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Chapter One

Hahnemann's
Quantum Leap

Introduction

The story of homeopathy is largely the story of one man, Samuel Hahnemann. While he is not the "inventor" of homeopathy, or the principles of homeopathic treatment, he is the person who managed to flesh out those principles that had been in place for more than two thousand years. His function was largely that of a detective. Just as a good detective will put together numerous small clues to build a fully rounded picture of an event, Hahnemann worked for years to test the theories of the past and to blend them with cutting-edge technologies of his day. We can only imagine what he might be up to if he lived today, blending ancient philosophies of medicine with empirical experience of the methods by which the body heals itself, combined with modern physics and computer graphics. Many of us mistakenly think of Hahnemann as a man who held with the conventions of the past. But this simply is not true. In practice as well as in philosophy Hahnemann was on the cutting edge.

    Christian Samuel Hahnemann was born on April 10, 1755, in Meissen, East Germany. The year of his birth was the year in which the preacher, alchemist, and great lover Casanova was imprisoned for espionage. It was also the year Benjamin Franklin published his "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind," which somewhat predicted Malthus' later treatise on overpopulation and its impact on the global environment. And it was the year before Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Saxony and set off the Seven Years'War, while in the New World, the French and Indian War paralleled the European conflict.

    During the eighty-odd years of Hahnemann's lifetime, innovation was in the air. In the field of medicine, the concept of inoculation was hot. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin again published, this time a work called "Some Account of the Success of Inoculation for the Smallpox in England and America," which predated both Hahnemann's and Jenner's work in the field of microdosing with toxic substances, and of using those microdoses of poisons in the treatment and prevention of disease. In medicine, European culture also saw the creation of a new discipline with the 1762 publication of The Diseases of Children and Their Remedies, by Swedish doctor Nils von Rosenstein, which created an entire new field of medical practice—pediatrics.

    It was also the era—1780, to be exact—that saw the opening of London's Temple of Health. The Temple was the brainchild of James Graham, who was himself the son of a Scottish saddler. Graham had studied medicine but had no formal degree with which to practice. He had left his native Edinburgh to travel to the United States, where he heard about Benjamin Franklin's experiments in electricity. He took the information he obtained to London, where he opened his Temple. Within its doors, patients were assaulted with incense burners in the shape of fire-breathing dragons. They also saw the device that they had come for: the Celestial Bed, which was built to stand upon forty glass pillars and numerous electrical devices. Patients came to lie down upon the bed and be treated with gentle electrical shocks for impotence or infertility. For a while, the Temple was quite a hit, with wealthy clients coming from around the globe to lie upon the Celestial Bed. But within a few years, despite its initial chic, and the hiring of a beautiful young dancer, Emma Lyon, to dress in robes and impersonate the "goddess of health," the doors to the Temple would close. For all its splendor, the Temple's treatments simply did not work.

    Inventions of the time included roller skates (1760), the steam engine (1765), the steamboat (1787), and "Bushnell's Connecticut Turtle" (1776), the first submarine designed for warfare. Another invention of the time was the hot-air balloon, which first ascended as a mode of transportation in 1782, when the Montgolfier Brothers gave a public demonstration of their invention with a ten-minute ascent. In 1785, John Jeffries did them one better by crossing the English Channel in a hot-air balloon. Discoveries included the planet Uranus in 1781, which was the first planet to have been discovered since the prehistoric times in which human culture was dominated by the nation of Babylonia.

    There was a general feeling of expansion at this time. It seemed that there were infinite possibilities for scientific advancement; and for physical and geographical discovery as well, as the settlers of the New World soon found. Once they ventured beyond the area of the original colonies, they discovered that they were dealing with far more than they had imagined. And Samuel Hahnemann, very much at home in this time, also was finding a new way of working medically, one that proved to be far greater and deeper a discovery than was first imagined.

