by Heather Peake

Here’s some Latin you can pull out to amaze your family and friends: simila similibus curentur. Or in English, “let likes cure likes.”

In either language, this is the guiding principal of homeopathy, a 200-year-old system of medicine that treats symptoms by prescribing tiny amounts of animal, plant, or mineral substances that, taken in large enough doses, would cause the same symptoms in a healthy body, thus stimulating the body to put up a defense.

What happens when you chop an onion? Your eyes water and your nose runs. Maybe you develop a sore throat or a cough. When the same symptoms occur and there’s no onion in sight, it’s probably an allergy. To treat an allergy homeopathically, you might take allium cepa, a derivative of red onion. In theory, at least, your symptoms will stop.

Around 1800, upon noting that the popular malaria remedy cinchona caused malaria-like symptoms when ingested by a healthy man, Samuel Hahnemann decided that the Greek physician Hippocrates’ 1,200-year-old dictum “like cures like” had been correct.

Collecting a group of willing volunteers, the German physician began testing, or “proving,” a variety of compounds and making careful observations of the symptoms. These provings became the basis for the book that would eventually become the bible of homeopathy, the Materia Medica.

Much to his surprise, when Hahnemann began trying these substances on the sick, he found that the more diluted the substance, the more powerful the healing results. He termed this “the Law of Potency.”

Is Less More?

When you look at a vial of a homeopathic remedy, you will often see a notation like 6X, 6C, 12X, 12C, 30X, 30C or so on. This is an indication of its dilution factor. For instance, to begin making a remedy, producers mix one drop of, say, a plant substance with 99 drops of alcohol and shaken vigorously. This makes a 1:100 ratio of 1C.

But it doesn’t end there. If something at 1C is then mixed with another 99 drop of alcohol and shaken, this makes it 2C. By the time the product reaches 3C, the dilution has reached one part in one million. To form pills, globules made of sugar and starches are coated with the dilution and dried.

Traditional doctors scoff at the notion that these are anything put sugar pills. Because the dilutions retain no trace of the original substance, there is almost no way it could possibly have any effect on the human body. Most traditionalists chalk homeopathy’s successes up to the placebo effect or the illness simply having run its course‘in short, coincidence.

Homeopathic practitioners point to studies that show their remedies to have a better rate of cure than placebos. Nor does the placebo effect explain the efficacy of remedies on infants or the unconscious. They claim that their compounds retain a “trace memory” of the substance, and that this faint imprint touches off a cure. It really isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. What is vaccination, after all, but a highly diluted strain of virus or bacteria that stimulates the body’s immune response?

Hahnemann lived long enough to see his work become one of the most popular forms of medicine in Europe and the United States. People welcomed the change from the harsh practices of bloodletting and purgatives that so dominated the 18th century. By mid-century, one in five American doctors were homeopathic practitioners, and dozens of schools were training physicians.

With the growing professionalization of medicine and the shift to a more mechanical and pharmacological view of the treatment of disease, homeopathy began to lose its footing in America. By the middle of the 1950s, all the schools were closed, and practitioners were hard to come by.

But within the last decade, Americans have begun to reexamine Hahnemann’s philosophies. According to the National Center for Homeopathy, sales of homeopathic products surged from $170 million in 1995 to $400 million last year. Between the 1997 and 1998 flu seasons alone, sales of Oscillococ-cinum, remedy made from the liver of Barbary ducks, grew 40 percent.

Good and Good For You

The attraction of homeopathy lies not only in its use of safe, gentle, natural remedies, but in its philosophy of healthy living.

Traditional medicine looks to suppress or mask symptoms. To the homeopath, symptoms represent the body’s attempt to cure itself. Remedies lean towards stimulating the body to heal itself more quickly. Conventional medicine often looks at heath as the absence of disease. Homeopathy sees health as a state of freedom, where a person is physically and mentally able to pursue his or her life as they chose.

Homeopathic medicines are available without prescription, and can be found in almost any natural foods store. (They are also one of the few such products that do not fall under FDA regulation, thanks to a 1938 bill sponsored by a homeopathic physician-turned-senator.)

There are dozens of books and Web sites that can show you the proper way to choose your medicines. This can be tricky, as medicines have to be carefully matched to symptoms; to the homeopath, all coughs are not the same. If you don’t want to go the do-it-yourself route, practitioners can be found through the National Center for Homeopathy’s Web site at homeopathic.org.

The usual caveat: homeopathic medicine is safe for minor illnesses, but if you are suffering from injury or a potentially serious medical condition, you need to see a traditional doctor, and use homeopathy for supportive care.