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Aberdeen's foremost holistic health clinic - established in 1997
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The Roots of Homeopathy  By Elaine Cairney  RSHom

Homeopathy is a gentle form of Medicine which was known to the Ancient Greeks, a fact mirrored by it's derivation from the Greek 'homoios', meaning like, and pathos, meaning 'suffering'. 

Essentially it means treating like with like.

The great physician Hippocrates first taught that there were two ways of treating a patient. Either one could cure by 'contraries', or by 'similarities'. That is, one could either give medication to counteract symptoms (the law of contraries) or medication which had the ability to produce the same symptoms as those suffered by the ill person (the law of similars).

In both cases he believed that the physician was merely creating the right conditions for the inner healing power to bring about the cure. Over the centuries physicians continued to practice both type of Medicine, although it was not until the 18th Century that the similar principle became formulated into a distinct system of Medicine. The founder of this school of thought was an eccentric genius by the name of Samuel Hahnemann.

Samuel Hahnemann qualified as a doctor from the University of Erlangen in 1779. After several unhappy years in practice, he became thoroughly disillusioned with the rather brutal and dubious medical treatments of the day. In a manner which was typical of his nature he gave up medical practice and started to study chemistry, which he subsided by making a modest living by writing and translating.

In 1790, while translating a textbook by the eminent Scottish physician Cullen, Hahnemann  came across a section dealing with the treatment of malaria by quinine.

Although this was and still is an appropriate treatment for the disease, he was unconvinced by Cullen's explanation that it worked by virtue of having a tonic effect on the stomach. He reasoned that since other more powerful 'tonics' had no such beneficial effect, it had to be working by some other mechanism. Being the experimenter that he was he then dosed himself with quinine for several days, the result being that he began to experience the symptoms of malaria. Thus the idea began to form - a drug which produced the symptoms of an illness in a healthy subject could also be used to treat an illness with the same characteristics.

Over the following years Hahnemann returned to medical practice, developing the concept of similars, by dosing himself, his family and friends with different substances in order to study the symptoms they produced when given to healthy subjects.

These experiments came to be known as provings  and culminated in the publication of his book The Organon of Rational Healing in 1810.  Homeopathy was born!

Homeopathy today.
More and more people are turning to homeopathy as like Hanhnemann the limitations of orthodox medicine and the toxic effects of some of the drugs used are disillusioning them.

Homeopathy is holistic in its approach, taking into consideration the spiritual, mental, emotional and physical bodies. Homeopaths treat 'the person' and not the disease, the person always exists before the disease. 

It is a gentle and non-toxic system of medicine. As  homeopath's we love symptoms, symptoms are the bodies natural way of expressing an imbalance, symptoms are the result of imbalance and we therefore do not treat just the symptoms but the cause of those symptoms. Once the cause has been identified and removed by appropriate similar remedies the body will then go on to heal itself.

Homeopathy can do everything that orthodox medicine can do and more, in certain circumstances.

It can be used to treat both chronic complaints as well as acute and because in Homeopathy it is the person who is treated and not the disease, it is then effectively able to treat people where no conventional diagnosis can be found.  A few examples of some of the most common cases a Homeopath may deal with would be: anxiety and depression, behaviour problems in children, asthma, hay fever, migraines, I.B.S. skin complaints M.E. menstrual and hormonal problems plus many more.

We even treat the teeth and painful backs! I say this because some people still believe their teeth and their sore back is separate from their other parts.

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