    Hahnemann was born into a conservative family in a conservative culture. But he was also born into a family with some standing in the community. Because his father was an artist—a painter of fine German china—Hahnemann was given the opportunity to study, to have the education of a gentleman. While medicine was his mother's choice of a proper career for a young man of means, but not his own, he honored his parents' wishes, and with the financial support of local royals, he set off for the University of Vienna.

    Here he expected to receive his education in medicine. But what he found instead horrified him. In the medical pharmacy of the day, doctors made regular use of such substances as arsenic in the treatment of disease. Further, this was the era of leeching, with millions of leeches used each year for the purposes of bleeding patients, all in the name of healing. Hahnemann concluded that all too often the treatments were more toxic than the diseases.

    This belief would guide Hahnemann for the next fifty years, as he performed his own clinical experiments in search for treatments that, while not toxic, were powerful as curative tools. His search for these substances would lead him back to the dawn of medicine, and would also cause him to take a giant leap ahead of the other medical scientists of his day.

    Hahnemann, in his search for a more benign medicine, began with what he knew—the herbal pharmacy of his day. This pharmacy, the use of plants and mineral substances in the creation of medicines, could largely be traced back to Dioscorides, a Greek herbalist who traveled with the Roman legions in order to learn the use of healing herbs from the witch doctors, barbers, and midwives whom he met during his long march through the known world. These he gathered into a book that he termed a "Materia Medica," a gathering together of all the knowledge he had gained of medical materials, which he left behind him as his legacy for those physicians who would follow in his path.

    Hahnemann came to understand that while these medicines were able to create a tremendous change in the human system, that change was often not for the better. And in order to create a more benign drug, he began to dilute his medicines. Certainly, other practitioners had tried mixing their belladonna with a little water, but Hahnemann set up a system of dilutions that left only the slightest trace of the original substance in place in the medicine.

    In using these diluted medicines, Hahnemann found something mysterious: as a medicine became more and more diluted it became less toxic and more powerful, more efficacious in the treatment of disease.

    With his discoveries in medicine, Hahnemann became quite revolutionary, but I think this was certainly never his goal. He began his work as a doctor with the intent of pleasing: pleasing his parents, his family, his community. He sought originally only to practice the medicine of the day to the best of his ability. However, like the original settlers of these United States who thought that they were sitting on a landmass roughly the size of England, he was ultimately shocked by the immense implications of his medical experiments. But his evolution from conservative Lutheran youth to medical revolutionary was a task thrust upon him, one that he never sought. Take a moment and look at his life in terms of your own. He, like the rest of us, went through life with no plan, doing his best to raise a huge family—he and his wife had nine children—and please his increasingly upset and disappointed first wife, Johanna. You can't help but empathize with his trying to do his best for his family, while at the same time, feeling he had had an actual visionary experience of sorts, one to which he felt he also had to be true. So for the majority of his adult life, Hahnemann found himself in a delicate balancing act, between his responsibility to his family and his equally keen responsibility to his work.

    We love to make movies about people like this—Norma Rae kind of people, who, although they themselves never early on seem like the firebrands they will prove to be, somewhere along the way receive an insight that transforms their life. In Norma Rae's case, the insight had to do with factory work conditions, and she ended up becoming a union organizer. In Hahnemann's case, he was a loving, concerned doctor who could not turn away from his patients when they reached out to him in pain and sorrow. He could not avoid the conclusion that the treatments that the doctors of his day were using were not only not ending the patients' suffering, but in many cases were actually causing it.

    What is surprising is not that Hahnemann noticed the reality of the medical treatments of his day and their implications, but that no one else seemed to. Even when he pointed it out to them, they seemed angrier at him for speaking out than they were at any of the accepted medical practices.

    But Hahnemann continued to speak out—and not because it would get him anywhere. In fact, it all but ended his ability to practice medicine and to support his family in the only way he knew how. No, he did it because he felt that any decent person had to speak out at the wrongs he saw around him. For instance, it was common practice at this time to prescribe arsenic as a treatment for disease.

