Healing the Homeopathic Way E-Book

Jörg Wichmann

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 311

Beschreibung

Homeopathy works, heals and is easy to explain and understand. All that is needed is a change of perspective to a scientific paradigm that suits homeopathy and on which basis its laws make sense. In the current discussion about the effectiveness of homeopathy, this book gives clear answers and illuminates the historical, philosophical and scientific backgrounds of this holistic medicine. It shows that there is much more to it than a healing method. Homeopathy offers a medical alternative that does not produce resistant germs, does not bring hormones and toxins into the body and the environment, and due to its minimal consumption of resources is sustainable, inexpensive and can be used worldwide. Homeopathy is a healing method that moves between the worlds of modern science and the traditional holistic paths and can contribute the best from both sides. It developed an accuracy of observation, documentation and knowledge of remedies, as well as an international exchange of experience, as is only known from modern sciences. And it builds on the depth of the intuition of the practitioners, on the direct encounter with the essence of the remedies and on an understanding of the life force as only the holistic traditions cultivate. Only those who see both sides can truly understand homeopathy and use or exercise its full potential.

Leseprobe

Content

I

NTRODUCTION

W

AYS OF

H

OMEOPATHIC

H

EALING

Remedies and Similarity – the Simile Principle

Two Important Remedy Pictures as Examples:

Dynamis and Potentisation

Samuel Hahnemann – a Short Biography

Potentisation – the Liberation from Materiality

Illness and Perception

The Healing Process

Remedy Provings

Health, Disease and Symptoms

Dynamis – the Life Force

A

NOTHER

R

EALITY

The World View of the Ancient World

Alchemy

The History of Alchemy

Micro- and Macrocosmos

The Tabula Smaragdina (the Emerald Tablet).

The Principles of the Hermetic World View

Another Reality II

Homeopathy and its Spiritual Roots in Hermeticism

Historical Connections

The Principles of Homeopathy

Homeopathy and Christianity

Materialistic Science and Homeopathy

Scientific Research on Homeopathy

M

EDICINE

M

EN AND

W

OMEN OF

T

ODAY

Shamanism

Spirits and Remedies

From the "Organon" about the Self-Experiment

"What's Wrong with Us?" Healing by Empathy.

Shamanic Aspects of Homeopathy

Jeremy Sherr on Shamanism and Homeopathy

Shamanic and Homeopathic Healing

Homeopathy and the Spiritual Path

S

ELF

-

CONFIDENTLY

D

IFFERENT

– H

OMEOPATHY IN

M

ODERN

S

OCIETY

A Question of Tolerance

Two World Views and Two Medical Paths

A Question of Ethics

Homeopathy and its Opponents, the ‘Sceptics’

The End of the Mechanistic World View

Health Policy against Human Rights

A Medicine for the Future

Homeopathy as Sustainable Medicine

Homeopathy in the Context of the Global Crisis

G

LOSSARY OF

H

OMEOPATHIC

T

ERMS

L

ITERATURE

F

OOTNOTES

In the boxes highlighted in grey – in the table of contents in italics and indented – you will find additional information that relates to the topic in question but is not necessary for understanding and can be skipped in the text flow.

Introduction

Facing the crisis of modern health care, more and more people are looking for other, alternative and personally appropriate ways of healing. The first concern of many is to find a gentler healing method for themselves, whose possible side effects are no more dangerous than the disease to be cured. For others it is about not having to completely give up responsibility for themselves, their health and their lives in the healing process. Not only do they want to have their symptoms removed or their organs cured, they also want to be able to make sense of such a difficult phase of life as a disease and to mature personally from it.

Today, numerous holistic healing methods from different cultural contexts strive to do justice to this concern. Apart from the obvious differences, they all have a lot in common that is important for a comprehensive understanding of today's medical development. In a new way, this book presents a path that is based on and promotes our own inner healing powers: classical homeopathy, the most important alternative to the predominant mechanistic medicine for more than two hundred years.1

Holistic healing methods are not only healing methods for use when you are ill, but are also part of a world view that helps us live healthily. A holistic view of the world gives us orientation and meaning and, through many of life’s difficulties, helps us to stay healthy, creative and in balance. For many people this aspect is as important as the possibility of experiencing healing when ill.

