Homeopathy and Herbal Medicine are alternative healing treatments. Both use natural plant substances, but follow opposite healing theories.
As you can see by the products on my website, my experience is with specific botanicals and herbs. While my understanding of homeopathy is mostly conceptual, there are many who subscribe to this therapy.
Herbalism
For thousands of years (dating back to prehistoric times) and continuing to this day, naturally occurring medicinal herbs and botanicals have been used by most cultures around the world as remedies to treat diseases and symptoms.
Every plant species has its own composition of active chemical compounds, some of which are healing and others that may be toxic.
Herbal medicine subscribes to dose-response pharmacology: that the biological response to the herb varies in direct proportion to the dose or concentration of the remedy.
Homeopathy (see below) subscribes to the complete opposite: that the more dilute (less concentrated) the natural remedy is, the more effective it is.
Modern scientists have studied the active ingredients or healing compounds in many botanicals and extracted them (or created synthetic “equivalents”) to develop modern pharmacological medicines.
Herbs have varying strengths of properties — some have side effects and/or interactions with conventional pharmaceutical drugs.
Herbal medicine is an integral part of Chinese and Ayurvedic Medicine and widely followed and accepted in many European countries today.
Homeopathy
Homeopathy, a relatively “modern” medicine first created about 200 years ago by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, also uses naturally occurring compounds including botanicals.
The belief in homeopathy is that a significant dose of a substance (plant and other natural substances) that causes disease symptoms in a healthy person will cure similar symptoms in a sick person, when given in tiny amounts.
In other words, homeopathy believes that the remedy becomes more potent the more dilute it is. (That there is an inverse relationship between the concentration and the effectiveness of the remedy.)
Homeopathy subscribes that when given the least amount of medicine, the body can trigger a healing response.
Dr. Hahnemann’s research included taking high doses of plant medicines and noting the symptoms that they produced. He then took extremely diluted versions of the same plant to treat diseases that produced similar symptoms.
He coined homeopathic principle of “similars,” and “like cures like.”
Homeopathy maintains that it’s ineffective to treat diseases by directly opposing their symptoms, (as is sometimes done in conventional medicine), because all “disease can generally be traced to some latent, deep-seated, underlying chronic, or inherited tendency.”
Homeopathy is not known to cause any side effects or interactions, because they are such a diluted form.
