Homeopathy is regarded worldwide as an important pillar of CAM - complementary and alternative medicine and is categorised as a special therapeutic direction in German pharmaceutical law.
Homeopathy is highly recognised by the population worldwide, not only in Europe (especially in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland) and the UK, but also in the USA, Canada, Mexico, South America and, to a particular extent, in India.
Brief definition of homeopathy
Summarised in contemporary language, a general definition is as follows:
Homeopathy is a holistic medicinal therapy with an independent methodology - individualised medicinal therapy - based on phenomenological drug diagnostics and prescription theory.
The therapeutic goal is the targeted stimulation of physiological autoregulation according to a stimulus-response model through controlled administration of medication, which should help to overcome the disorder "on its own" and to develop greater robustness against the pathogenic stimuli as sustainably as possible.
The therapy procedure also includes close disease monitoring, which very precisely examines the reactions that occur and analyses them by means of falsification.
The name describes the therapy principle
The premises of homeopathy go back to observations of nature and empirical practical research carried out by the German doctor Samuel Hahnemann at the beginning of the 19th century.
However, the term homeopathy is not protected and this has led to a great deal of confusion over the course of two centuries. Depending on the prevailing epochal zeitgeist, which continues to this day, this manifests itself in very different ways. For example, if you ask "what homeopathy is" in everyday life, you will receive a wide variety of answers, many of which are contradictory and even contradictory. Most of these are opinions based on vague ideas with little foundation. Even the term "in homeopathic doses", which since the mid-1990s has become a colloquial expression for "not measurable, not verifiable", shows how much such ideas based on ignorance can be "off the mark", because:
Homeopathy (ancient Greek ὁμοῖος homóios, German "gleichartig, similar" and πάθος páthos, "suffering") describes a therapeutic drug prescription concept that carefully compares the patient's symptoms with defined drug reactions of remedies. In this analysis, the greatest possible congruence is sought
- the precisely explored, individual symptom pattern of the disease case with
- defined drug reactions described in the homeopathic pharmacopoeia,
sought. The remedy that most closely matches the patient's individual symptom pattern, in other words the remedy that is most similar to the condition, is prescribed in a controlled dosage after an individual case analysis: "similia similibus curentur" is this prescribing principle, which gave homeopathy its name.
Systematic drug trials and evaluation of case progress
Such an approach imposes an essential condition: The physiological reaction of the remedies used according to the homeopathic principle must be known before they can be prescribed as medicines. This becomes:
- determined in detail and systematically in test series on test subjects (traditionally referred to as Homeopathic Drug Proving / Homöopathische Arzneimittelprüfung – HAMP) and
- the clinical effects of the treatment are continuously documented and validated in detail in several steps by analysing case histories.
Such a process takes many years for each individual remedy before the reactions of homeopathic remedies are sufficiently defined and comprehensively documented to be able to use them in a targeted manner. The reason for this procedure is also immediately obvious: without such reliable knowledge, remedies cannot be precisely differentiated phenomenologically in individual cases, as required by the methodology.
Since Hahnemann's early days of homeopathy, and continuing to this day, systematic drug trials have been carried out and their clinical results documented in practice.
These are written down in the homeopathic pharmacopoeia, the Materia Medica (lexica of verified drug reactions and symptoms), which thus also reflects a wealth of experience from 220 years of observations of patients worldwide.
Homeopathy describes a prescription principle
In other words: If homeopathic medicines are used without such a differentiated comparison in the case of illness, it is not a homeopathic treatment, even if the pack of the tablets taken is labelled "homeopathic medicine". The decisive factor for homeopathic use is the prescription principle, not the manufacturing instructions for the medicine.
In "homeopathic doses", correctly and completely quoted, this means a remedy prescribed after analysis of the individual case, precisely tailored to the individual symptoms, which is applied in single doses and (re-)analysed in its reactions in the course of the case.