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Homeopathy is a safe, effective system of medicine that uses very diluted natural ingredients to help the body to heal itself and to build up its resistance to illness. It's been used successfully, worldwide, for about two hundred years.
Homeopathy is a 'holistic' system of medicine. It views good health as a natural balance of both the physical and mental sides of you as a whole person. It recognises that symptoms of ill health are expressions of inner disharmony, and that it is the patient who needs treatment and not the disease. The remedies therefore tackle the cause of someone's illness, rather than merely preventing or reducing the symptoms. For this reason, the remedies need to be tailored to the individual to be effective, and this means that buying them over-the-counter, without consulting a qualified practitioner, may be a waste of time and money. |
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HOW DO THE REMEDIES WORK? |
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Homeopathy is based on the principle of 'like cures like'; that substances that cause symptoms in healthy people will cure those symptoms in someone who is not well. The idea behind a homeopathic remedy is that by mimicking the disease it will stimulate the body to correct itself in a way that it hasn't yet managed to do on its own.
As an example, cutting a strong onion can produce stinging, runny eyes, a sore throat and an acrid, runny nose. A homeopath would prescribe the homeopathic remedy made from onion (Allium cepa) for a patient who had a cold with these particular symptoms. Conventional medicine (known as allopathic medicine) tries to deal with the chemistry of the symptoms and treats them with something that is their opposite, rather than something that is similar. By doing so, the body still goes on trying to produce the symptoms. A homeopathic remedy contains only a very tiny amount of active ingredient. To prepare it, a substance is diluted many, many times over, and shaken (or 'succussed') in a particular sequence. An ingredient may be diluted in up to one hundred parts of water or alcohol. This process of dilution may be repeated anywhere from five times up to hundreds of times, or more, depending on the remedy. |
