARY HOMEOPATH is a practitioner who practices homeopathy on animals, although the practitioner may or may not also be a qualified veterinarian. So what is homeopathy, and where does it come from?

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, born 1755 in Germany, was a medical doctor and translator who developed the concept of homeopathy—named for the Greek root words homo meaning “same” and pathos meaning “disease”—as a unique approach to medicine. Medicine in his time was indeed an often-barbaric proposition with an unimpressive record of success due to poor hygiene and the lack of understanding about physiology and pathology.

Materia Mediea is an old Latin term for the body of knowledge about medical material or medical treatments. (A first-century Greek text also bore the title Materia Mediea, as had numerous others.) While translating William Gullen’s Materia Mediea into German, Hahnemann noticed the text indicated cinchona bark was used to treat malaria fever and he reportedly ingested some of the bark and felt he developed malarial symptoms within a few weeks.

Cinchona, a tree or shrub with about twenty-five varieties, is found throughout South America and had long been used as a folk medicine. Quinine kills the mosquito-borne parasite that causes malaria, and the quinine alkaloid occurs naturally in many plants, including cinchonas. However, Hahnemann concluded that cinchona giving him malarial symptoms indicated that a substance that causes symptoms in a healthy person would cure the same symptom in an unhealthy person.

Curing through similars was a concept pursued by ancient Greeks as well. It contrasted strongly with the idea of curing through anti-dotes, substances that fought a problem. The term allopathy—allo meaning “other”—now sometimes used as a pejorative reference for mainstream medicine, originally sprung up as a homeopathic term for what was then modern medicine.

LAWS OF HOMEOPATHY

Hahnemann coined the term similia similibus curantur, also known as letting like cure like, or the law of similars. He carried on his hypothesis with the notion that a substance becomes more powerful the more the dose is diluted (law of infinitesimalism) and developed a system of shaking and diluting substances in alcohol, water, or both then testing his concoctions (law of potentization). Because he believed that substances that caused a particular symptom in a healthy person would cure a sick person with the same symptoms, he tested substances on himself and others, detailing how they fel twhen administered the substance (law of proving).

SUCCUSSION

Hahnemann crafted homeopathic remedies with vigorous succussion (shaking) between dilutions and worked hard to determine exactly how long a mixture should be succussed and then left to stand between dilutions. He particularly promoted succussing by striking the vial of solution against a leather-bound book.

DILUTION

Creating the common 30c homeopathic remedy of arnica, for example, consists of crushing the arnica flowers, leaves, stems, and roots and soaking the plant parts in a mixture of 90 percent alcohol and 10 percent water. After this base has been shaken and allowed to steep, it is strained into a dark bottle, creating a tincture. One drop of this tincture is combined with ninety-nine drops of alcohol or water and shaken—this is its first dilution. Next, one drop of that diluted solution is again combined with ninety-nine drops of alcohol (or water). Repeating the 1:99 dilution—one drop of the last dilution to 99 more drops of water or alcohol—a total of thirty times yields the homeopathic dilution noted as 30c, which is perhaps the most common dilution sold.

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