HOMEOPATHY - MEDICINAL SUBSTANCES

Calling homeopathy names such as witchcraft or wizardry cannot banish it from the face of earth. Homeopathy shall always remain established as the true healing science and art which it is. Sound curative principle of homeopathy makes it the potential cure for all possible ailments afflicting mankind despite many of them having been deemed incurable by the traditional medicine.
Another beautiful discovery of homeopathy is that of medicinal substances. It was found that homeopathic medicines in their crude form aggravated the symptoms occasionally. It became necessary to reduce the dose. Initially it was attempted to reduce the dose to achieve a reduction in the degree of such aggravations. Finally even a quantity of medicine absorbed by one small globule of cane sugar was found to be too much for some patients. There was a need to reduce the dose further.
It was at that stage that many experiments of Hahneman led him to the discovery of dilution. He found that latent curative potential of a medicine could be enhanced by diluting it with rectified spirit and strongly shaking the bottle. He found that a very small quantity of the resulting diluted solution worked as well as and sometimes even better than the original medicine.
First requirement was that of standardization. It was solved by making each degree of dilution a one percent solution of the previous degree in rectified spirit followed by the process of strongly shaking the bottle. Note that these successive dilutions are not diluted solutions of the medicine.
Further research led Hahneman to conclude that pure water, ethyl alcohol and cane sugar served the purpose equally well, if correctly used to prepare dilutions. He named these as medicinal substances, defining a true medicinal substance as one with no curative or medicinal properties of its own but which absorbs the medicinal properties of any substance which is mixed with it
Thus we know that pure water, ethyl alcohol and cane sugar are three truly medicinal substances. They are pure food and create no symptoms when given to a normal person. As a corollary these substances have no medicinal properties of their own. However, when dilutions of a medicine are prepared using one of these substances, the dilutions retain the medicinal properties of that medicine.
We see that preparation of dilutions is an extremely well defined process and it can be carried out only with a medicinal substance. Subsequent researches have come to accept sugar of milk also as a medicinal substance though ethyl alcohol remains the most preferred medium. The reason for this preference appears to be its preservative properties, which make the dilutions last practically without any expiry date.
Of course, the dilutions have to be kept carefully stored away form direct sun light or ultraviolet light of any kind and no substance with a strong smell kept in the vicinity of the medicine. One may find it unbelievable but I can personally testify to having used medicines up to twenty year old which worked as well as they had worked when fresh.

HOMEOPATHY – DILUTIONS

Trickiest part of homeopathy that never fails to irritate traditional doctors is its concept of dilutions. After his discovery of the great curative principle – the law of similarity – its founder set about applying it on himself and his patients for treatment. He soon found that the substances which gave rise to a range of symptoms in a healthy person did cure a patient with sufficient similarity of symptoms.
But there was a draw back. In many cases, the substance aggravated the symptoms in the patient before it affected a cure and in some cases these aggravations were prolonged. This led to further research and discovery of dilutions. He found that simply diluting a medicine before giving it to a patient was not enough. He discovered that if a medicine is diluted with 100% pure alcohol in the ration of 1:99 and the solution is shaken strongly twice, the resulting 1% solution retains most curative properties but in a refined form and does not give rise to the unwanted aggravations in as many cases.
Taking the analogy further he named the original medicine in its pure or crude form the mother tincture and its 1% solution in pure ethyl alcohol the first dilution and went on to prepare a 1% solution of the first dilution with a strong shake and called it the second dilution.
A repetition of the process led to creation of further dilutions. He found that third, sixth twelfth and thirtieth dilutions were more effective in curing the sick. Any student of mathematics will tell you that third dilution contains only a millionth part of the original medicine. If you add this knowledge with a little chemistry and Avogadro’s number, you will know that probability of a dilution beyond twelfth containing even a single molecule of the original medicine is zero.
It cures the sick nevertheless and this unsolvable paradox of homeopathy is impossible to be understood at the present stage of our knowledge of medical science. This evidence of their ignorance never fails to irritate traditional doctors as it shows the hollow foundation of knowledge on which their system has been erected.