It is one of my biggest pet peeves when people refer to all natural medicine as “homeopathic”. Guys! The world of natural remedies is large and diverse, so let me just make you a little Venn diagram to explain:
Homeopathy is its own distinct form of medicine. It was founded by a German physician named Samuel Hahneman in 1796, and the foundational principle is the “Law of Similars” which is “the idea that an illness could be cured by giving a medicine, which, given to to a healthy person, would produce similar but less severe symptoms of that same illness.”1
Okay, cool, but what does that mean? The general idea as I understand it, is that “like cures like”. So a tiny dose, so diluted that it’s really only leaving the energetic imprint of the substance, stimulates your body to know how to deal with the illness or problem. Now, I will be honest, the thing that consistently drives me nuts about homeopathy is that I don’t understand exactly how it works. Now, do I understand exactly how an antibiotic works? No. But there’s a lot of scientific studies to explain western medicine, most likely because there’s a lot of funding for those studies2.
I’m not going to get into those weeds here, for obvious reasons, my only point is that it’s not fair to say that because we don’t understand something fully, it can’t be effective. While homeopathy is not as well known in the U.S. it’s much more widely accepted in the UK, Germany and India. Most of the clinical studies, are small, but have promising results. However, because the funding for such studies is largely nonexistent, there’s not a large body of evidence3. Personally, I know many people who’ve been shocked at how effective it is, and pleasantly surprised by having an alternative to consider in treating their family. It’s not a miracle cure. Nothing is! I do think it deserves a place in the toolbox.
Here’s the thing: in the worst case scenario you are spending money on sugar pills. In the best case scenario, which is something I’ve experienced many times, it helps — a lot and quickly. You get to make up your mind about this, but in my mind it’s a low risk, high potential benefit scenario. It’s quickly become one of my favorite modalities.
I started dabbling in homeopathy when my first was born. My gateway drug was the miracle working teething tablet, later branded “oral relief” that was the only thing that calmed my sensitive teether down. Then, about seven years ago we started seeing a homeopath for one of my children. I was amazed by the progress we made, but due to the fact that appointments with professionals are expensive, I started to do more research on my own. Like most of my medical research, I dug in to anything I could find on the internet. It was pretty confusing. I’d read one thing about one remedy on a site, then the next site would have a slightly conflicting definition. Sometimes I’d google a remedy name and get a description of a plant instead of the homeopathic remedy4. I couldn’t seem to keep things straight. But gradually it started to get clearer. I started to understand that whenever you selected a remedy you were looking for the one that fit the picture most closely. You could prescribe based on emotional and physical symptoms, and the remedy was based on the symptoms you observed, not the illness you were treating5. So, when a viral illness ran through our house it was possible that I could be treating children with the same virus, with different remedies, based on their presentation. The more I read about different remedies, the more I started to get a bit of an intuitive sense of what might work. When we moved up to rural WY right before Covid, I started digging even further6. Homeopathy was one of the safest forms of medicine for both pregnancy and infancy, so I felt confident that I could try things, without worrying about adverse effects.7My husband gave me a hard time about my sugar pills, but when they helped with children’s sleep, coughs, ear infections, RSV, eczema, stomach flu, influenza, my own headaches, hormonal issues etc… he didn’t complain8. He even bought me a case to hold them all so he wasn’t digging for the one I asked for at 2 AM.
Now, homeopathy is not the only one of those things in the Venn diagram that I have tried9, but I do think that it’s one of the most effective, especially for kids. Children are naturally quite vital, and so if you provide them with good nutrition — the building blocks — my personal experience and belief is that homeopathy can correct a lot of the smaller imbalances while they’re still young. As one of our practitioners explained it, you can’t make something out of nothing, so sometimes you will need to address nutrient deficiencies or other underlying problems. Keeping kids healthy in our current world is really hard. There’s a lot that is out of our control as parents, but what I love about homeopathy is that it is both empowering and hopeful. So much of the natural world is fear mongering and restrictive, and that starts to get to you after a while.
Now onto a few more pertinent details. There’s several different fields of homeopathy, so I’m going to give you a brief run-down here:
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