Homeopathy is both known and unknown. Many people have come into contact with it through their own suffering or childhood diseases within the family. They have experienced homeopathy in practice and know that it is an effective method. However, many have found it difficult to find a good explanation as to why and how homeopathy works. There are many positive experiences, but behind them is often the question mark regarding what the successes are based upon. There are ideas of placebo, herbalism, talking cures, or vague understanding of ‘vibrations’ or ‘energies’ as effective factors – muddled and misguided understanding quite frequently.

Trying to explain the working of homeopathy in the same way as one generally understands the effect of a pharmaceutical medicine does not, however, lead to a real understanding. Moreover, the wrong view of the essence of homeopathic healing often prevents the full potential of this method from being realized. It is not enough to perceive homeopathy merely as a practical method. A healing method and the laws on which it is based can only be taken seriously if they fit into a world view that functions according to the same laws. Homeopathy often requires its patients and the public to accept that the effects of homeopathy lie outside the generally accepted reality, without being able to give an alternative world view in which it fits. The fact that homeopathic treatment works and heals convinces many people. But there remains an uneasiness to get involved in a system that contradicts lots of everyday assumptions about our world, or at least seems not to provide clear information about these connections. In trying to deconstruct and understand our world in its minutest material parts, the spirit of the whole is lost, subsumed into the sum of its parts. The mechanistic world view has no place for the sacred, the divine, the magical, that which is not ‘countable’ – the unaccountable.

For this reason, many more or less scientific pseudo explanations are put together, which are then rejected again and again by the established science. All attempts to understand homeopathy through by way of the current conventional science are bound to fail because such science is not the appropriate world view. Rather, homeopathy is based on a world view that is initially very unusual for many people. Homeopathy2 is part of an ancient European spiritual tradition that differs fundamentally from the mechanistic thinking of the currently established materialistic sciences. Only from the wealth of thoughts and experiences of hermetics and alchemy, even reaching into the world of shamanism, do the principles and procedures of homeopathy make recognisable sense. Once we have understood the essence of these ancient traditions, this treasure of knowledge that unites all humanity, will the mysteries of homeopathy be solved in a simple way. And we can trust that a constantly evolving materialistic science is in the process of approaching the insights of this philosophia perennis, the eternal philosophy, on its own paths. We will discuss this in a later chapter.

Much of what is said here for homeopathy also applies analogously to other holistic healing methods. The holistic healing methods are neither remnants from a ‘pre-scientific’ era, whose semi-understood experiences have to be scientifically processed, nor are they forms of a ‘complementary’ medicine, which can complement the actual and main medicine, where less problematic ailments are concerned. Rather, they are complete and independent fields of knowledge and methods, with their respective strengths and weaknesses, which can in principle be used for the healing of all human diseases.

They are therefore not only alternative methods for the treatment of diseases, but they also share the ground of a world view that could be transformative in today's crises. This combination of properties offers challenge and opportunities: it is a system of healing whose infinite possibilities are known to but a few, and even then only in part.

By associating the healing method of classical homeopathy with shamanic healing and seeing the preparation of its remedies as an alchemical procedure, it is possible to fully and profoundly understand this method of healing, which has so far been unsatisfactorily explained. In this understanding it can be taken by therapists as well as by patients as a fascinating way to find access to one's own healing powers, to find healing in the deep encounter between people and between people and the world and thus to gain an expanded relationship to oneself, one's fellow human beings and the environment.

With this, homeopathy says goodbye to the struggle for so-called scientific recognition and classification into a world view that does not fit in with holistic healing methods. In fact, it has always been possible to prove the existence of homeopathic effects within the conditions of basic science; but there are also scientific theoretical reasons for the fact that an explanation of this effectiveness will not be satisfactorily possible within the given framework. However, it’s a mental shortcut that something that cannot be explained mechanistically, generally cannot be explained.

Homeopathy is easy to explain and understand, but not within the framework of today's mechanistic science. With this book I would like to try and shed light on the spiritual background of this way of healing and to explain the effect of homeopathic healing in this context.

