He dosed himself with large quantities of cinchona bark, ingesting it repeatedly to document the fever, sweats, and nausea that set in. His aim: to test whether the remedy for malaria produced the symptoms of malaria in a healthy person. It did. Soon, he defined several so-called laws; two are guiding principles of homeopathy today:. Late 18th century medicine revolved around balancing the four humors, most frequently through bloodletting.
The American Institute of Homeopathy, founded in , even arrived three years before the American Medical Association. Conventional medicine eventually became increasingly science-oriented, discarding bloodletting and the like for more effective and drastically less dangerous treatments.
Homeopathy, by contrast, maintained its original dogma, one that hinged on individualized treatment and made it nearly impossible to conduct clinical trials that adhered to the scientific method. By the s, homeopathy was even recognized by the US government. Royal Copeland , a surgeon, New York City commissioner of health, storied US senator, and homeopath, used his medical authority to lend credibility to homeopathy and his political influence to ensure its recognition by the law.
The Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of oversees homeopathy to this day. In the world of homeopathy, there are believers, and there are skeptics. There are also passive participants who seek over-the-counter remedies as supplements, believing in these pastilles and ointments, tinctures, tablets, creams enough to buy them, if not necessarily to stake their health on them entirely. Boiron was the homeopathic brand of choice for my Southern California family in the s and early s.
Whenever I had a cold, she gave me something called ColdCalm , which I took, but begrudged for its chalky taste and easily crumpled blister packs. I know now that the active ingredient in Oscillococcinum is Anas barbariae, extract of duck heart and liver. For supplemental users, homeopathy is an alternative medicine, another option in the medicine cabinet. Critics see all homeopathic use as an alternative to medicine.
For Grams, this is the biggest risk — that people will forgo conventional, proven treatments in favor of homeopathic remedies which, she says, are nothing more than sugar pills. If you have cancer, time is life. Doug Brown was happy in his practice as a family nurse practitioner, for a time.
Eventually, however, ambivalence about modern medicine set in. The people who turn to homeopathy are a subset of a larger wellness-focused demographic that tend to be female, young to middle age, non-smokers, with lower body mass indexes, who make healthy lifestyle decisions diet, exercise, supplements, you get it. Conventional medicine, they feel, is failing. Most attitudes toward modern medicine are positive.
Homeopathy is decidedly more comprehensive, exhaustive even, in its tack, from the inside out, and top to bottom. Hahnemann believed homeopathy to be the only true medicine. They are often a first line of treatment that can offer relief with a low risk of side effects when used as directed. There are no known interactions with conventional medications or herbal supplements, allowing users to complement other treatments as well. Devotees say that homeopathy works. Water is not known to maintain an ordered alignment of molecules for much longer than a picosecond.
Second, if water can remember the shape of what's in it, then all water has the potential to be homeopathic. Tap water, with its traces of natural substances sloshing about in pipes known to cause cancer and other diseases, would be therapeutic against these diseases.
Third, explanations of how it could work aside, there are no high-quality scientific studies to show that homeopathy is any more effective than a placebo. In testing homeopathy, two trends have emerged: Homeopathy is best at "curing" things that would soon pass anyway, such as colds, but would be dangerous for the treatment of serious ailments, such as diabetes; and the larger and more thorough the scientific study, the more homeopathy resembles a placebo.
Don't assume homeopathy, unregulated by the FDA, is safe. In some cases, the homeopathic medicine does contain traceable amounts of the original medicinal substance.
Consider the case of Zicam, a homeopathic cold remedy pulled from the market in after reports of users permanently losing their sense of smell. Zicam is 2X, making it a 1-percent solution. A dose of Zicam contains more than microliters of solution, and 1 percent of that is zinc gluconate. Zinc substances have been known for decades to cause hyposmia, a reduced ability to smell, and anosmia, a loss of smell. Similarly, in , the Japanese government began investigating deaths of babies resulting from homeopathic treatment instead of real medicine.
Deaths included babies born with a vitamin K deficiency, whose mothers' midwives administered a homeopathic treatment instead of the much-needed vitamin K injection, well known to prevent hemorrhaging. The infants died from bleeding in the skull. Christopher Wanjek is a contributor to Live Science and a health and science writer based in Baltimore. Samuel Hahnemann Hahnemann graduated from medical school in and started his own medical practice.
He soon began his first homeopathic experiments in , as a result of his disillusionment with such common medical practices of the day as purging, bloodletting, and the use of toxic chemicals. At one point, he gave up his own daily practice to begin working as a chemist while translating medical texts. It was when Hahnemann began working on a project to translate William Cullen's Materia Medica into German that he began his quest for a better way of providing healthcare using the principles of "Similars.
Hahnemann ingested the bark and discovered that it caused symptoms similar to malaria. He continued his research into "cures" and the idea of "similar suffering," and began compiling his findings. Similia similibus curentur, the Latin phrase meaning "let likes be cured by likes," is the primary principle of homeopathy.
A homeopath searches for a substance that produces in a healthy person those same symptoms a patient experiences. It gained recognition because of its success in treating the many disease epidemics rampant at the time — including scarlet fever, typhoid, cholera and yellow fever. At that time, there were 22 homeopathic medical schools, homeopathic hospitals and over 1, homeopathic pharmacies.
Boston University, Stanford University and New York Medical College were among those educational institutions that were teaching homeopathy.
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