Classical Homeopathy: Alive and Well

“As vital force gets stronger, everything evolves together. The mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical selves
become stronger and healthier.”

—David Kramer

Someone overhearing snippets of my conversation with David Kramer might have thought we were talking about spiritual growth when he said, “The whole purpose of being a healthy human being is to fulfill the higher purposes of our existence.” Or this: “We are the embodiment of the Earth, of nature. We have the same proportion of materials in our body that exists on planet Earth; water, minerals—that’s all in our system. So if we understand how nature works, we understand how our nature works.”

But David Kramer was explaining his field of expertise: classical homeopathy. When homeopathic treatment eliminated his own debilitating, chronic allergies, he was convinced that something remarkable was afoot in this approach that pharmaceutically based medical treatments weren’t providing. Now, a few decades later, Kramer is a fully invested, exuberant homeopathic practitioner in a field he says is alive and well. “When I started studying in the mid ’70s, there were 250 homeopaths in the US,” he recalls. “Now there are probably 5,000 to 10,000.” Kramer is the founder of Hudson Valley School of Classical Homeopathy, dedicated to maintaining the highest of standards in the homeopathic healing arts by training practitioners and others interested in the healing process. “The mission of our school is to educate all people about the many reasons they become ill, on all levels.” He sees that people want to be empowered about their health, and knows they can be. “With a new paradigm shift of health and healing through homeopathy, people can finally gain access to some of the hidden aspects of themselves to unlock their own potential to heal.” Kramer’s vision is to open a holistic hospital and integrative medical center in the Hudson Valley that combines the best of conventional medicine, homeopathic care, nutrition, and other healing modalities for mind and spirit.

Lest you think that homeopathy is a New Age phenomenon, it is not. Developed in the late 1700s by Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, homeopathy was widely popular in Europe and immigrated to the United States, where it became the first system of organized medicine in this country. During the 1800s and 1900s in the United States there were more than 100 homeopathic hospitals and 14 homeopathic medical colleges. In 1900, in Washington, DC, home of monuments to the great, a bronze statue of Hahnemann was built just a few blocks from the White House to honor the man’s contributions.

But homeopathy dissipated to a whisper in this country early in the 1900s. “Homeopaths did not practice the highest and purest standards of classical homeopathic treatments,” says Kramer. “Certain reports came out that cast a dark cloud over it, and it fell out of favor. Allopathic medicine and pharmaceuticals filled the gap and got the homeopaths out quickly.” The resurgence in homeopathy today is driven by citizens’ desires for holistic approaches to healing and wellness, and by dissatisfaction with the conventional medical system, including drug side effects and recalls.

You may know of homeopathy from seeing little vials on the shelf of a natural food store, or maybe even a mainstream pharmacy. Those remedies are a small aspect of the approach—and not a very representative one. Larry Malerba, a doctor of osteopathy in Altamont and a trained homeopath, says that there are several ways a consumer encounters homeopathy. “The novice will use remedies he got at the health food stores for simple problems, such as a cold, a bruise, or a sprained ankle,” he explains. But the off-the-shelf remedies aren’t what classical homeopathy is all about. They are typically made from many substances to affect a particular general symptom or condition. By contrast, classical homeopathy applies a single remedy, prepared from one substance, and carefully chosen on an individual basis through precise, detailed evaluation of the person’s condition.

Peter Fallon, a functional medicine consultant and pharmacist at the Fallon Wellness Pharmacy in Latham, who has some training in homeopathy, explains: “A classical homeopath will analyze the characteristics of a cough and of other symptoms and choose one remedy—a constitutional remedy—that is given once to see how the body adjusts. The good homeopaths have been out there for decades with a huge body of knowledge. It’s an art.”

As for the remedies you can pick up yourself, Fallon says, “Because of the low side-effect or no side-effect profile with homeopathy, companies have provided the consumer with this option. You can walk into a health food store and pick something off the shelf for a cough. It’s consumer-friendly, but in essence it kind of defies what classical homeopathy is trying to do.”