Homeopathy was born a good two hundred years ago, when modern science was in its early stages of development; and a medicine similar to our present one was not yet in sight. With his new system, its founder Samuel Hahnemann, reverted to the old spiritual traditions of the Occident, but he was already a child of the Enlightenment and tried to formulate his discovery in the new terms. He even had the idea that with the help of homeopathy, medicine could become as exact and predictable as mathematics. These ideas of Hahnemann can be well understood from his time, because mathematical ideas, rationality and measurability were the intellectual programme of this epoch. But today they no longer help us to understand people, medicine or homeopathy. Today we know infinitely more about the possibilities and limits of modern science than Hahnemann could. And we can see today that homeopathy is much better understood on the basis of the world view that prevailed throughout Europe and the whole world before the rise of materialism and with which humanity has always tried to understand the world and its own existence, life and death, happiness and suffering.

This path to a clearer understanding of homeopathy and healing in general will lead us far back through alchemy to the shamanism of our very early ancestors, to the healing methods of native peoples and to esoteric approaches to understand the essence of being human. It will become clear that the production of homeopathic medicines is an alchemical process, and that the homeopathic approach to healing is most similar to shamanism. Thus homeopathy is rather alien to mechanistic science and orthodox medicine and can neither be understood nor judged by it. It does not contradict it, but has its own view of the world and its own scientific methods, which are comprehensive and conclusive in themselves.

Conversely, from the point of view of a holistic spiritual world view, one could ask what a suitable medicine could be? Among the forms of medicine developed in Europe, homeopathy as the most comprehensive system, osteopathy, which is becoming more and more important, anthroposophical medicine, Bach flowers and spiritual healing are the main forms of medicine to be considered. Although many of today's so-called ‘alternative therapies’ represent gentler alternatives to conventional medicine, they are essentially based on the same view of the world: herbal medicine, manual and chiropractic methods, forms of energy medicine such as bio resonance or electro acupuncture, most psychotherapies. Like orthodox medicine, they all assume a division between soul and body and believe that therapeutic measures have a causal influence on the system of body and soul.

Finally, in our consideration of the ways and possibilities of holistic healing, we will come across the extent to which this kind of healing is currently hindered in our society. In a liberal and pluralistic society, it should be self-evident that we citizens are not ideologically patronised or fixed in the choice of our way of life and our healing methods. In medicine, however, this is the case to a considerable extent. By becoming aware of the path we want to take in health and sickness and of the differences between the paths offered, we can gain the strength to work for greater freedom of choice.

There are different ways of knowledge and science that have their respective advantages and disadvantages, and different ways in which we can lead our lives. I would like to make a contribution to a partnership between different world views and lifestyles. Even though for me modern scientific thinking is the most exciting venture of the West and its greatest contribution to the development of the human spirit, I reject its claim to dominate all other views of the world. Genuine cooperation between different medical procedures and approaches will only be possible if there is an understanding and mutual respect for the particularities and differences involved. The aim of this book is to contribute to such a fruitful cooperation between different forms of science and medicine.

The book therefore has two aims: to show a path to homeopathy by embedding it in the larger context in which it belongs; and to enable interested people, patients and practitioners to find more clarity about different forms of therapy in order to consciously choose their own path in illness and health.

It is not the aim of this book to present or develop a particular or even new type of homeopathy. It is about understanding classical homeopathy better and understanding it as part of a larger mental environment. This better understanding will reveal some aspects of homeopathy that are still underdeveloped or have not been properly valued in their importance for the overall context of this holistic science. The mechanistic era of the West has forced homeopathy – as well as many other holistic sciences – to adopt a methodological approach that has atrophied a number of essential possibilities in these disciplines. Now that the end of this epoch is in sight in many respects, it is time to realise the full potential of holistic procedures and world-views and to begin their revival and implementation – for the benefit of countless ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’ individuals as well as the overall cultural development.

I had my first encounter with homeopathy during my training as a naturopath when I attended a lecture on the remedy Symphytum (Symphytum officinale is the Latin name for comfrey), which is typically used for acute complaints of the periosteum and joints. I had problems with my arm at the time, which I had broken 10 years earlier in the elbow joint and overloaded it a few months ago while working. Since then every movement in the elbow was painful and severely restricted, and I could feel a loose cartilage particle wandering around in the joint. For three months I had tried in vain to alleviate the complaints and tried all the methods I came across: sports ointments, bandages, compresses, essential oils, embrocations, warmth, cold; nothing had helped. Now I thought: Why not try a homeopathic remedy? So I took Symphytum in a low potency, but without seriously expecting that something would change noticeably. I didn't know anything about homeopathy yet, and the tiny globules didn't seem very impressive compared to my healing efforts so far. In fact, however, the next morning the pain was so intense that I only had a few centimetres reach to move in the joint. The evening after, everything was gone, the pain and also this annoying and obstructive piece of cartilage in the joint. Like a spook, everything had disappeared and never came back.

