POV: date=June 2008

Homeopathy (also homœopathy or homoeopathy; from the Greek ὅμοιος, hómoios, "similar" + πάθος, páthos, "suffering" or "disease") is a form of alternative medicine first defined by Samuel Hahnemann in the 18th century. A central thesis of homeopathy is that an ill person can be treated using a substance that can produce, in a healthy person, symptoms similar to those of the illness. Practitioners select treatments according to a patient consultation that explores the physical and psychological state of the patient, both of which are considered important to selecting the remedy. According to homeopaths, serial dilution, with shaking between each dilution, removes the toxic effects of the substance, while the essential qualities are retained by the diluent (water, sugar, or alcohol).

Claims to the efficacy of homeopathic treatment beyond the placebo effect are unsupported by the collective weight of scientific and clinical evidence.

Common homeopathic preparations are often indistinguishable from the pure diluent because the purported medicinal compound is diluted beyond the point where there is any likelihood that molecules from the original solution are present in the final product;

Homeopathic remedies are generally considered safe, with rare exceptions, although homeopaths have been criticized for putting patients at risk by advising them to avoid conventional medicine, such as vaccinations,

History

18th-century medicine

At the time of the inception of homeopathy, the late 1700s, mainstream medicine employed such measures as bloodletting and purging, the use of laxatives and enemas, and the administration of complex mixtures, such as Venice treacle, which was made from 64 substances including opium, myrrh, and viper's flesh. Such measures often worsened symptoms and sometimes proved fatal. While the virtues of these treatments had been extolled for centuries, Hahnemann rejected such methods as irrational and unadvisable.

Hahnemann's concept

Samuel Hahnemann conceived of homeopathy while translating a medical treatise by Scottish physician and chemist William Cullen into German. Being sceptical of Cullen's theory concerning cinchona's action in malaria, Hahnemann ingested some of the bark specifically to see if it cured fever "by virtue of its effect of strengthening the stomach". Upon ingesting the bark, he noticed few stomach symptoms, but did experience fever, shivering and joint pain, symptoms similar to some of the early symptoms of malaria, the disease that the bark was ordinarily used to treat. From this, Hahnemann came to believe that all effective drugs produce symptoms in healthy individuals similar to those of the diseases that they can treat. This later became known as the "law of similars", the most important concept of homeopathy.