    And it is important to remember that the discoveries Hahnemann made, the insights to which he was witness, all fit within the context of the education he received at the University of Vienna, perhaps the best school of his day, and within the context of his medical viewpoint. Indeed, some of the most important insights into medical practice can and should be used equally by homeopaths and allopaths, in that they are insights into practice and not into the goal or method of treatment.

    But let's examine Hahnemann's great shifts in the philosophy and practice of the healing arts.

    For years I told my students that while he must be considered the father of the homeopathic method, Hahnemann was not really the father of homeopathy, that he was making use of information that had been collected and considered as far back as the Hippocratic School of Medicine. And this is true. But while Hahnemann's work was in the exploration and evolution of Hippocrates' philosophy, he also made some rather staggering discoveries of his own. The irony is that he often does not get any credit for these—instead, he is credited, wrongly, with the "discovery" of homeopathy.

    Homeopathic philosophy began the day that Hippocrates told his students that when you were faced with a patient with symptoms, with aches and pains that he wanted to be rid of, there were only two things you could do with those symptoms. You could work against them, and, in doing so, say in essence that those symptoms came about for no reason, that they have no message for us, and that they should merely be removed from the body. Or you could work with the symptoms. In doing this, you are really saying that the symptoms are there for a reason, that they mean something. In working with the symptoms, you are trusting Nature, and believe that the symptoms bring some message.

    That lecture of Hippocrates was really the "invention" of both allopathic and homeopathic medicine, although those terms were never used. Hahnemann himself coined both the word homeopathy and the word allopathy.

    So, from that day forward, you are going to see those concepts come up again and again. Every healing modality, every form of medicine from every part of the world, will contain both concepts. And most will make use of both, save modern Western medicine, which, in placing all bets on the allopathic color black on the roulette wheel of life, completely forgets that very often the homeopathic color red comes out the winner.

But, back to Hahnemann. And to his genius as both a practitioner and a philosopher. And to those discoveries of his that, surprisingly, have equal impact upon both the allopathic and homeopathic traditions.

    First there is the insight he had into the nature of medicine itself. Allopathic or homeopathic. Hahnemann refers to medicine as being an "Artificial Disease."

    This is the term that Hahnemann gave to the effect that any medicine has on the human system. This concept will be dealt with more completely in the next section of this book. For now, consider Artificial Disease to describe the full impact that any medicinal substance has on the body, mind, and spirit of its user, all the many symptoms that a medicine creates. In our culture, we tend to think that medicine ends symptoms rather than creates them. But stop and think about this for a moment: think about what would happen if you, in a state of total health and wellness, took an over-the-counter medicine for a few days. Your sinuses would dry up, you would grow sleepy, very sleepy, or you would be totally unable to sleep. Your breathing and heart rate would be affected, as would your digestion, your sense of balance, even your mood. There would be some changes in your day-to-day life that if they happened totally on their own without your having taken anything to cause them, you would think of as a disease state. That's an Artificial Disease.

    Notice that in this Artificial Disease state we have not just one symptom but several. Hahnemann found that medicines—and, again, this applies equally to all types of medicine—create more than one symptom. They all create many changes in the human system. In allopathic medicine, medicines are considered to have one action and many side effects. In Hahnemann's philosophy, the action of any medicine includes many different effects, all of which are taken into account in the use of that medicine.

    Another of Hahnemann's insights concerned the manner in which he tested his medicines in order to see what their specific actions in the human system might be. In Hahnemann's day, most medicines were tested on the sick and dying. If a treatment worked in one crisis, then it was used in another. If over a series of treatments it was found to be more useful than harmful, then it became part of the doctor's pharmacy of medicines. But Hahnemann reasoned that if a medicine were truly to be thought of as an Artificial Disease, then it could not be tested on a human in whom a Natural Disease was already present. If it were tested in that manner, Hahnemann reasoned, you could only measure the impact that the medicine had on the disease and not on the person with the disease. And Hahnemann wanted to know—and felt the need for all doctors to know—exactly what the medicine did to the whole human system, what its total range of actions might be shown to be.