I was very impressed, and I started to learn more intensively about homeopathy, which until then had not been my field of interest. I had to learn that such a miraculous healing process is very pleasant, but also rare. But such a chance hit, as I had experienced, showed me quite drastically the possibilities of a homeopathic remedy. Apparently my body was able to reintegrate even manifest cartilage parts in a very short time if it was given the right impulse. My interest was aroused and I was open for further new insights.

This marked the beginning of a phase in my life in which I experienced myself as a homeopathic patient, as a student of homeopathy and finally as a homeopathic practitioner and teacher. Today I am in all three roles at the same time: in homeopathy you remain a lifelong student – that is the beautiful and exciting thing about it –, I am a patient once and again, and homeopathic therapy has become my profession.

Ways of Homeopathic Healing

Health is the ability to develop symptoms in unhealthy situations and learn from them, I read recently.

This sentence reflects well the attitude of homeopathy towards health and disease. If you go to a homeopath for treatment, you will notice this first: He (or she) will be very interested in your symptoms, in your own experience. Medical diagnosis usually plays a subordinate role. Rather, as a homeopathic patient, you will learn to observe yourself very closely, which changes in your state of health occur under which circumstances, when they get better or worse, which likes and dislikes you feel, how your feelings and dreams react to your life. All this information gives homeopathic practitioners an overall picture on the basis of which they can prescribe a remedy. Everything is about understanding how you as a whole person, your mind and your organism, react to the situations of your life. Illness is a possible response to the demands of life and just as individual as any other behavioural pattern that someone can show. Everyone works, eats, sleeps, laughs, loves, scolds and runs in his or her typical way. But we believe we can summarise such a complicated event as a disease with a simple label. Hundreds of sick people with very different physical and mental states ‘have rheumatism’ and, depending on its severity, receive one or more typical medications. Their personal history and their own way of suffering are at best marginally perceived by an attentive doctor, but more likely ignored and considered unimportant for the ‘rheumatism’.

The first and perhaps most important message of the homeopathic practitioner to the patients is: I take you and your condition, your own experience and your whole story seriously, every detail of it as you have experienced and suffered it yourself. I listen to everything quietly, without judging or interpreting anything. With this form of therapy you yourself as a whole person are in demand and challenged. It is about you, about your life and your unique way to be ill, to suffer, to become healthy and to shape your existence. The therapy can promote and support you in your own power and invite you to use your illness as an opportunity for greater self-awareness and to continue on your path strengthened and healed. Homeopathic treatment gives the impulse and shows the way. You yourself go out on your own.

This basic attitude has various components that are also helpful in life. Listening calmly without evaluating or reinterpreting is a key to deeper understanding and greater openness and closeness in all human contacts and also in nature. Ultimately, my whole biography is a kind of anamnesis of life with myself – ‘an-amnesis’, retrieving from the unconscious, from oblivion. If I take this attentive and non-judgmental look at my life span, I can gradually discover what my soul meant by my existence. Looking at myself in the same way as a good therapist would do, can be a helpful exercise in freeing myself from the judgements of a strict superego, taking myself more lovingly and leniently, or even finding out my own excuses.

The approach of always wanting to perceive the whole thing and not just correcting the symptoms alone is not only useful in healing, but also helps me everywhere in life where I want to understand connections, where a project does not run as I imagined it to or where I want to gain a better overview of political events. Looking at the specifics from the perspective of the whole makes everything more transparent.

And the idea that my body knows the best solution and only needs a small impulse to move towards healing gives great confidence that the power for my life lies within myself and not in external help, experts or gurus.

Remedies and Similarity – the Simile Principle

Usually all attention in homeopathic therapy is focused on the prescription of a homeopathic remedy – both on the part of the patient and in homeopathic education. It forms an essential part, but only a part, of the comprehensive concept of homeopathy considering ourselves and life. Yet since homeopathic medicine in general is the starting point of many discussions about this form of therapy, we want to begin our walk along the homeopathic paths with it.

