Key principles & theories in Homeopathy

Homeopaths believe that good health derives from an equilibrium between the mind and body, which is maintained by a "vital force" that regulates the body's self-healing capabilities.

The vitalistic concept of science had existed for many years by the time Hahnemann was developing his theories. It claims that all living things possess a subtle energy beyond their physical and chemical states, and that even inanimate matter may contain vitality. Hahnemann applied this view to both the human body and to seemingly inert substances from all the kingdoms of matter. Thus the vital force of any plant, mineral, or animal could be harnessed to produce a powerful medicine when "potentized". Hahnemann viewed ill-health as the result of an internal imbalance affecting the body's vital force and disrupting its equilibrium. If this vital force is put under strain or weakened by this imbalance, illness may develop. In stimulating the body's self-healing abilities to fight any imbalance, the vital force produces symptoms. These may manifest externally, producing such symptoms as fever or a skin rash, or may emerge as emotional or psychological states, such as weepiness or great irritability. An effective medicine must help the vital force to redress the internal imbalance, enabling the symptoms produced by that imbalance to disappear, and this is what homeopaths seek to achieve. Hahnemann adopted the principle of similia similibus curentur, or "like cures like", first established in the 5th century BCE by Hippocrates. His "provings" of remedies aimed to establish the particular set of symptoms, or "symptom picture", produced by taking a substance. When the symptom picture matched the particular set of symptoms produced by an illness or imbalance in a patient, that remedy was indicated as the most effective at stimulating the vital force to treat the disorder. The key was – and in classical homeopathy still is – to establish which remedy most exactly matches a patient's symptom picture.

Many of the substances from which remedies are made are highly potent or possibly even poisonous. Hahnemann used only small doses of substances in his medicines, but to his consternation his patients still tended to suffer side-effects, or "aggravations", as he called them. He developed a technique called "potentization", which involved diluting and shaking the medicine vigorously or banging it on a hard surface during Preparation. This turbulent motion, which Hahnemann called "succussion", apparently released more potency into the medicine, even at lower dilutions. To Hahnemann's surprise, his research showed that microdilutions prepared with the additional turbulent energy provided by potentization seemed to have a much stronger effect than standard dilutions, providing a rapid and gentle effect that was long lasting. Homeopaths therefore need to give only this minimum, completely safe dosage. Hahnemann's original theories were expanded further by the US homeopaths, Dr. Constantine Hering and Dr. James Tyler Kent. Dr. Hering developed three basic Laws of Cure to explain how illness is cured in homeopathy, while Dr. Kent established a clear framework by which a course of treatment could be understood. Possible scenarios included: the patient gets better; the patient gets worse; the patient's condition remains unchanged; the patient initially gets worse but then gets better. Dr. Kent laid down 12 different possible outcome scenarios, including the above, which enabled homeopaths to determine how treatment should be continued and assess whether a particular remedy had been successful or not. Since the 1970s the Greek homeopath George Vithoulkas has done a great deal of research to update the scenarios and refine the theory and practice of homeopathy.

Constitution & susceptibility
In homeopathic terms, a person's "constitution" describes their state of health, including their temperament and any inherited and acquired characteristics. Homeopaths believe that healthy people resist developing sickness, despite being constantly exposed to an enormous variety of potentially harmful viruses and bacteria, since their vital force is strong and their susceptibility is therefore low. Their degree of susceptibility to ill-health may change, however, from hour to hour and day to day. It depends on a particular stress or emotional distress, overworking, exposure to pollutants, or intake of drugs. Underlying "miasmatic" factors may also affect the ability of the vital force to withstand any onslaught. Some homeopaths place great importance on the patient's "constitutional type" when they are prescribing treatment, choosing remedies whose "symptom picture" exactly match the individual's psychological and physical makeup when healthy. These remedies are taken when healthy to strengthen the patient's vital force and build up resistance to developing symptoms that may occur in the future. Health problems generally fall into two categories: acute or short-term illness, arising rapidly and potentially clearing up quickly (such as a cold or minor digestive problem); and chronic, long-term ill health (such as rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes), which has a tendency to be recurrent, deep-seated, or progressively degenerative. Homeopathic remedies work to support the self-healing powers of the vital force in its response to illness: to speed recovery from acute illness and make the duration of the illness less debilitating; or to aid recovery from recurrent illness or prevent it from recurring altogether. Remedies must be carefully chosen, however, if they are to work at optimum efficiency, and chronic conditions are best treated by qualified homeopaths rather than left to self-diagnosis.

Miasms & predisposition
After many years developing his ideas, Hahnemann noticed that some patients still did not seem to respond to the remedies prescribed for them, or that they relapsed after a short time. He studied these cases all together as a group, and concluded that general, inherent, higher-level themes of ill health were to blame. These he called "miasms."
They can be described as the chronic effect of an underlying disease or disease susceptibility, present in an individual or in previous generations of that person's family history. Three particular miasms were identified by Hahnemann—Psora (which relates to scabies), Sycosis (which is linked with gonorrhea), and Syphilis (which is based on syphilis). Cancer and tuberculosis are regarded by some as further potential miasms. He developed remedies called "nosodes," made from the diseases themselves, to combat these miasms. Since all infected material is sterilized before the potentizing process of dilution and succussion, it is completely safe to use.

The concept of a miasm proposes a model of people's health that has layers of predisposition or imbalance. In some cases more layers need to be peeled away than others to reach lasting good health. At a certain stage in the treatment process, an underlying miasm may become clearly active. Treatment can then be tailored to overcome it. However, it should be emphasized that this does not mean that a person actually has the diseases that are implied by the names of the miasms. Rather, the names describe the inheritance of a predisposition to a specific pattern of possible symptoms or a tendency to fall ill in a particular way—the person's susceptibility. For instance, Psora relates to slow development and poor nutrition; whereas Sycosis is associated with a frantic pace of life and overactivity of both mental and physical processes; and Syphilis describes a pattern of breakdown, decay, deterioration, and eating away.

Types of homeopathic practice
Various prescribing habits have developed in different countries or at different times. A clear conceptual division has emerged between two main schools of practice, classical and complex. Classical homeopaths generally treat with a single remedy that exactly matches the patient's inherent constitutional type and symptom picture. There are occasions, however, particularly in the case of acute illness or injury, where the physical symptoms far outweigh the emotional and other symptoms. In cases such as these a more pragmatic approach may be taken, using combinations of remedies in low potencies. Thus, for instance, five or six remedies known to be helpful for influenza might be combined in a single tablet. This is the complex approach, based on the theories of the British homeopath Dr. Richard Hughes, and also known sometimes as combination homeopathy or polypharmacy. In some situations, generally of an acute nature, it may be adopted by classical homeopaths, but in certain countries it is actually the standard method of prescribing. In 1948 it was officially sanctioned by the American Institute of Homeopathy, and in many European countries, such as France and Germany, polypharmacy is more common than classical homeopathy.

Further variations on the homeopathic principle include isopathy, in which a potentized microdilution of the substance causing the disorder is actually used to treat the symptoms: for example, Apis (which is made from the sting of bee) might be given to someone to treat a bee sting. A classical homeopath will generally only expect a 20 to 30 percent success rate using this method, since it does not take into account the unique constitution of each patient. A refinement of this concept is tautopathy, in which the exact substance triggering the symptoms is used to make a remedy for treating those symptoms. In theory this means that the remedy for a bee sting would be prepared from the actual bee that had inflicted the sting. In practice the concept is most commonly used for allergic reactions, such as treating a child with a remedy made from a vaccination to which the child has reacted.