Tapping the body’s own healing

In Samuel Hahnemann’s era, bloodletting, arsenic, mercury, and other toxic and dismally ineffective treatments were standard fare. Hahnemann recognized that there was no experimental basis for these, and reasoned it would be better to help the body do its own healing. He coined the pair of terms, allopathy and homeopathy, to describe the very different strategies in the concept of healing a body. The first used treatments unlike the body’s own healing physiology (allo– means other), the second used those treatments to enhance the body’s self-healing capacity (homeo– refers to same). Hahnemann developed the latter approach through extensive experiments, called provings, in which he observed and accurately recorded how healthy people reacted to homeopathic preparations made from plants, minerals, and animals.

Hahnemann found that each substance created a set of specific symptoms, from which the person would then recover as the body reestablished its healthy balance. This key is the homeopathic law of similars, which posits that like cures like. In a healthy person, a substance can aid in healing if it creates symptoms closely matched by the illness. For example, a homeopathic preparation derived from Allium cepa (red onion) produces sneezing, watery eyes, and scratchy throat in a healthily person, and thus becomes one of the curative remedies for the symptoms in hay fever. The Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States (the official compendium listing today’s homeopathic preparations approved by the FDA) captures this foundational concept by defining homeopathy as “the art and the science of healing the sick by using substances capable of causing the same symptoms, syndromes, and conditions when administered to healthy people.”

Homeopathy is more than giving remedies to support the body to heal what’s causing symptoms. It is truly a holistic practice. “People suffer on many levels,” Kramer says. “It took me more than 15 years to call myself a healer, which is to understand the human organism on all its four essential levels: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Homeopathy treats people; we don’t treat symptoms. Symptoms are merely the sign of what is called the vital force, the life force.” It is an ailing vital force that produces symptoms, he says, “just like a house will produce ‘symptoms’ if it’s left unattended. The paint will begin to flake, mold might be growing, it will become dilapidated, showing symptoms of ill repair. It may be sound, structurally, and the symptoms superficial. But, on the other hand, those symptoms may indicate dry rot or wet rot eating away at the infrastructure. That’s why someone drops dead on the golf course; because the infrastructure has been slowly eroding away.”

By contrast, Kramer continues, “Allopathic, or conventional, medicine deals with only the physical body and the outwardly showing symptoms that cause enough distress that the person needs to seek attention—what we call the presenting symptoms. It doesn’t really take into account the psychological [aspect of a person], other than referring you to a psychiatrist. It rarely takes the emotional into account, and it never takes the spiritual into account.”

Kramer and Malerba are quick to point out that medical doctors, however, have important roles to play. They collect valuable information about a person’s physical state. “I like to get good and accurate medical diagnoses [from a patient’s doctor],” says Kramer. “That helps me know to what degree the physical body has been impaired, and whether, for example, someone has asthma and not emphysema,” which are two very different airway afflictions that compromise breathing.

Seeing the warning signs

Kramer puts a lot of responsibility on the homeopath to do his or her job well (something that, when done less well, only fuels the fire of doubt about the approach). What makes a good homeopathic practitioner? Kramer has several criteria. “A homeopath must be able to truly observe, to see people,” he says. To accomplish that, an initial appointment typically lasts two hours. During that time, questions and conversation reveal traits, concerns, history, and symptoms within all facets of one’s being, not just the physical. Being a good homeopath takes many years of learning and experience. In addition, Kramer advocates that practitioners “follow the golden rule of ‘healer, heal thyself.’ I think we have to live an exemplary life—not that we’re going to be perfect, but I think we have to be healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The homeopath needs to first heal themself in order to see other people.”