According to the individual approach, as indicated above, within homeopathy a remedy is not prescribed with regard to a specific diagnosis of a disease, but in the greatest possible similarity to the nature of the patient and to the essence of his or her disease. ‘Similia similibus curentur' – Similar things should be cured by similar things, that is the so-called Principle of Similarity or Simile principle. This similarity means that a substance in homeopathic treatment is able to heal such a complex of symptoms as it causes in a healthy person in the context of a remedy proving (or poisoning).

The practical work of homeopaths with their remedies now consists, on the one hand, in finding out the properties of possible remedies through remedy provings (usually on groups of colleagues) and, on the other hand, in determining by means of detailed case taking – the anamnesis – which of the known medicines is the most similar to the condition to be cured in the respective patient.

Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, came across this law of similars when he was translating a medical book and wanted to check a claim about the effects of cinchona bark (China officinalis). He simply took it for a few days and to his surprise noticed that this substance caused very typical malaria symptoms in him as a healthy person. At that time, cinchona bark was the main medical remedy for this serious tropical disease, and even today, conventional medicine still uses chemically modified extracts from cinchona bark against malaria. Hahnemann thus experienced the symptoms against which the cinchona bark was actually used – triggered by the remedy itself. He continued to experiment, on himself and on family members, and found out that he had come across a general principle which had also been formulated by ancient doctors, such as the famous Hippocrates, and the most important physician of the late Middle Ages, Paracelsus.

As an educated and well-read scholar, Hahnemann will certainly have known of the ideas of his predecessors about healing by way of similars, but it was in the spirit of his time that he relied on an assumption only when he could confirm it by trials. Hahnemann spent the rest of his life researching this idea further, proving new remedies and systematising the results, refining the rules of his healing method and working out a form of preparation of the ‘homeopathic’ remedies (as he then called them) that met his high demands for a fast, gentle and lasting medicine.

Identifying the substance that comes closest to the overall picture of the patient's symptoms, finding the most similar remedy, is not an easy task. After all, from hundreds of known remedies with partly quite similar characteristics, the most similar is to be found. The result also depends on how well the therapist has understood the patient's problems, because during the first conversations often only the surface of the actual story is revealed.

A very simple example for illustration: A patient comes to my practice because she complains about sore throats that have been getting worse for three days. I can already sense her grumpy, defensive nature. I let her tell about it: The sore throat stings, especially when swallowing, and gets worse when she moves her head. She also complains of a terrible thirst. She does not see a reason for the sore throat; she has not caught a cold and has no other symptoms.

On questioning, the patient explains that she does not like to move now in general and that the way to my practice had already been too much for her. This corresponds to my initial perception of her mood. The homeopathic medicine that will help her is Bryonia, the wild hop plant. The typical signs of this remedy are so well known that I don't have to read about it.

To be on the safe side, I ask her if she would rather be alone or in company during this disease; and she confirms my assumption that she prefers to be left alone and otherwise reacts rather grumpily. But I'm not satisfied with that yet, because I sense another kind of emotion in the background, and so I'm sure that's not the whole story yet. Knowing this patient, I believe that it would be important and helpful for her to be able to further extend the overall picture of her sore throat. Therefore I ask her to tell me about her experiences and moods of the last days. She then reports that they are about to move into a new house, the financing of which has been secured, but she would still give it a lot of thought. Just three days ago, her husband and she had had an appointment at the bank. As she tells this, she notices for herself that the sore throat has occurred exactly since that date. She laughs about this spontaneous insight, gets her remedy and goes home.

Fears for the property and the business are known from the remedy picture ‘Bryonia’. Speaking metaphorically: The garden fence is very important for wild hops, because they have to climb up it.

The decisive factor for the choice of the remedy was not the occurrence of a sore throat per se, but the typical stabbing pain character, which could also have manifested itself in the bladder or cough, as well as the strong thirst and aggravation of the discomfort with every movement.

