Homeopathy is experiencing a huge surge in popularity right now as people re-discover the “old” traditional “cures” seem to work better than the new pharmaceutical ones. We can only hope that this means the pharmaceutical approach to disease has seen its peak.
Most fans of homeopathy are surprised to learn, however, that homeopathic remedies are better than drugs only because they do less additional harm. They don’t “cure” anything. Homeopathy’s benefits lie in the fact that its substances are so dilute that they don’t interfere with the body healing itself. Homeopathy has been called a “happy delusion” by people who really understand disease and the healing power of the body. That’s exactly what it is. When it “works”, it’s because it’s given the body something more important to do than express the symptom it was expressing. That’s the best scenario to hope for, if you’re looking for symptom suppression. If you know the cause of the symptom, have done everything possible to remove it and still have need of temporary management, it’s best to try the least harmful ways first. Homeopathics definitely fill the bill. Of course their dilute nature causes them to very often have no effect at all, and if that happens you can always move on to the more powerful (and additional-harm-causing) remedies. If, on the other hand, you’re under the impression that homeopathics cure disease or “assist” the body, or create favorable conditions for healing, etc., you’ve been misled.
Giving the body something urgent to attend to is what drugs do. They simply distract the body from what it was attempting to do with a symptom. Homeopathics are no different than conventional medicines in this regard, despite their undeserved reputation as ‘harmless’ remedies. They follow the same misguided “cure” paradigm which holds that adding things to the body is what makes it heal. A very convoluted and illogical story (advocates of homeopathy call it a theory, but it’s really not because it can’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny) has been invented to explain why homeopathic substances seem to “work”. If you’ve had the experience of using homeopathics and finding that they don’t work, the reason is because they just didn’t give the body a big enough worry. It could carry on with what it was doing.
The bottom line is that homeopathics are a waste of money in most situations. They are usually too dilute to offer any help with pain or symptom management in those cases where causes have been removed and temporary relief is needed. In those cases, management of symptoms needs to be done with the awareness that administering medicines is always costly to the body, and costs versus benefits need to be carefully weighed as I explain in my article here.
And when causes have not been addressed, these substances just add to the body’s burden. Whatever people perceive them accomplishing in the body has been done by the body alone. When homeopathic remedies stop a constructive symptom (like skin, ear or digestive issues), it means the wastes that the body was attempting to eliminate have been retained.
The body needs no assistance. If that weren’t true, no injury would ever heal on its own. We don’t want to distract the body — to make it look in the other direction or perform some unnecessary eliminative function related to getting rid of a remedy or otherwise dealing with it so it can’t continue what it was doing. We want to respect its wisdom, cooperate with it and allow it to cleanse and repair itself.
Here’s more info on the truth about homeopathy: http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/chiropractic-homeopathy-and-osteopathy/homeopathy.html.
Best wishes,
Nora