The body has many complex health-maintaining defensive mechanisms. The immune system is an essential part of this, but other factors also have a role to play. If these mechanisms fail, then we sustain damage or wounds which then have to be repaired. Homeopathy works by stimulating both the health-maintaining and the repair mechanisms.

Modern homeopathic doctors work in the same way as their conventional colleagues. History taking, examination and investigation are all important in establishing the diagnosis - in understanding just what is wrong. However, homeopathic doctors consider a wider range of aspects of the patient's condition - personality traits, physical features, the effects of a variety of environmental influences, patterns of disease within families, and family and social relationships.

Homeopathic medicine was first described by Dr Samuel Hahnemann (1755 - 1843). Hahnemann was a German physician who was dissatisfied with the medical therapies and theories of his day. As he was translating a book by the Scot, Cullen, on medicines and their uses, Hahnemann challenged the ideas about how such medicines might work. This led him to take the substance himself so he could experience and describe its effects on a healthy human being. Repeating this type of experiment with other healthy volunteers (these experiments were called "provings") led him to observe and describe the basic principles of homeopathic medicine.

"Like cures like"
The first observation was that the symptoms of an illness were identical to the symptoms experienced by a healthy individual who had been given a drug which could treat that illness.

Although this is quite the opposite of the way conventional doctors use drugs, there are some modern drugs which work on exactly this principle. Digoxin, for example, can both cause and cure heart irregularities.

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The minimum effective dose
His second observation arose from his desire to minimise the harmful effects of the drugs which doctors were using. He did this by repeatedly diluting and succussing (shaking) each medicine to reduce its potential to poison and cause harm. What surprised him in his use of these preparations was that the more stages of dilution and succussion the drug had gone through, the greater its potential to cure quickly and harmlessly.

This latter observation is still the most controversial one. How can a medicine be more effective in a greater dilution? Indeed, many homeopathic preparations have been subjected to so many stages of this process that it is highly unlikely that any single molecules of the original substance remain.