How holistic is homoeopathy?

World Homoeopathy Day is observed every year on April 10 to commemorate the birthday of Dr Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy. In a three-week series, we will discover how homoeopathy works. This week we chat to experts in the field from DUT for a crash course in homeopathy 101.

HOMOEOPATHY is built on two fundamental beliefs: like cures like and minimal doses, while homoeopaths take a holistic approach to treatment.

This means a homoeopath will consider the person who is sick rather than focusing on the sickness itself, explains Dr Ingrid Couchman, a lecturer at Durban University of Technology (DUT), who holds a MTech in homoeopathy.

“Rather than looking at a disease and treating the disease, we look at the person who has the disease, because each person handles a disease differently. Instead of thinking of a disease, we think of a person who is dis-eased,” she said.

The concept of approving – that like cures like – is key to homoeopathic diagnosis and treatment.

“Healthy people will take a substance and document their symptoms. Then we will make up, what we call a remedy picture. For example, if you are cutting onions, your eyes and nose might run and your eyes will begin to burn. If a patient came in with those symptoms, we could prescribe onion as a remedy,” said Couchman.

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By using minimal doses, the homoeopath will stimulate the immune system.

“We believe that the body doesn’t need a large dosage to activate healing. It’s a hint rather than a hammer. We succus and dilute remedies to stimulate the immune system, rather than overpowering it,” said Couchman.

An easy way to understand this is to consider the way a vaccine works, said Dr Shraddha Sirpal, a lab technician at DUT’s homoeopathy department.

“In a vaccination, you take a minute dosage of the dead virus, to stimulate your body to fight that virus. In the same way, we are administering a minute dose in homoeopathy. This will stimulate your body to fight the disease,” she explained.

How the body learns to heal

This spurs the body into action, to fight a disease that the patient is perhaps not aware of.

“If you sleep next to a train station, you stop hearing the train go by after a while. This happens in the body – a disease is there, but your body forgets that its there. A homoeopathic remedy will remind the body. If you have a neck pain that just doesn’t go away, you forget that its there. We are going to give you a remedy that causes neck pain in effect, so it aggregates that response. Your body reacts because the remedy is a foreign source. When your body reacts against the homeopathic remedy, it is helping your body health the problem that it’s forgotten to see, to hear that train go by again,” explained Sirpal.

A homoeopath will spend an hour consulting with a patient to address their individual aliment.

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“We are all born with our own susceptibilities. The way we produce sickness is different, based on our genetics, our background and environment. Homeopathy takes all of these factors into consideration, as well as the patients mental state, stress triggers, nutrition and sleep patterns. All these factors impact how we heal. We get to know our patients,” said Sirpal.

Homeopaths strive to consider the environmental factors that surround a patients symptoms as well as how they deal with life’s stresses.

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