Читать книгу Energy Medicine - C. Norman Shealy - Страница 46

Homeopathy is the “youngest” of the major fields of Energy Medicine. The topic is treated in Chapter 7 because I consider it one of the foundational energy techniques. However, we need to lay a brief foundation as it truly is, to some extent, the use of “pure energy.”

The founder of homeopathy was German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, who founded the science in 1790. His father and family had traditionally been painters and designers of porcelain for Meissen porcelain. His early studies were in languages, as he had become proficient as a writer and translator in French, Italian, Latin, and Greek and later in Aramaic Syriac, Chaldaic, and Hebrew. He studied medicine at Leipzig, Vienna, and the University of Erlangen, graduating with honors. He became a village physician, married, and fathered eleven children. Hahnemann rather vigorously attacked the conventional medicine of his day, stating that it did as much harm as good. In 1794, he returned to writing and translation, but became interested in William Cullen’s A Treatise on the Materia Medica and its treatment of the legendary South American medicinal bark called cinchona. Testing cinchona on himself, which had been used for treating malaria because of its quinine content, Hahnemann noted that the drug induced malarialike symptoms in him. He went on from there to test many substances giving test subjects adequate amounts of them to produce symptoms and then developing his famous technique of diluting them to treat the symptoms.

In 1811, Hahnemann actually moved back to Leipzig where he became a faculty member at the University of Leipzig. He continued investigating homeopathy, writing, and lecturing for the rest of his life. The basic principle of homeopathy is the Law of Similars. If a substance causes a symptom, then diluting that substance adequately can be used to treat that symptom. Techniques of the dilution, etc., will be discussed in Chapter 7. However, suffice it to say that Homeopathy certainly was safer than the medicine of its day, which consisted largely of leeching, bloodletting, and other seriously dangerous approaches. Homeopathy is widely used today, especially in Germany, and throughout much of Europe and Great Britain. In this country, it was thrown out with what I would call the infamous Flexner Report of 1910, which called on American medical schools to raise admission and graduation standards and to adhere strictly to mainstream science in their research and teaching.