With regard to the case history, it should also be noted that financial worries are not considered to be ‘psychological’ causes of sore throats. In the homeopathic sense they are part of the totality of a complaint, a pattern that appears analogously on different levels. However, the psychological side of the symptoms is usually closer to our experience, our ego, and easier to ‘understand’ than the physical symptoms. That is why it is easier to restore conscious contact with our whole life through them. The encounter with the homeopathic medicine Bryonia will first help the patient to get rid of her sore throat (in this case until the next morning) and in the long run reduce her fears for material safety. Such changes can sometimes be experienced through dreams and often through more or less unconscious inner changes in everyday life. Therapeutic accompaniment of this process can also provide a deeper understanding of the need for security and stability.

Even Hahnemann, at a time when psychology was still a long way from being a science, recognised that mental states – he called them mind symptoms – are most important for the individual understanding of a state of illness. However – and this is the special advantage of the homeopathic method – all physical states and sensations are taken seriously as expressions of the body and integrated into the overall picture. This overall picture is the homeopathic ‘diagnosis’, the characteristic pattern which includes all levels of the human being and within homeopathy bears the name of the natural substance which, according to our experience, is most similar to it. The patient presented above is therefore suffering from a ‘Bryonia’ disease. In homeopathy, diagnosis and therapy coincide. Once I have recognised the condition, I also know the remedy – ideally. Theoretically, there is an infinite number of different remedies, herbal, animal, mineral, chemical and other substances that can be used in homeopathic preparations and would produce typical conditions in provings. No one could ever overlook such abundance. Hahnemann worked with about ninety different remedies; today many hundred remedies are quite well known and proved, and new ones are constantly being added. Therefore in a real case the similarity to a condition can usually only be met with moderate exactness. Often one must approach a condition with several remedies; or as a therapist I am facing a condition, which I can describe exactly and typically, yet I don’t know any homeopathic remedy, which corresponds to it well. Then I can only hope that in discussions with colleagues, by further reading or by the homeopathic proving of new substances, I come across the suitable remedy for this person. Fortunately such cases are rather rare, and we can help satisfactorily with the remedies known to us in general. In the chapter after next we will deal in detail with the subtle interaction of practitioner, patient and remedy.

The fascination of the diagnoses ‘Bryonia’, ‘Lachesis’ or ‘Natrum muriaticum’ compared to clinical diagnoses is that the patient receives a mirror of his or her inner and outer state with the remedy, i.e. a substance of the world as a possible help for self-knowledge. It is not necessary for the homeopathic healing that the patients know or observe this, but it can be very exciting for an extended understanding of the healing process and for the extension of one’s own consciousness to deal with it.

Two Important Remedy Pictures as Examples:

Ignatia amara

The Ignatius bean is used in states where the basic tendency is cramping and which leads to paradoxical reactions and great hypersensitivity. The best known feature is the adherence to grief or disappointment in which a person cannot resign him- or herself to a loss. The blocked feelings manifest themselves in silent brooding, violent sighs or hysterical outbursts. All states can change quickly or turn into their opposite, crying in laughter, brooding in fury. All feelings are experienced very intensely, but the romantic inner life easily comes into conflict with external demands for rationality. Experiencing the strong inner contradictions can lead to hysteria or fainting. Typical for the feeling of internal cramp is a lump sensation in the throat, sighing, nervous shivering and muscle cramps, up to and including chorea, and also shows up as twitching of facial and other muscles, eyelid cramps, stomach cramps, hiccups, cough cramps, swallowing cramps, urge to urinate simultaneous with the inability to urinate, spasmodic yawning. Sleep is superficial, and the limbs twitch a lot. In general, strong feelings worsen all complaints, as do stimulants such as coffee and tobacco. Pressure, loneliness, deep breathing, travelling and changes in position, on the other hand, improve. Another set of paradoxical symptoms are: Appetite, which disappears when the food is there; nausea, which gets better by eating indigestible things; roaring in the ear, which gets better by music; coughing stimulus, which gets worse by coughing. Ignatia has an aversion to meat, alcohol and especially smoking.