    So he began working only with healthy people. Since he knew that the action of a medicine was to create an Artificial Disease, and since he knew that through the process of dilution, he had removed the toxicity from the original substances, he felt quite safe using his medicines in this manner. He began testing these medicines by having healthy people ingest them and then keeping track of exactly what happened, what changed in their bodies and in their minds, their perceptions. In giving the medicines to a number of healthy persons, all of whom kept complete diaries of their experiences, Hahnemann was able to track exactly what the Artificial Disease state created was like, what would be the likely changes caused by this medicine, and what might be termed the whole sphere of action of this particular medicine. In this way, he knew the changes in state of being that were created by the medicine, instead of just knowing the physical changes that the medicine could cause and therefore treat.

    This is the only form of testing that could be appropriate to homeopathy because this is the only form of testing by which Hahnemann could assess the type of person that his medicines could treat, instead of the type of disease; because it is central to the philosophy of homeopathy that it is always the person with the disease who is to be treated, and never the disease itself.

    But Hahnemann's method of testing his remedies is practical and sensible not only for the homeopath but also for the allopath. Think about it. Hahnemann came to use his medicines not just for a handful of symptoms that the patient didn't like, but for the totality of symptoms—good, bad, and benign—experienced by the patient. Instead of giving a patient one medicine for headache and another for stomachache, he matched the remedy that had both symptoms, as experienced by the patient, within its sphere of action.

    This, too, could be employed by the allopaths. In their PDRs, they have a listing of every known medicine and its every action. In allopathic medicine, of course, they are listed by their principal action and their side effects. And they are given based on the principal action only. Some doctors may warn their patients about the side effects, those other, equal parts of the Artificial Disease, but some may not. But in Hahnemann's method of testing and using medicines, there were no such things as side effects of medicines, because all effects were considered equally. If allopathic medicines were considered and given in the same way, they might be far more effective, and have far less troublesome impacts upon the patient's system.

    Since, unlike the other doctors of his day, Hahnemann saw a medicine as not bringing about one primary change in the human system with any number of pesky side effects, but saw a medicine instead as having a complete sphere of activity, he came to believe that no doctor should give more than one medicine at a time. He felt that polypharmacy, the giving of more than one medicine, would create multiple Artificial Diseases within that human system, making it quite impossible to determine which had brought about what change specifically. Further, he felt that while it was quite possible to predict what changes were likely to occur by the use of one medicine, thanks to his impeccable form of testing, it was quite impossible to predict what the combination of medicines could do within the system, or even if they might set up a new Artificial Disease by their combination that would be permanent and incurable. Where Hahnemann found that, in his healthy test subject, the symptoms of Artifical Disease would simply fade when the subject stopped taking the medicine, he was in no way sure that the symptoms would ever fade if medicines were given in combination. And certainly the experience of modern polypharmacy would seem to bear him out. Modern medicine now must include terms for those many diseases that are caused, not by nature, but by medical treatments themselves.

    And so, Hahnemann's insights into the nature of medicine led to changes in how he both tested and used his medicines, but these all also led him to consider the changes that were necessary in the very nature of the medicines themselves. And here he somehow managed to leap two hundred years ahead of his time.

    Hahnemann had to use the same deck of cards that everyone else had; he had only the basic pharmacy on hand that every other doctor of his day did—arsenic and the like; toxic substances.

    And so, since he could not, with clear conscience, make use of medicines that he knew good and well were toxic, he sought another way of working and did the logical thing—he created a method of diluting those substances until they reached a point at which they could be used safely. He found in his years of experiments in dilution—and Hahnemann did not dilute his medicines in just a glass or even a barrel of water, but instead with generation after generation of levels of dilution, each precisely measured out in hundreds of beakers in his laboratory—that there was a mystery to this process, that there was a level at which, if you diluted a toxic substance enough, the toxicity fell sway, but the ability to create the Artificial Disease remains intact; that this ability for a medicine to be a catalyst to change was not a function of its substance, but was instead a fundamental component of its very nature.

