Manufacturing Homeopathic Remedies

Manufacturing

Making the Remedies:
The substances, from which homeopathic medicines are produced, go through drastic changes before being sold to the public. From a basic mother tincture or herbal extract, a final product emerges only after being processed through several essential stages.

Hippocrates wrote of the homeopathic method five centuries before the birth of Christ: "The same things which cause the disease can cure it." Other doctors made similar observations in the centuries to follow. However, it was Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician and toxicologist, who brought homeopathy to its rightful place as a respected, scientific, therapeutic method.

Around 1790, Hahnemann hypothesized: "It would appear that certain medicines are able to cure symptoms which are similar to those which they themselves can cause." He went on to discover that his hypothesis was confirmed "only when minutely small or infinitesimal doses were used."

The works of Hahnemann at the end of the 18th century led to the presentation of the three postulates of homeopathy:

(1) The Law of Similars which states that there is a similarity between the toxicity of a substance and its therapeutic action. In other words, there is a relationship between the symptoms of an illness and those caused by the remedial substance.

(2) "Infinitesimally" is the use of vegetal, mineral or animal substances in repeatedly diluted strength whose experimental effects in concentrated form are similar to the symptoms of the patient.

(3) The totality of the patient must be considered. Homeopathic treatment is based on the assumption that every illness manifests a set of symptoms which are characteristic of the complete bodily response to that particular disease.

Homeopathic medicines are expressed in their potency or extent of dilution. The manufactured remedies are typically diluted in either the decimal (X) scale or the centesimal (C) scale. Simply stated, X potencies are a dilution of 1 part base substance and 9 parts of the diluents. Consequently, C potencies are 1 part base substance and 99 parts of the diluents.

During the manufacturing process, the base substances are progressively diluted. Between each progressive dilution, the remedy is vigorously shaken. This shaking process is variously known as "dynamization", "potentization" or "succession." This procedure has been shown to be an integral step in the manufacturing process without which there seems to be no therapeutic value to the substances.