What is Homeopathy? (Transcript) |
| So, what is Homeopathy? Homeopathy is a system of medicine that treats the individual using highly-diluted substances that trigger the body's natural healing mechanisms. |
| Have your eyes glazed over? I wouldn't be surprised if they had because that's rather a long explanation, so I'll break it down. |
| Homeopathy is a system of medicine |
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A system of medicine is a set of guiding principles, beliefs and theories upon which the treatment of ill health is based. You've probably heard of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Herbal Medicine and maybe Ayurverdic Medicine. So homeopathy is just another system of medicine. The system of medicine used in the Western world is allopathy, so when you go and see your doctor, your doctor is practising allopathy, just another system of medicine. So, homeopathy is a system of medicine that ... |
| Treats the individual |
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Now a homeopath could have ten people in their waiting room all of whom are experiencing migraines, and as far as they're concerned, because they've got the label migraine, they're all experiencing the same symptoms. What a homeopath knows is that everybody's migraine is experienced slightly differently. If you think about it, you could have a headache anywhere on your head, so some people have one-sided headaches, left or right, and other people have headaches on the top of their head or at the back of their head. So there's one difference. Another difference is the type of pain - some people would say it's an aching pain, others stabbing, or shooting, or throbbing or pulsing. So there are lots of different types of pain. And also, what people experience alongside a headache can be different, so, for example, some people feel nauseous, some people feel dizzy and other people just have a headache. So the job of the homeopathy is to find out how each individual person is experiencing their migraine and to find a medicine that suits that individual. So homeopathy is a system of medicine that treats the individual ... |
| Using highly-diluted substances |
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Now the best analogy that I've ever heard about this is to think about washing up. If you were to try and wash up in neat washing up liquid you wouldn't get very far. Just squirt a small drop of washing up liquid into a big bowl of water and swish it around and you've got a very effective means of washing the dishes. And that's what Doctor Samuel Hahnemann found in the 1790's when he developed the system of homeopathy. He found two things. Firstly, diluting a substance gets rid of all the toxic or poisonous elements of that substance. Secondly, the more a substance is diluted, the more effective it becomes, as a medicine. So homeopathy is a system of medicine that treats the individual using highly-diluted substances that ... |
| Trigger the body's natural healing mechanisms |
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You know, if you cut your finger and it's not that big a cut, then you maybe lick it, or run it under the tap, possibly put a plaster on it and in a few days it's healed. Most of the time, you don't even know where the cut was. That's because your body self-heals. And that's what homeopathic medicines do, they help the body to self-heal, because sometimes if it's a bigger thing than a little cut, the body needs a bit of help. So, homeopathy is a system of medicine that treats the individual using highly-diluted substances that trigger the body's natural healing mechanisms. |
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