User:Shdw.puppet/homeothapy

Homeopathy is a system of medicine whose principles are even older than Hippocrates. It seeks to cure in accordance with natural laws healing and uses medicines made from substance: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Homeopathy was "discovered" in the early 1800's by a German physician, Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann. Shortly after setting up practice, he became disillusioned with medicine, and with good reason. Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-century physicians believed that sickness was caused by humors, or fluids, that had to be expelled from the body by every possible means. To achieve this end, patients were cauterized, blistered, purged, and bled. Hahnemann protested against these brutal and senseless methods, and his colleagues quickly denounced him for heresy. He was also opposed to the way doctors prescribed medicines. In those days, it was customary to mix a great number of drugs in one prescription. In his book, no is your Doctor and Why?, Dr. Alonzo J. Shadman mentions having seen, in the Pharmacopoeia of 1875, a prescription that contained fifty ingredients. Earlier, Hahnemann's outspoken criticism of this "degrading commerce in prescription" naturally enraged the chemists, who were as powerful as our drug companies today, and they were to hound him all of his life. Hahnemann gave up the practice of medicine and turned to medical translating as a livelihood. But he persisted in his lifelong goal-to discover "if God had not indeed given some law, whereby the diseases of mankind would be cured." His sense of frustration increased when one of his children became critically ill and he could do nothing for her. It was while translating Lectures on the Materia Medica by William Cullen, A Scottish professor of medicine, that Hahnemann stumbled on the key to curing sick people. In this work, the author claimed that cichona bark, or quinine, cured intermittent fever (malaria) because of its astringent and bitter qualities. This explanation did not sound plausible to Hahnemann, who knew of other substances equally bitter, so be did a daring thing: he tested the medicine on himself. I took by way of experiment, twice a day, four drachms of good China (quinine). My feet, finger ends, Etc. at first became cold; I grew languid and drowsy; then may heart began to palpitate, and my pulse Grew hard and small; intolerable anxiety, trembling, prostration throughout all my limbs; then pulsation, in the head, redness of my checks, thirst, and in short, all these symptoms, which are ordinarily characteristic of intermittent fever, made their appearance, one after the other, yet without the peculiar chilly, shivering rigor. Briefly, even those symptoms which are of regular occurrence and especially characteristics-as the stupidity of the mind, the kind of rigidity in all the limbs, but above all the numb, disagreeable sensation, which seems to have its seat in the periosteum, over every bone in the body-all these make their appearance. This paraoxyem lasted two or three hours each time, and recurred if I repeated this dose, not otherwise; I discontinued it, and was in good health.

This was the first "proving" a testing of medicine on a healthy person. The symptoms Hahnemann developed corresponded exactly to the symptoms of malaria. Thus Hahnemann reasoned that malaria was cured by quinine, not because of its bitter taste but owing to the fact that the drug produces the symptoms of malaria in a healthy person. After experimenting on himself, Hahnemann enlisted the help of his friends and followers and embarked on an extensive program of drug testing. When he died at age 88 in 1843, he had conducted or supervised provings on 99 substances. More than 600 other medicines were added to the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia the end of the century. (Excerpt from the Homeopathic Medicine At Home - B. Panes, M.D. and Helmlich, 1980)