Nux vomica

Similarly overexcited is the patient, who is helped by Nux vomica, the poison nut tree, but here the organism shows signs of strong over-excitation, which easily occur in the modern urban lifestyle. Excessive work and ambition, stimulants and drugs, insomnia and overnight stays, too much and irregular food, material worries and lack of exercise lead to the typical picture of Nux vomica disease with its focus on nervous reaction and digestion. Nux vomica patients are very easily irritable, explode rapidly and put themselves and others under severe pressure – the typical choleric. They are very sensitive and hypersensitive to pain, noise and smells. Sleep is bad, comes late and is not restful. Moods alternate easily and violently, outbursts of anger are frequent. Nux vomica produces in healthy people the symptoms that we know from an excess of food, irritants and stress, and is therefore often used homeopathically to alleviate the consequences of overdose of any kind. Nausea, choking and vomiting as well as colic, abdominal pain and constipation often occur. Vomiting, bowel movements and excretions of all kinds improve the symptoms. Sleep and warmth also help, because Nux patients are extremely chilly in physical exhaustion. Tension and spasticity also manifest themselves as asthma or acute back pain, for which Nux vomica provides excellent relief, provided the above-mentioned conditions are met.

Both Ignatia (bot.: Strychnos ignatii) and Nux vomica (bot.: Strychnos nux vomica) belong to the plant family Loganiaceae and contain to a large extent the poison Strychnine. Strychnine itself as a homeopathic remedy is similar to the medicinal pictures of Ignatia and Nux vomica, especially as far as the basic symptoms of cramps are concerned.

Dynamis and Potentisation

What about the second pillar of homeopathy, the homeopathic preparation of medicines? At first glance it seems quite simple: homeopathic medicines are produced by diluting a thoroughly ground (triturated) substance in a ratio of 1:100 and then rhythmically succussing it ten times, i.e. thumping it on a firm surface with the vial in your hand. This is the so-called potentiation or potentisation (see box for more details). Potentiated agents are marked with C and a number indicating the number of potentisation steps performed (dilution plus shaking). In the case of a ‘Lachesis C12’, the initial substance, the poison of the bushmaster snake, would have been diluted twelve times in a ratio of 1:100 and rhythmically shaken. It is easy to calculate that with potencies above C12, no molecule of the starting substance is present. This is the reason why scientific minds tend to be bewildered, stating Avogadro’s constant as their chemical reason, but homeopathy is not a form of chemical therapy. The effect is not based on the chemical ingredients. Otherwise it would be completely nonsensical to produce potencies up to millions. Even the most common potency levels of C30 and C200 used in classical homeopathy indicate dilutions in which chemically nothing has been detectable for a long time. No homeopath would be so stupid as to overlook that fact. Therefore, the discussions about the fact that there is ‘nothing in it’ completely miss the point. One would have to claim that every conceivable effect must always be chemical. That's nonsense, of course. From a chemical point of view, two CDs or two books cannot be distinguished either and certainly not checked for the sense of their content.

The character of a homeopathic potency is rather that of information. The homeopathic remedy conveys a message to our holistic system (or organism) or body, life force, mind and spirit – an impulse, how to achieve a better balance. Hahnemann's idea of this was that a homeopathic remedy causes an artificial disease in the sick as well as in healthy people during remedy testing (called ‘proving’ in homeopathy). In the case of the patient, however, it is so similar to the already existing disease that it eradicates it. We can also use the modern technical image of resonance to form an idea of it: similar to a tuned resonance event. Or we can imagine the homeopathic remedy to strengthen the information existing in the organism in the same sense (i.e. homeo-pathically) in such a way that the life force can finally react correctly to it. All these images and aids to understanding have in common the fact that they do not have a material or energetic effect, but rather a transmission of information. This also makes it understandable that the remedy be administered in very small and very rare doses – the better and more precisely it works, the less frequently it is to be applied. It's like with good advice: If I give it at the right time and in the right way, I don't have to repeat it. If I have to scream it out loud more than once, there's something wrong with my piece of advice. What happens due to a proper homeopathic impulse is the self-reaction of the organism, or the dynamis, its life force.

In the potentisation of remedies Hahnemann saw a possibility to strengthen the dynamic or spiritual nature of a substance3 and at the same time to reduce or exclude the physically toxic effects by dilution. As the cause of an illness he saw the ‘morbid derangement’, a disharmony of the life force of a person, of the ‘dynamis’ as he called it. Therefore, a remedy should not act directly on the physical body, but on the dynamis, whose derangement shows itself externally as a ‘disease’. This derangement or disharmony can have various causes, which of course must also be eliminated. But the most important thing for healing is how this derangement is, i.e. how