Homeopathy is a cheap, nontoxic system of medicine used by millions of people all over the world. It is very effective in treating chronic illnesses that fail to respond to conventional treatment, and is also an excellent method of self-care for minor conditions such as the common cold and flu.

  The word homeopathy derives from the Greek word homoios, meaning "similar," and pathos, meaning "suffering." Homeopathic remedies are generally dilutions of natural substances from plants, minerals, and animals. Based on the principle of "like cures like," these remedies specifically match different symptom patterns or "profiles" of illness, and act to stimulate the body's natural curling response.

 Throughout its 180-year history, homeopathy has proven effective in treating diseases for which conventional medicine has little to offer. However, due to its low cost, which threatens pharmaceutical profits, as well as its divergence from conventional medical theory, homeopathy has been continually attacked by the medical establishment.

  Homeopathy, however, is practiced around the world, with an estimated 500 million people receiving homeopathic treatment. The World Health Organization has cited homeopathy as one of the systems of traditional medicine that should be integrated worldwide with conventional medicine in order to provide adequate global health care by the year 2000.

  In the United States, an estimated three thousand medical doctors and licensed health care providers practice homeopathy, and the number continues to rise annually. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) recognizes homeopathic remedies as official drugs and regulates their manufacturing, labeling, and dispensing. Homeopathic remedies also have their own official compendium, the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States first published in 1897.

  In Europe, the birthplace of homeopathy, there are about six thousand practitioners in Germany and five thousand in France. All French pharmacies are required to carry homeopathic remedies along with conventional drugs. 

 

 

  Homeopathy has a long and distinguished history in the United States, and was popular from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. A father of homeopathy in the United States, Dr. Constantine Hering, established the first homeopathic medical school in the U.S. in 1835 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. By 1844, there were so many physicians claiming to be homeopathic practitioners that the homeopathic medical profession formed the American Institute of Homeopathy, the first national medical association in the United States. The American Medical Association (AMA) was formed three years later and denounced homeopathy as a delusion. AMA members were forbidden to associate with homeopathic physicians either professionally or socially, and physicians practicing homeopathy were expelled or blocked from becoming members.

  Due to its great success in treating such acute and epidemic diseases as cholera and black fever, homeopathy continued to gain attention in America. During an 1849 cholera epidemic in Cincinnati, Ohio, only 3 percent of those patients treated homeopathically died, as compared to the 40 to 70 percent death rate among those treated with conventional medicine.

  In the 1879 epidemic of yellow fever, homeopaths in New Orleans treated 1,945 cases with a mortality rate of 5.6 percent, while the mortality rate with standard medical treatment was 16 percent. At this time some of homeopathy's more illustrious supporters included John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, and Mark Twain.

  By 1900, there were twenty-two homeopathic medical schools and nearly one hundred homeopathic hospitals in the United States. According to Trevor Cook, Ph.D., DI Hom., President of the British Homeopathic Medical Society, 15 percent of all American physicians practiced homeopathy at the turn of the century. However, by the same time, the bond between the AMA and the pharmaceutical companies was firmly established. Paid advertisements from pharmaceutical companies in the AMA journal were the AMA's main source of revenue (as it is today), prominent physicians were paid to endorse proprietary drugs, and doctors were deluged with free samples of pharmaceutical drugs. Through a series of maneuvers including a new rating system for medical schools aimed at eliminating homeopathic colleges, the practice of homeopathy had nearly disappeared as a force in American medicine by 1930.

  However, homeopathy is again becoming recognized as a viable alternative medicine, and statistics now show that the American public is returning to this form of treatment in dramatic numbers, with annual sales of homeopathic medicines in the United States now reaching $150 million.