Homeopathy is not well known in the United States yet, though it is growing fast due to its high success rate in helping people, especially those that cannot be helped by conventional medicine. Homeopathy is very common and accepted in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, India and many other countries.
Homeopathy was developed by a German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), who thought, correctly, that the medical treatments of his day -- bleeding, mercury, powerful laxatives, and drugs that caused vomiting -- did more harm than good. He closed his practice and worked as a medical translator to better acquaint himself with healing arts around the world.
Hahnemann became fascinated with cinchona bark, the first effective treatment for malaria. (Cinchona is the source of the antimalarial drug quinine.) In 1790, while experimenting with cinchona bark, Hahnemann ingested some himself and quickly felt cold, achy, anxious, thirsty, and ill -- the very symptoms of malaria that cinchona bark was used to treat. That experience led him to postulate his Law of Similars, the idea that the symptoms of an illness can be treated with the substances that cause the same symptoms in healthy people. The Law of Similars led to the term "homeopathy," which Hahnemann derived from the Greek for "treatment by similars," or using like to treat like.
Hahnemann theorized that substances that produced specific symptoms in healthy individuals -- medicinal herbs, animal materials, and natural chemical compounds -- might be used to treat diseases that produced similar symptoms. For the rest of his life, he tested hundreds of substances on himself and catalogued their effects. Eventually, he reopened his medical practice, prescribing only homeopathic medicines.more info
