Is Alternative Medicine, an Alternative?

ECLT 103 - 17

Research Paper

Final Draft

December 19th, 2004

Is Alternative Medicine, an Alternative?

Are people ready to apply new concepts of medicine even if they might seem strange to them? Can they abandon conventional medicine and use alternative medicine? Homeopathy, which is the most popular branch of alternative medicine, is a medical system that relies on nature and is effectively applied. Whether homeopathy, however, can avoid the serious side effects of conventional medicine completely, and at the same time allow patients to depend on it only to cure all their illnesses and diseases is creating a dilemma; to the extent that the World Health Organization held a conference in 2003 aiming to solve that issue, yet they could not reach an exact answer. While some people believe that homeopathy is a kind of alternative medicine, meaning it can replace the conventional one, others suggest that homeopathy should only be used complementary, alongside conventional medicine. To clarify, "medicine" refers to a system which has its own philosophy and principles, which aims at maintaining health and wellness of the body and the mind. It also includes specific measurements that allow doctors to do diagnosis. The following step is the treatment plan, in which it is decided how the different ailments could be cured, or in which sequence the treatment should take place. Finally, a medical system should have medications which enable the fight of the disease (Shams). On the other hand, homeopathy, which is a medical system that is based on natural concepts, meets all those requirements and consequently, it is considered to be a kind of medicine. Besides, the use of homeopathy goes back 200 years in history and it relies on different principles which make it special among other kinds of medicines.

Homeopathy is a natural system which aims at treating all kinds of ailments to reach a healthy body. In comparison to conventional medicine, homeopathy treats the body as a whole rather than only one part or a disease. Homeopaths always say: "Treat the cause, not the symptoms. Treat the whole, not the part"(Kenney). In fact, this is another advantage of homeopathy; for example, if there is a patient who is suffering from several kinds of illnesses and he usually gets treated by conventional doctors, then he will have to make several visits to various doctors as each is specialized in a specific field. Homeopaths, on the other hand, would be able to diagnose the whole case with all the ailments as they treat their patients' body as a whole, and not according to one disease. The human body is in a constant dynamic state to reach homeostasis which "is a state of equilibrium between processes tending to disorder the organism and processes which tend to maintain order" (Vithoulkas 16). According to homeopathy, diseases and ailments are nothing but a method chosen by the body to express itself and try to heal itself rather than a manifestation of the disease. "If the stimuli are stronger than the organism's natural resistance, a state of imbalance created which then manifests itself as sign and symptoms. Although the effects are experienced by the entire person on all levels, the manifestations are expressed with relatively greater force in mental, emotional, or physical levels, depending upon the individual predisposition of the person"(Vithoulkas 16). Homeopathy can be considered not to be treating a disease directly but the focus is fairly on the patient, while letting the body itself do the healing. Nevertheless, people still wonder whether homeopathy can be considered to belong to both these kinds of medicines. On the one hand, it is complementary because it has definitely made great successes in curing diseases alongside conventional medication. But whether it can be considered as an alternative medicine or not, is not yet certain, since its effect on deadly diseases such as cancer is still debatable. However, this should not play a big role in that decision, keeping in mind that conventional medicine itself still cannot treat cancer completely in the first place either. Accordingly, people should be open for new kinds of treatment such as homeopathy because it can be very effective with several diseases such as colds and flu, and it provides safer remedies than conventional medicine. Even if homeopathy might not be the method that would be used in emergency cases, such as cases after accidents where surgery is obligatory, but that's a different case. Besides, homeopathy helps healing after surgery, so it still plays a big role.

Homeopathy relies on natural concepts and laws which qualifies it to be the treatment method to heal our natural body. For example, the concept that states "like cures like" is also called the law of similarity and it has a similar concept of vaccination. This law states that a remedy is able to alleviate a disease as long as it produces the same symptoms of that same disease on a healthy person. It can be simply explained by the following example. When any person cuts onions, the first thing that happens to him is that his eyes begin to produce tears. So, if someone has flu and his eyes are at the same time irritated and producing tears then he can take onions at homeopathic doses, as it makes a healthy person produce those tears; and his eyes would stop tearing. Another law is the proving law, which "refers to the method of testing a substance to determine its medicinal effect"(Shams). In order to make the proving of a remedy, each individual in a group of healthy people is given a sample of the substance daily, and each should report the occurring symptoms (Shams). And in order to assure the validity of such experiments and that they do not only rely on coincidence, the tests "are double blind, which means that neither the supervisor nor the volunteers know what the substance is", and whether they should be experiencing any changes in their body (Adams 4). The third and last law of homeopathy is the law of potency (or the minimum dose). All homeopathic remedies are prepared from natural substances. These are diluted in a special way in alcohol and water first for several weeks. Afterwards, the substance is diluted again and again in water until the new mixtures contain very small amounts of the original ingredient. Concurrently, these remedies have to be shaken in a controlled sequence. What is remarkable is that the more a substance is diluted, the more powerful healing effect it has. "Homeopaths argue that this shaking transfers the energy into the water and imprints it on to a "memory" of the original substance" (Garner). Actually in that energy