    And Hahnemann used his dilutions for a period of some years, with great success. He acquired a reputation for practicing good medicine as he traveled every day in his wooden cart from door to door, visiting the sick in their own homes.

    In what may be a homeopathic myth, it has been said that throughout these days of travel, Hahnemann noticed again and again that the person he visited at the end of the day seemed to get a greater benefit from his medicine than did the person whom he visited earlier in the day. Although this might have been chalked up to a heightened perception on his part in the afternoon hours, he instead looked at his remedies and reconsidered their nature. He traveled with his medicines in liquid diluted form, he reasoned, and therefore the shaking that the medicines received all day in his cart might have had something to do with their seemingly increased potency. And so he began to work with what he called succussion, the shaking of the medicines as a part of their potentizing process.

    Soon Hahnemann was combining the stages of increased dilution with succussion and found that the result was a powerful medicine with no toxic impact to be found. He had created what he would in time refer to as a homeopathic remedy.

    Now, it is the exact nature of this homeopathic remedy, how these two rather simplistic methods of diluting and shaking could create what today we call a microdose—which while retaining the impact of a catalyst no longer has the toxicity of the substance—that remains the central mystery of homeopathy.

    Today, we have microscopes powerful enough to tell us that there are no molecules of the original substance left in a diluted homeopathic remedy. These are brought into play every time anyone sets out to debunk homeopathy. Usually the investigator will choose to test a homeopathic medicine and send it to a lab to see what's in it. It always comes back with the same result—there is nothing in the remedy. Nothing of a physical nature, at least.

    In his day, Hahnemann had none of the tools at his disposal that he would have had today. He could only work with his test subjects, and later, after his remedies were correctly created and proven, with his patients, to see with his own eyes, again and again, the changes that his remedies could create.

    In his day he also lacked the help that Einstein and the study of Quantum Physics could bring to homeopathy.

About ten years ago, I read an article in The New York Times Science Section that quite literally changed my life, and my viewpoint about life. But, like Hahnemann's life changes, mine was slow and quiet, so that I did not at the time think anything about it other than that it was an interesting article. Today I believe that if you are to accept this article, this information, as truth, then this truth changes everything.

    The article said that scientists who were studying the smallest bits of matter, the smallest of the small microscopic bits, were finding that those bits changed their behavior when they knew that they were being watched. When I read it, I thought that it was typical—another proof that everyone, no matter how small, just wants to be on camera.

    But over the years, it has come to mean much more to me: it means that there is a coherence—perhaps an intelligence—to every part of Creation. And that the behavior of that Creation, the rules by which it acts and interacts with all of the parts of Creation, just might be mutable in nature. That all Creation itself might be changing its structure and behavior around what the viewer perceives and what the viewer wants.

    Now, I could go in a lot of directions with this thought, and it certainly has great implications for the creation of illness in our lives (for instance, if these particles were not mutable, it is highly likely to me that we would lack the ability to heal at all, but would instead, like Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her, have to glue our arms back on to our bodies if we were unlucky enough to break them), but let's look at it from the viewpoint of what it means for homeopathy.

    In class I love to tell the story of Paracelsus. And I love to share his viewpoint of healing, how he said that when a cold person needs to light a fire in the fireplace, he does not stand there and think to himself, "Now, precisely, how much energy do I have to apply to these logs in order to cause them to ignite?" No, he simply strikes a spark and stands back as the fire catches.

    Paraclesus tells us that healing is a spark. A Vital Spark. And that the proper use of a medicine is to ignite the natural healing mechanism within each of us. It is then, as Paracelsus tells us, the role of the physician to get out of the way and let the fire catch. Healing is a natural response; it is the realignment and reorganization of those tiny bits of matter throughout our whole body, returning it to a state of health. It is the rewriting of the rules of our personal universe.

