Read

September/October 2002 Featured Stories
Evolution of a Medical Paradigm:
The Hope and History of Homeopathy

by Douglas Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom(NA)

It’s 1849, and a cholera epidemic is sweeping through Cincinnati. The morgues are filling up faster than people can be buried. 45 to 60% of patients admitted to the allopathic medical hospitals die. Yet in the homeopathic hospitals, only 3% of cholera patients die.

It was the glory days of homeopathy. Historian Harris Coulter reports that by 1892 "homeopaths controlled about 110 hospitals, 145 dispensaries, 62 orphan asylums and old peoples’ homes, over thirty nursing homes and sanatoria, and 16 insane asylums." Communities and state governments regarded homeopathy highly. In 1870 the New York State Legislature appropriated $150,000 toward the construction of a homeopathic psychiatric hospital, and the New York Ophthalmic Hospital, one of the largest and best-endowed eye and ear hospitals in the country, passed into homeopathic hands. After the Westborough Massachusetts Insane Asylum was transferred to homeopathic control the Springfield Republican devoted an admiring column in praise, reporting that "the cost of maintenance is much less, and the recoveries and general success greater than in allopathic asylums"

100 years later homeopathy was barely alive in the U.S. The homeopathic medical schools had locked their doors or become allopathic institutions. The homeopathic hospitals were forgotten. A tiny band of heroic elder homeopaths continued to practice, but few younger practitioners were available to take their places. Meanwhile, allopathic medicine had abandoned mercury poisoning and blood-letting, discovered the power of antibiotics, anesthesia, x-rays and steroids, thereby developing a credible diagnostic and therapeutic armamentarium with which to combat disease. The medico-industrial complex was rapidly developing into a powerful financial, ideological, and political empire.

Much has been written about the conspiracy of the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical companies to destroy homeopathic practice. But it is now generally recognized that while these powerful economic interests contributed to the near demise of homeopathy, other factors may have been at least as important. An aspect of the history and hope of homeopathy that I’d like to focus on here is the relationship of its underlying assumptions to the zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. For no one makes decisions about health care in a social and ideological vacuum: the model of health care we select is intimately tied to our deepest beliefs about what causes illness, and what constitutes health.

Homeopathy was "born" as the 18^th century expired, as industrialization was spreading like wildfire across Europe and North America. Its principles of using "like to cure like", non-material dosing, and careful individualization of prescriptions had more in common with medieval alchemy than modern ideas of mass production, the germ theory of disease, efficiency, reductionism, and classification. Expert homeopathic practitioners witnessed daily seemingly miraculous cures with remedies that had no substance and were considered spiritual in nature, reinforcing their deeply-held religious views of the world. The world, on the other hand, became increasingly enamored with its power to control material forces with technology and rational, causal thinking.

Fast forward to the present: It is the dawn of the new millennium. There is a rebirth of interest in spiritual matters, along with growing disillusionment, malaise and alienation produced by the one-sided emphasis on growth, technology, and exploitation of the earth. Homeopathy, along with many other once-suppressed healing techniques, is enjoying a resurgence of popularity.

Growth presents an opportunity as well as a challenge: How do we explain what we do? How do we relate to today’s zeitgeist, to peoples’ need to understand their health in the context of today’s deeper appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things? For all of its newfound popularity, homeopathy retains an antiquated, dated image. ‘Little placebo sugar pellets for running noses’ was my first thought when it was suggested that I take my then two year old child to a homeopath for an ear infection that didn’t respond to the antibiotics I prescribed. It was only after I experienced, through my son’s miraculous homeopathic recovery, the power of homeopathy that I began to investigate it seriously.

While Chinese medicine, herbalism, and shamanism are increasingly understood and sought out, homeopathy remains a mysterious relic from the past. What is the difference between naturopathy and homeopathy? How does homeopathy work? What is actually in those remedies? These are questions I am asked every day, and I find myself digging deeply into myself each time I hear one of these most basic, important questions.

Most of my patients come to me after they’ve exhausted all other options. They’ve been to the specialists, and they’ve taken the drugs. They’ve had lots of tests but little relief. People with fatigue, pain, anxiety, irritable bowel, depression, allergies, confusion and memory loss, unexplained symptoms often find dramatic relief where no other previous treatment could help. Why didn’t they come sooner? Because first and foremost people want to understand what’s going on with them. The promise of a diagnosis is a promise of meaning, of making sense of what they are experiencing. And modern medicine promises just that: a diagnosis, a categorization, and an explanation.

Homeopathy promises a cure: it doesn’t promise an explanation. This is both its strength and its weakness. In Part Two, I’ll discuss how homeopathy needs to overcome this weakness; how it needs to explain itself as part of an emerging consciousness of who and what we are, and of how it can contribute to the important question: What is our place in the cosmos?