Part One: A Historical Perspective on the Urgent Relevance of Classical Homeopathy Today

Thoughtful observation reveals some pivotal trends in mainstream medicine today. Increasingly, efforts are made toward individualization of treatment, sequent to expanding discoveries in genetics and epigenetics. There is exploration of the possibility of stimulating or enhancing a natural immune response, as opposed to suppressing symptoms, imposing an artificial endocrine regime, or even shutting down the immune system by force. Developing nano-scale medicines and delivery systems bring us to a fascinating and hopeful frontier.

In all of these, conventional medicine is moving ever closer to the central tenets of classical homeopathy. Though I know such a statement can evoke indignation or even wrath from both doctors and homeopaths, the truth is that the two modalities have always had a lot in common: their roots, their overarching aspirations, their commitment to what we may call, as a kind of shorthand, a scientific worldview. And they are closer now than ever before.

Meanwhile, in holistic and traditional healthcare, we have spoken for many generations of “deeper healing,” or “healing underlying disturbance,” or even “energetic healing.” Improving function at the deepest possible level is an appealing prospect indeed. But what do these phrases actually mean? How often do we stop to clarify what sort of process we are talking about? Some resist or resent such questions, but we cannot afford to dismiss them, or to succumb to sloppy thinking, or to ask that our methods be accepted on faith.

What, then, is the “deeper level” which we promise to address with a therapy such as homeopathy? The answer, surely, is that our aim is epigenetic healing. This is not a simple answer so much as the emergence of a whole new vista of questions. Working with the epigenome has implications chemical, electrical, energetic, social. We can sometimes see the complete resolution of severe allergies, mental illness, chronic fatigue or post-viral syndromes, endocrine or metabolic disease. What, other than epigenetic remodeling, could explain such a fundamental change of trajectory, such profound self-re-organizing, in an organism? Exploring this vein of thought can perhaps help us begin to apprehend the subtlety and power of classical homeopathy, effectively practiced. It can also help homeopaths understand why some cases are relatively clear (even if the disease is very serious) and can be brought to cure, while in others the signs are confusing, reactions are complicated, and the organism seems to lack the energy to hold a regenerative course.

Homeopathy didn’t arise out of thin air. It was an organized reform movement by medical doctors who were dismayed at the narrowness of thought, absence of cure, and rampant harm caused by conventional medicine in the early 19th century. It expanded with astonishing speed, becoming widely established across several continents in just a few decades. I’m not a historian, but I think it might be hard to find another medical system which was embraced so widely, so quickly.

There have been quite a few beneficent offspring from within Western conventional medicine. Each has grown in its own direction, opening new areas of knowledge and new possibilities of relieving suffering and strengthening health. In the 1990s, functional medicine; in the 1890s chiropractic; in the 1870s osteopathy; and earliest of all, homeopathy, with its first text published in 1810. All of these were founded by medical doctors who saw that a more comprehensive understanding of human health and disease processes could bring much better results while minimizing the collateral damage—and commonplace iatrogenic disabilities and mortalities—which have characterized conventional treatments, from ghastly Victorian purgatives to the 21st century’s billion-dollar pharmaceuticals. Dr. Samuel Hahnemann’s “new medicine,” homeopathy, was an unconventional fusion of the clinical observations of physicians reaching back many hundreds of years (including Hippocrates); contemporary toxicology; the recognition (ubiquitous on Earth, in all ages) of the fundamental tendency of living things to return themselves to order and function, given favorable conditions; a truly novel theory and method of drug development; and a dawning grasp of the power of genetics and epigenetics. That last may sound strange; this was the early 1800s. But let’s look a little more deeply.

The 19th century in Europe was a period of astounding intellectual energy and fertility. Hahnemann’s contemporaries were announcing evidence of the atom and the cell, the principles of electromagnetism, the conservation of energy. The periodic table of elements was created, as well as the “analytical engine” (the first model of a digital computer), the camera, the microphone, the stethoscope, the telegraph—and the repeating firearm.

Hahnemann’s commitment to scientific principles was as staunch as any of his contemporaries. As critical insights often do, his work inspired both enthusiasm and knee jerk hostility; and he was not an easy man. Launched with force from the convergence of his zealous personality, his genuinely revolutionary ideas, and his tremendous frustration with the harm the medical profession was inflicting every day (to which he had lost two of his own children) his scathing public rebukes of the medical profession, and the answering resentment, are still echoing. From the start, Hahnemann antagonized the doctors of what he called “the old school” (in fact, it seems he may have coined that term). The stakes were so high, and the potential of his findings so vast.

Interestingly, much of the uproar was over ideas we now consider obvious. For instance, he said the composition of our diet impacts our health and immunity. During the devastating cholera epidemics of the 1830s, he declared that hygienic practices such as hand washing could help limit the spread of infectious disease (Pasteur’s germ theory did not appear until the 1860s). These were radical ideas at the time, which earned him censure and ridicule. Most outrageous of all was his insistence that people suffering from emotional trauma or mental illness must be treated with the same respect and care as those with physical pathologies; the shameful treatment of the mentally ill in that time is now a matter of dark legend.

