What Is Natural Medicine?
Natural medicine approaches health and disease in an entirely different way than conventional or allopathic medicine. Natural medicine strengthens, supports, and enhances the body’s ability to regain and maintain health through a wide range of therapeutics including nutritional, orthomolecular, botanical, physical, and homeopathic medicine.
How Is Homeopathy Different?
Homeopathy is a 200-year old comprehensive system of medicine that treats a wide range of acute and chronic conditions. It is based on an understanding that mental, emotional, and physical planes of the body are intrinsically interrelated. Effective homeopathic treatment demands a detailed understanding of how a disease affects an individual at all of these levels.
The central difference between orthodox and homeopathic treatment of chronic conditions involves suppression of symptoms. Symptoms are the way our bodies attempt to normalize and reestablish homeostasis, or balance. Most prescription drugs work to block or suppress these symptoms. Because symptoms are our built-in effort to self-correct, when symptoms are blocked, the body is driven to use more forceful means to regain homeostasis. This means that symptoms usually get worse over time, requiring higher doses of drugs to treat them. It also explains why you need to take these drugs every day, and why the symptoms can return when you stop, often worse than they were before treatment.
Homeopathic medicine instead works by evoking rather than suppressing symptoms. This allows symptoms to reach an endpoint, after which point they resolve without the need for suppression or daily medication. Homeopathy recognizes that the experience of most disease is not external, but an internal reaction producing the symptoms that we experience. Ongoing research in mind-body and epigenetic medicine aims to further explore this aspect of understanding and treating disease.
What to Expect from Homeopathic Treatment
The purpose of homeopathy is to cure, not to manage or suppress symptoms. It is virtually impossible to say how long it will take for chronic disease to be cured. Just as the remedy choice is individual, the duration and extent of cure is also individual. Homeopathy is a process. In many instances the effect of the medication can be very dramatic. Other times the process requires a fundamental shift in the disposition of the body, mind and emotional state. It can take time for these changes to occur. Usually patients will notice improvement within months in chronic conditions. Acute conditions typically show improvement within hours.
Homeopathic Medications
Homeopathic medications are made from plant, mineral and animal substances; they are regulated by the FDA and are considered non-toxic.