A hallmark of homeopathy is to see signs of a weakened vital force before a full-blown acute situation or chronic condition arises. “Nobody gets sick suddenly,” Kramer explains. “If there’s a tsunami because of an earthquake, it takes thousands of years for those plates to shift. As a homeopath, I can see the plates shifting before they crack. Hopefully, I can prevent the cracking. And if I can’t do that, maybe I can prevent the subsequent damage.”

He gives this example. “A man works a job for 40 years, retires, goes down and plays golf six months later, and then drops dead of a heart attack. That heart attack doesn’t happen suddenly. There were signs. Maybe he wasn’t sleeping well; maybe he was depressed; maybe his mouth had been dry for a period of time; or he had some mild skin eruptions. Nature never obscures anything. If you can see the signs, then you can treat the disease. We’re trained to see the signs.” He says that typically in our culture, we go to a doctor only when the catastrophe’s already stuck. “The tsunami has already happened, and now you have to go and fix that.”

The nature of a remedy

We are all familiar with getting prescriptions for an ailment. That is what conventional doctors are trained to do and supposed to do. We take ourselves in when symptoms get unmanageable, and the doctor observes, perhaps does tests, makes a diagnosis, and prescribes medicine. If a medication could influence a patient’s symptoms and is not prescribed, the doctor risks being sued.

A homeopathic remedy is chosen from an analysis of the person’s presenting symptoms and feelings—not just physical, but those of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual realms. But skeptics of homeopathy say the remedy can’t have anything specific to do with the outcome (unless it’s a placebo effect). This denouncement of homeopathic remedies comes from how they are made and what they contain—and don’t contain.
Homeopathic remedies are made through a series of dilutions that contains a material (such as a plant or mineral), while tapping ,or succussing, the solution to capture the energy of the material. It is the captured energy that is said to be effective, not the original source material. Current methods of measuring those materials in a remedy typically detect none. This is in stark contrast to pharmacological preparations (and also herbal extracts in tinctures, capsules, and essential oils), which are highly concentrated forms of the source material.

Working with energy as a healing strategy is not new; it’s paramount in many cultures’ systems of medicine, such as traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. But that has not been a component of allopathic medicine; most Western doctors deny that such an energy system exists.

Malerba helps the uninitiated cast doubt aside. “We live in a materialistic culture. We only believe in that which we can see and touch with our hands, he says. “The interesting paradox is that you have a lot of diagnostics based on energy—energy is used in CT scans, MRIs, X-rays, etcetera. But it’s dismissed when it comes to the notion of using energy to heal illness. If you believe in physics and energy, then it’s very reasonable to believe that a dose is not a physical/chemical entity, but an energetic property, and that in illness a person is struggling with an energetic pattern or vortex they can’t get out of. So all the symptoms are manifestations of a distortion of their energy field. The right treatment would help restore that back to balance. Homeopathy is all about energy medicine. With energy, you can change things down to a cellular, molecular level—that’s what runs our bodies. It can reverse chronic illness. Lots of patients do very well.”

To the critics, homeopaths calmly say, “Just try it.” Malerba is confident that “If the skeptical scientist were to give it a chance, and not dismiss it because it doesn’t make rational sense to them, they would find it to work. I’ve observed that it does, for 20 years. Anyone with exposure to homeopathy, who tries it for a few simple things, can’t help but notice the results.” What’s more, remedies are safe. They don’t have side-effect profiles like pharmaceuticals do. (The substances from which the remedies are made, of course, do have detectible physical effects before they are diluted.) Further, Malerba emphasizes, all the homeopathic remedies are FDA approved and regulated.

Resources
David Kramer, MEd, classical homeopath, founder of the Hudson Valley School of Classical Homeopathy. (845) 255-6141; www.classicalhomeopathy.com.
Larry Malerba, DO, homeopath, Guilderland/Altamont. (518) 357-4210;
www.docmalerba.com.
Peter Fallon, functional medicine consultant. Fallon Wellness Pharmacy, Latham: (800) 890-1137; (518) 220-2005; www.fallonpharmacy.com.  

This article appears in September 2007.