I have often wondered whether Hahnemann, a polymath by any standard, was aware of the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Another scientist turned into a pariah after making an insightful theoretical leap, Lamarck proposed that adaptations in an individual animal, occurring in response to the demands of its environment, could be inherited by offspring. He could arrive at no valid mechanism—his controversial work was published in 1809. Gregor Mendel’s experiments with heritable traits in garden peas are considered the beginning of the field of genetics. He published his findings in 1866. The foundational ideas and studies of epigenetics would not emerge until the 1930s, with a 10-year investigation into the intergenerational health of cats by Francis Pottenger, though credit is usually given instead to Waddington’s work a decade later—perhaps because he invented the term, epigenetics, which we now use.

Since Hahnemann’s time—230 years now—homeopaths have warned that the way we live impacts not just our present state but our own future immunity and the generations that follow us. Medicines are one of many types of exposure which change us. The alterations may be immediate and obvious, or they may be invisible, subtle. They are cumulative. They may be expressed in any number of ways; a mechanical intervention can have emotional consequences. Living organisms are complex—a fact that seems too obvious to warrant repetition, yet it has been ignored by mainstream medicine to an astonishing degree. Hahnemann warned that suppressing or manipulating the work of a human organism will eventually cause its functions to become deranged. It will become unable to cope with the challenges of life. It will become less and less capable of recovering. Its offspring will be born compromised.

And this brings us up to the present: this is precisely the landscape we see today, after generations of heedless medical interventions: a torrent of autoimmunity, epidemic-scale allergies, endless variations on the theme of chronic inflammation. And of course that cardinal sign of immune system collapse: cancer. All are increasing at dramatic rates, and sure enough, each generation is beginning life more vulnerable than the one before. Deadly conditions which were extremely rare two centuries ago are now not only commonplace but expected, and glumly accepted as inevitable. Pharmaceuticals can have super-human powers, and there are absolutely times when they are indicated and life-saving. The problem is the indiscriminate use of force when safer options are at hand. The antibiotic catastrophe we have created is a case in point.

After decades of observation and documentation of individuals and families, Hahnemann began to piece together his theory that influences such as diseases, medications, exposure to toxic materials, periods of severe physical hardship, and emotional traumas could imprint a predisposition—particular, predictable susceptibilities—not only in the later life of the person who experienced them but in their descendants. Children born to parents or grandparents who had suffered tuberculosis or syphilis, for example, would be predisposed to develop certain types of pathology, if and when they encountered a shock or strain that weakened their immunity. His much-debated miasm theory is often misunderstood and misused in prescribing today. But that detracts nothing from his systematic observations and analysis, and his efforts to elaborate rational guidelines for individualizing treatment. As far as I have ever been able to discover, he was the first person to formulate a theory of epigenetics in human health, in his text The Chronic Diseases. He published it in 1828: almost 40 years before Mendel’s work, and well over a century before Pottenger and Waddington.

Classical homeopaths thus have a long history of working with these concepts. Many since Hahnemann have contributed further to a coherent model of health, sickness, and treatment. Homeopaths do not base treatment on the DNA, the genetic library of the patient—a repository of possibilities—but on the individual’s expression: the unique and specific actuality. As a thinking homeopath, I wish to interact positively, supportively, with the epigenome. A thinking doctor, researcher, or patient might ask: What are we doing to our future (and to our descendants, should any come along) when we obstruct the organism’s inborn impetus to self-organize?

Given the understanding that begins to emerge from epigenetics research, we must acknowledge that it is possible to reset or reorder our health to some degree, though the extent of irreparable damage will vary from one person to another. Ideally, this would be the first aim of any therapy or medicine. Rearranging symptoms through forceful manipulation of our chemistry would be a last resort—not automatic, routine, and indiscriminate.

Many aspects of modern life unfortunately run counter to our desire to be well: broken circadian rhythms, pollutants in our water, air, and food, and many others. For deep health, we need to work with the whole, try to reestablish conditions in which we can thrive. When therapeutic help is called for, seeking that deeper restoration, using healthcare which is allied with Nature rather than trying futilely to overpower her, can actually simplify our task. Better yet, we can use homeopathy to gently guide an organism, helping it stay on track, before overt disease has developed. Correct homeopathic treatment is one of the most potent, most individualized options to help free our beleaguered mitochondrial networks, managers of our genetic expression, which alone can recreate our possibilities and potentials.

Part Two of this article will focus on some of the strengths and weaknesses of homeopathic practice as we find it today. In particular, it will examine a very unhappy irony: mainstream science is beginning to explain and validate homeopathy as a medical system, and it stands poised to be understood, accepted, and integrated more widely. But the field of homeopathy itself may be imploding.