More and more, Americans are turning to complementary medicine to treat what ails them. Many of these therapies, which are often commonly used in other countries around the world, have been criticized by the conventional medical community. Homeopathy, a 200-year-old practice that is based on the idea that "like cures like," is one such therapy. Below, two specialists in homeopathy discuss the history, theory, and practice of this treatment option.

What is homeopathy?
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Homeopathy is not about simply treating a disease, it is stimulating the vital force, or nowadays we call it the defense mechanism, of the individual patient.

RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: We're looking at the whole person, that's one of the things that makes homeopathy unique. We look at a particular symptom but we look at it in a much broader perspective, and our goal here is to look at the person in addition to just that particular symptom. We all are very different. Some people are morning people, some are night people, winter people, and some people are summer people. So we look at who this person is and treat them, not just the symptom.

When I practiced conventional medicine, people would walk in, tell their symptom and you'd run some tests. Every person got the exact same treatment because they had a symptom, a diagnosis. In homeopathy, five people can walk in with the same symptom and get five different homeopathic medicines because who they are in their totality can be very individualized.

When did the idea of homeopathy first come about?
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: German doctor Dr. Samuel Hahnemann founded homeopathy in the late 1700's. He became very dissatisfied with the treatments used at the time, including bloodletting, toxic metals and heavy cathartics, so he decided to stop practicing medicine, because he found that it was too dangerous for his patients.

Instead, he began translating medical texts from one language to the other. In the course of translating one particular text from English to German, he described why a particular bark worked in the treatment of malaria. Hahnemann thought this treatment was preposterous and couldn't possibly be true, so he decided to take some of the bark himself and shortly afterwards, he came down with the symptoms of malaria. It began a whole chronicle of events that made him look at something more holistic. Hahnemann is also given credit in medical history as being the first person to actually do systemic drug research on people, not rats or other laboratory animals.

Why don't more doctors practice homeopathy and why is it still criticized?
HAROLD OFGANG, MD: Scientists and conventional physicians tend to be very, very conservative. Anything new takes quite a long time to catch on. By the 1930's, approximately 30 percent of medical schools in America were homeopathic medical schools and hospitals. But it is still something that is not well understood by conventional or allopathic physicians, and it is also something that is perhaps a little bit difficult to understand for a lot of scientists. This is because you're dealing with very, very small dilutions and you're using medicines that are totally nontoxic. They are very effective, and very safe-just different from conventional medicine.

Explain the idea of diluting things in water as a treatment?
RICHARD DUSHKIN, MD: It's a little more than just that, because if you just took something and diluted it in water, you'd end up with nothing. Homeopathy goes significantly beyond that-it's understanding Hahnemann's basic belief that there was something which he called a vital force. In Chinese medicine it would be called chi, in yoga it would be called prana, in religion, it might be called spirit, but everything in nature has this vital force.

So when diluting a substance, Hahnemann would also do what he called "succussion". He would shake the dilution a certain number of times and then repeat the dilution. The theory is that in that shaking, the actual vital force, the healing vibration of that substance, gets transmitted into the next series of dilutions. So we're working with what's often called energy medicine and it's this particular approach that goes beyond conventional Western medicine. People say, "this can't work and therefore it doesn't." In the United States, people are still pretty resistant to homeopathy.

Wouldn't it be better to start with a remedy that is nontoxic, causes no harmful side effects, is very, very gentle and very effective and try that first?

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