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. Instead, he favored the use of single drugs at lower doses and promoted an immaterial, vitalistic view of how living organisms function, believing that diseases have spiritual, as well as physical causes. (At the time, vitalism was part of mainstream science; in the twentieth century, however, medicine discarded vitalism, with the development of microbiology, the germ theory of disease, and advances in chemistry.) Hahnemann also advocated various lifestyle improvements to his patients, including exercise, diet, and cleanliness.Hahnemann's concept Samuel Hahnemann, considered to be the father of homeopathySamuel 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. The term "homeopathy" was coined by Hahnemann and first appeared in print in 1807, although he began outlining his theories of "medical similars" in a series of articles and monographs in 1796.Hahnemann began to test what effects substances produced in humans, a procedure which would later become known as "proving".

These time-consuming tests required subjects to clearly record all of their symptoms as well as the ancillary conditions under which they appeared. Hahnemann saw this data as a way of identifying substances suitable for the treatment of particular diseases. The first collection of provings was published in 1805 and a second collection of 65 remedies appeared in his book, Materia Medica Pura, in 1810. Hahnemann believed that large doses of drugs that caused similar symptoms would only aggravate illness, and so he advocated extreme dilutions of the substances; he devised a technique for making dilutions that he believed would preserve a substance's therapeutic properties while removing its harmful effects, proposing that this process aroused and enhanced "spirit-like medicinal powers held within a drug". He gathered and published a complete overview of his new medical system in his 1810 book, The Organon of the Healing Art, whose 6th ion, published in 1921, is still used by homeopaths today.

Homeopathy

Homeopathy (also homœopathy or homoeopathy; from the Greek ?µ????, hómoios, "similar" + páthos, "suffering" or "disease") is a form of alternative medicine first defined by Samuel Hahnemann in the 18th century. Homeopathic practitioners contend that an ill person can be treated using a substance that can produce, in a healthy person, symptoms similar to those of the illness. According to homeopaths, serial dilution, with shaking between each dilution, removes the toxic effects of the remedy while the qualities of the substance are retained by the diluent (water, sugar, or alcohol). The end product is often so diluted that it is indistinguishable from pure water, sugar or alcohol. 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.Claims for efficacy of homeopathic treatment beyond the placebo effect are unsupported by the collective weight of scientific and clinical evidence.

Common homeopathic preparations are diluted beyond the point where there is any likelihood that molecules from the original solution are present in the final product; the claim that these treatments still have any pharmacological effect is thus scientifically implausible and violates fundamental principles of science, including the law of mass action. While advocates point to positive results as evidence for its efficacy, the number of high-quality studies that support homeopathy is small, the conclusions are not definitive, and duplication of the results, a key test of scientific validity, has proven problematic at best. The lack of convincing scientific evidence supporting its efficacy and its use of remedies without active ingredients have caused homeopathy to be regarded as pseudoscience; quackery; or, in the words of a 1998 medical review, "placebo therapy at best and quackery at worst."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, anti-malarial drugs and antibiotics.


In many countries, the laws that govern the regulation and testing of conventional drugs do not apply to homeopathic remedies. Current usage around the world varies from two percent of people in the United Kingdom and the United States using homeopathy in any one year to 15 percent in India, where it is considered part of Indian traditional medicine. In the UK, the National Health Service runs five homeopathic hospitals, and in the 1990s, between 5.9 and 7.5 percent of English family doctors are reported to have prescribed homeopathic remedies, a figure rising to at least 12 percent in Scotland. In 2005, around 100,000 physicians used homeopathy worldwide, making it one of the most popular and widely used complementary therapies.History 1857 painting by Alexander Beydeman showing historical figures and personifications of homeopathy observing the perceived brutality of medicine of the 19th century18th-century medicine.