This is a common question because often people don't understand what either of these therapeutic systems do. The short answer is No, they are entirely different.
In Naturopathy a range of therapies are used to support the person. Therapies may include nutritional / diet advice, the use of herbal medicine, lifestyle choices and advice and physical therapies such as massage or acupuncture. Some Naturopaths also use homeopathic medicines within their practice so it can become very confusing.
Homeopathy, how it all began...
Homeopathy on the other hand is a 200 year old system of medicinal prescribing based on the ancient 'Law of Similars'. The philosophy of homeopathy is deeply grounded in the principle of giving a medicine which reflects the symptom picture of the patient. I'll explain more...
Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843)
Hahnemann, seen above, was a brilliant doctor, fluent in 7 languages. He became dissatisfied with the often barbaric medical practices of his day and turned to life as a translator of medical texts. During his work he came across a medical text which claimed that Quinine cured malaria because 'it was a stomach tonic.' Hahnemann knew enough about chemistry and medicine to realise this could not be true but he was puzzled as to why this medicine worked. Starting a process which was to consume his passion over a lifetime he decided to chew some Cinchona Bark - the substance in which Quinine is found. Cinchona is a genus of flowering plants in the family Rubiaceae native to the tropical Andean forests of western South America. As soon as Hahnemann ingested the bark he began to exhibit the symptoms of Malaria. He realised that he had stumbled across an ancient philosophy in medicine known about since the times of mankind's early development and documented by Hippocrates (460 to 377 BCE).
'The Law of Similars'
Known as 'The Law of Similars' this philosophy is the principle of treating “like cures like”-the phenomenon that a disease can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people. Hahnemann realised that this was worthy of further exploration and subsequently dedicated his life to what we now know as Homeopathy - in Greek “homeo pathos” - Homois meaning similar and pathos for suffering. He began testing and meticulously documenting his tests on many hundreds of substances, he was a great man of science. He realised that he had to dilute many of the substances he was experimenting with as they were in crude form poisonous to the human body so he began a process of dilution and succussion where the original substance was not only diluted an exact number of times, but was also energised through the process of succussion which required the preparation to be shaken vigorously between each dilution. The process of sequential dilution and succussion is called potentization.
Homeopathy has a different approach to disease in the body to allopathic (conventional) medicine, thus it is the perfect complimentary care. Homeopaths look on symptoms as the body's attempts to heal, they are a healing response. The obvious examples of this are vomiting, fever, coughing, weeping etc. where the body clearly exhibits a clearing action in order to cure. As the action of homeopathic remedies is to mimic this response we can see that the way homeopathy works is via the Law of Similars outlined above. This is a safe approach because it continues the unique direction of cure instigated by the person / body, who may have become stuck or does not have the energy to see through the process of healing without the helpful artificially introduced similar energetic prompt of the matching remedy.
I hope you have found this interesting. If you want to know more please do book in for a free discovery call here.
Here are the delicate flowers from the Cinchona Tree, commonly known as the Fever Tree, which started the whole of this beautiful journey.
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