    In his book The Organon, Hahnemann even tells us that illness is conceptual, that it is, in its nature, nothing more than the tiny bits of our personal universe responding to some catalyst. And illness is the response. In the same way, he tells us, healing is a response. We live our lives in our own little portable universes, beset with ongoing catalysts to which we do or do not respond. Respond with healing or respond with illness.

    So, in diluting his medicines, Hahnemann was in fact removing the obstacle that matter throws into the equation. He was making the catalyst action of the remedy more powerful by getting down to the Vital Spark itself. He was moving to the more fundamental level of energy. He was, without knowing it, making use of the living energy of substances in the creation of his dilutions. And all this was without Einstein to tell him that matter is energy, and that matter cannot be destroyed, only endlessly changed by meeting with catalysts of its own. So it is energy that makes up those tiny bits (particles and waves) that behave differently when you watch them, and it is energy that makes up the potency of homeopathic remedies and speaks to the energy in our own systems in creating a healing response.

    Perhaps the most exciting part of homeopathy is that we even today lack the technology to truly measure its action. When our ability to see and to measure our bodies, our "selves," becomes sophisticated enough to measure those selves as energy beings, we will finally be able to see the exact action of a homeopathic remedy in a human being. Until that day, we, like Hahnemann, will have to make do by keeping careful track of the exact changes in that human—body, mind, and spirit—that we can see, that we can measure. And, in this way, we will hopefully be able to make better and better uses of these remedies as we hold tight to Hahnemann's discoveries.

Hahnemann, therefore, should be seen as the bridge between the ancient society of Hippocrates and the modern world of Einstein. He both made use of concepts that had been handed down from antiquity and presupposed the ideas of an atomic age.

    So, for the moment, we are actually as bound as was Hahnemann himself. We, like him, can only be solid emipiricists and deal with our own clinical experience in determining the nature and practice of homeopathy. Not because it does not work, but because we still lack the technological tools to prove how it works.

    We can only look to our clinical experience to show us the way. And so, in learning homeopathy, we must learn it as Hahnemann did, and as the great practitioners who have followed him did: with our own eyes and ears, with our own intellect and intuition.

    In the pages that follow, I have attempted to create the most practical guide possible for these purposes, one that can replace the need for a bookshelf full of texts for the beginning student of homeopathy, and one that can be turned to again and again over the years as household crises arise.

    The section that follows this introduction gives an outline of the philosophy of the practice of homeopathy, intertwined with a working definition of a physician's role in the community. To me, it is perhaps the most important section of this book in that it uses Hahnemann's own words, taken from his writings in The Organon of Medicine to give the principles behind any homeopathic treatment.

    Following that, I have gathered together a large group of diagnostic symptoms that offer many clues in the selection of correct homeopathic remedies for any given situation. The idea for this came to me from Chinese medicine, a healing art that makes use of basic tools—reading the pulses and the tongue among them—that give practitioners a map to follow in selecting a course of action. I thought that what would work for acupuncture needles or Chinese herbs would also work for homeopathic remedies. And in the years since I first thought this, I have found that it is true. If you can learn the basic diagnostics in terms of homeopathic remedies, you can often move very quickly to the selection of a remedy.

    What follows the diagnostics is a long section on the uses of homeopathic remedies in simple acute emergencies. Just as the average New England housewife a century ago owned and used a homeopathic kit for day-to-day ailments, so should we today. This section will give suggestions for appropriate remedies in household situations.

    And then there is a materia medica of some sixty basic homeopathic remedies, those most often used in the home. Each listing gives an overview of the remedy and its actions, as well as the most commonly used dosage and potency.

    It is not my intent in putting together this guide that anyone should take it upon himself to practice medicine on himself or others without the proper training and legal standing. It is instead meant as a guide for those who wish to self-treat simple acute illness in the home setting. I do believe that, at this level, it is a well-rounded guide that offers the reader primary education into homeopathy.

—Vinton McCabe
June 1999