Illnesses in the 21st century are increasingly more complex. Patients rarely come with just one complaint, rather they present a layering of allergies, complaints on skin, hair, on mood, they usually have sleep and/or food disorder. At the same time the cost of public health has reached high levels while life expectancy is stalling. Conventional medicine has mostly evolved during times when acute infectious disease were the leading cause of death. But its success has been less glaring with chronic diseases, where the leading paradigm emphasized drugs to suppress the symptoms rather than address the underlying cause of the problem.
One of the causes for the wearing of conventional medicine can be tracked to its silo specialization with an approach organ by organ. Medical students to this very day draw their training from dissecting cadavers. In the same vein, symptoms are viewed as something that must be eliminated and their disappearance means that medicine successfully dealt with the issue. When a new symptom appears, most likely on another organ, it triggers the care by another highly specialized expert, who has no reason to suspect that the new and old symptoms are connected.
The paradigm used in homeopathy is very different. Complaints are seen as the result of complex interactions between the patient, its occupation, environment, mental predisposition, personal and family history. For homeopathy, the body adjusts as much as it can and as long as feasible under adverse circumstances before producing a given ailment—be it back pain, tooth decay, sleeplessness, or even hypertension. These are symptoms of a living active organism that manifests its conditions and level of vitality. The symptoms are signals, which the body manifests to indicate imbalances and homeopaths need to be keenly attentive to the signs displayed on the body and mind. Symptoms are also individualized, and each patient receives its own tailored remedy called the “simillimum”. Moreover, each dose of the remedy is fitted, depending on different factors, such as age or condition of the patient’s vital force. Homeopaths typically review the remedy, the potency, and the dose at each follow-up visit and adjust them if needed.
