Homeopathy: what's it all about?

The law of similars

Rather than simply suppressing symptoms of a disease, homeopathic remedies are believed to help the body's own healing mechanisms work. This is accomplished by giving patients small amounts of a substance that causes an illness to stimulate the body's natural capacity to heal from it. Known as the "law of similars," this approach was introduced by German physician and chemist Samuel Hahnemann in the late 1700s.

Today, homeopathic practitioners choose from a wide variety of treatments that include minute amounts of ingredients that create symptoms similar to what each patient is experiencing. Because the active ingredients are significantly diluted, patients rarely feel worse. On the contrary, their symptoms should go away.

Too little medicine to do any good?

Skeptics of homeopathy say that these dilutions, some with concentrations of substances as small as one in 100 (to the 200^th power), are useless. After being diluted to this degree, they say, the solution does not contain a single molecule of the medicinal substance.

"[Hahnemann] invented something that would be a foolproof way of not doing harm to people, which meant diluting substances so that they have no effect," says Wallace Sampson, MD, editor-in-chief of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine.

Letting your body do the work

Homeopathic practitioners, many of whom are also medical doctors, disagree. They point to 200 years of anecdotal evidence and the popularity of homeopathy abroad as proof that their methods work.

"Homeopathy is a very important component in natural holistic medicine," maintains Raphael Kellman, MD, founder and head of the Raphael Kellman Center for Progressive Medicine in New York City. Dr. Kellman sees homeopathy as a way to tap into the body's powerful "software" that conventional medicine too often ignores.

"Ultimately, it's the body that does the healing," says Dr. Kellman, who uses homeopathy to complement traditional medical therapies.

Chronic conditions

Homeopathic practitioners say that their approach allows them to treat illnesses for which traditional medicine has no good answers.

"I have had many cases of long-term cures of chronic asthma, chronic migraine headaches, rheumatoid arthritis and chronic depression," says Todd Rowe, MD, CCH, DHt, president-elect of the National Center for Homeopathy.

The individual and the whole

Dr. Rowe stresses that homeopathy focuses on the whole patient in an attempt to heal both surface and underlying issues not to suppress symptoms.

"The goal," he says, "is to find one remedy that covers all the individual's problems."

Searching for evidence

Advocates say that the individualized nature of homeopathy makes finding scientific proof of its effectiveness an unnecessary challenge.

"You can't apply the same methods of proof in natural medicine," maintains Dr. Kellman. But most physicians and clinical researchers strongly disagree with this point of view.

Of the research studies that have focused on homeopathy, most have included small numbers of patients and showed mixed results. A recent meta-analysis of 16 clinical trials, published in the European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, showed that while there was some evidence that homeopathic remedies were more effective than placebos, higher-quality studies were more likely to show no effect from homeopathy.

Finding a practitioner

There are various types of doctors practicing homeopathy in the United States, and their certification depends on their qualifications and level of training. For example, one certifying board licenses medical doctors who are also homeopaths (DHt), one certifies naturopaths for homeopathy (DHANP), one certifies professional homeopaths only (RSHOM), and one certifies any of the above (CCH).

"Some professional homeopaths choose to work in conjunction with a conventional physician, thereby helping their patients to receive the best of both worlds," Dr. Rowe explains.

Not a replacement for traditional medicine

Dr. Rowe says that homeopathy is not the answer to every medical problem.

"Some conditions require immediate conventional intervention," he says. For example, a car accident requires a trip to the emergency room, not a homeopath, he says.

Still, Dr. Rowe believes that in cases where homeopathy is not the complete answer, it can still play an important role. For example, he has seen patients with insulin-dependent diabetes reduce the amount of insulin they need by using homeopathic treatments. However, there are no clinical studies to support this observation.

"It is not an either or," he says. "Some conditions are best treated by conventional methods, some conditions are best treated by combined treatment and other conditions are best treated by homeopathy."