How do homeopathic remedies work?

We do not know how homeopathic medicines work in the same way in which we know how telephones or cars work. This is also true of many, or even most, drugs in conventional medicine. A living being is still, despite all or our scientific advances, a mystery at many levels. Some drugs are known to have a specific chemical effect on a specific part of the body, This is called a “mechanism of action”. The mechanism of action for general anesthetics used to put people to sleep during surgery are one class of drugs for which no mechanism of action is known. In other areas of science there are still many mysteries also. Gravity, for example, does not have a mechanism of action which is agreed upon by the world’s physicists. Time cannot be proven to even exist. This doesn’t mean that we cannot use gravity or time in our daily lives. We can also use drugs which do not have a known mechanism of action. No one would have surgery without anesthetics just because we don’t understand their mechanism of action. Homeopathic medicines are extremely useful even though we don’t understand how they work at this time. It is often useful to discuss Homeopathic medicines as energetic or vitalistic medicines than in mechanistic terms, so we say that they are energetic or vital medicines because Homeopathic doctors agree that the effects of Homeopathic medicines are effects directly on the energy level of a person, directly upon whatever vital force underlies our shared understanding of that state of being we call Health.

We produce energetic medicines because homeopathy recognizes the fact that life exists due to a life energy, a vital principle. When a person falls ill, his or her overall state of health declines because his or her life energy has been compromised or has become imbalanced. To correct this imbalance in one’s life energy, an energetic medicine must be used.

The remedy that best matches the life energy’s state of imbalance, as expressed through a totality of symptoms, is given in a potency or strength that is stronger than the disease. This most similar homeopathic remedy goes to the same places where the whole illness resides. The homeopathic remedy that is most similar to but stronger than the illness stimulates the life energy to free itself and recover from the imbalance of its disease state. This recovery causes the person’s mental, emotional and physical symptoms to disappear.

We give only one remedy at a time because we are treating one life energy that has fallen into a state of imbalance or disease—an imbalance that expresses itself through a variety of symptoms.