What
is homeopathy?
Homeopathy was
first described in a book
written by Samuel Hahneman in 1796, based on the central tenet
that “like cures like.” This form of alternative medicine utilizes extreme
dilutions of chemicals – usually natural – as therapeutic agents for symptoms
and conditions often caused the original source of the substance (for example, arsenic as a cure for severe pain).
Homeopathic solutions are prepared by diluting substances many orders of
magnitude in either water or ethanol and vigorously shaken (known as succussion).
Several rounds of dilution and succession are repeated until the desired dilution
has been reached. This repeated process of succession and diution is known as
potentisation. Homeopathic dilutions are logarithmic in scale, meaning that each
round of potentisation is diluting the substance by 10-fold (Table 1).
