Classical homeopathy follows the principles laid out by the founder, Samuel Hahnemann. Classical homeopaths will recommend a single remedy, for the whole person (not for a single symptom), based on the law of similars, in the minimum effective dose, using remedies whose symptoms are known through provings in humans and toxicology reports, and have been verified clinically.
Let’s look at each of these aspects and why it matters when you are seeking true, long-term healing of PANS/PANDAS and your child’s underlying susceptibility.
Law of Similars
This is the central and most fundamental point of homeopathy. All aspects that make up classical homeopathy come back to the law of similars, so we must start here.
Samuel Hahnemann founded homeopathy as a distinct system of medicine after coming across evidence that a centuries-old concept – “like cures like” – might be responsible for why a medicine that was very useful for curing malaria worked. He was a chemist and physician, so his natural inclination was to test the hypothesis. His initial test was successful, so he expanded the study and tested more substances on more subjects.
What he found again and again was that the substances that were known to be useful for treating certain conditions ALWAYS caused very similar symptoms of the illness when taken by a healthy person.
This wasn’t enough for Hahnemann, though. After all, it was only a theory until he put it into practice. So he started treating patients with the information he had gathered in his experiments. Over the next decades, he was consistently able to confirm that applying the law of similars actually led to healing.
Perhaps it isn’t really a spoiler alert to share that it did indeed work.
In order for someone to be practicing homeopathy of any sort, they MUST be using the law of similars to select a remedy. This means that the remedy must have known effects when taken by a healthy person that are very similar to what you are experiencing in illness.
It is important to note that using the EXACT thing that someone got sick from (i.e., a strep nosode for PANDAS) is NOT applying the law of similars. There are several reasons behind this that are beyond the scope of this article. This is a practice of isopathy, which means the same disease rather than a similar disease. It tends to have a more palliative outcome rather than a curative healing outcome. For more on this, listen to our Mom & Doc Talk: Healing PANS/PANDAS episode 118 – Understanding the Difference: Homeopathy, Isopathy, LDI and LDA.
Provings and Clinical Verification
The experimentation that Samuel Hahnemann did to test his hypothesis which led to the law of similars, became known as provings. This comes from Hahnemann’s native language, German, where the word for test is prüfung.
In order for the system of medicine to be successfully used, everything had to be tested to truly understand what symptoms would be produced when taken by healthy people. Many people had to be included in order to get a broad representation of the physiologic effects the medicine could cause. These symptoms were collected and combined into a materia medica, which is a reference of what a medicine can be used for. Toxicology reports from poisonings were also used to add to the materia medica, particularly for the highly toxic plants and metals, so that they could understand the more severe symptoms without actually poisoning or killing the testers.
Once the medicines were understood in the materia medica and used clinically, cures of specific symptoms were added to the materia medica to strengthen the support for their use in patients.
There are important notes on provings and how they are evaluated by a classical homeopath.
FIRST:
Provings must be done on humans to be used by humans; they must be done on healthy people, and they must include a significant number of provers.
Any provings that are done in other species can’t be reliably used for humans because the effects of a substance aren’t always the same in different species. For example, humans can gleefully and happily eat chocolate every day. Dogs, on the other hand, can die from consuming chocolate.
SECOND, and very importantly:
Provings must be done with the actual substance and on trained provers. There are some homeopathic practitioners who do “meditation provings” or say they are proving something that can’t actually be materially produced or isolated for ingestion. Two examples are the color blue or moonbeam. These are not legitimate provings; they are not used by classical homeopaths, and they are not used by members of the Resilience Naturopathic team.
Single remedy
We now clearly understand the need for testing and proving to accurately select remedies based on the law of similars. But maladies rarely have only one symptom. Couldn’t a person take several remedies that cover different aspects of the case or symptoms? Would that ensure we have everything covered better?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. And this isn’t just in homeopathy.
When we combine something with another substance, the very nature of that substance changes. Our body then responds to the combination, not the component parts. So if you are using multiple remedies at the same time, you aren’t actually applying the law of similars because you don’t know what those two remedies combined would produce in a healthy human. It’s like baking a cake. If you eat all of the ingredients separately, they taste one way. But if you mix them together, they taste entirely different.
Remedies have impacts on our bodies for prolonged periods of time. So, using a single remedy alternating very closely with another remedy can also have the effect of combining remedies. To further complicate things, remedies can and will interfere with each other.
But what about the fancy and well-marketed remedies you can buy at the grocery store for colds or allergies?
Some people find that these remedies help, but they are likely palliative at best. They are only used for acute conditions that will resolve quickly, whether you do anything for them or not. So you might see some relief, but they don’t have any deep effect on healing the body. PANS/PANDAS or other chronic conditions have an underlying susceptibility component that is only impacted by single remedies.
Whole Person
As Hahnemann saw the success of the law of similars, he realized that the whole understanding of disease in the early 1800’s was flawed. He needed to come to a new understanding of disease. He observed that as people healed, they did so as whole people, beyond just the label of the disease they were seeking help with.
From his observations, he developed the concept of the vital force as the unifying factor that kept all of our body systems working together. Disturbance of the vital force is what led to disease. And because the vital force is what connects everything together, a disturbance in the vital force could affect the whole body.
To simplify this further, what homeopathy is addressing is susceptibility and a disturbance to the vital force – even if you are using it to address PANS/PANDAS, Lyme, mold illness, or more.
In order to heal the vital force and address susceptibility, you need to look at the body as a whole.
This means we are looking at all of the symptoms of PANS/PANDAS, but we are also looking at the eczema your child used to have, the migraines, and the constipation. It also means that we can’t decide to focus on a single symptom and have a successful healing response. We must look at and understand the totality of a client’s health.
Minimum Effective Dose
The final concept that is important in homeopathy is often what people focus on most (and why things that aren’t homeopathy are often called homeopathy).
Homeopathy uses ultradilute preparations of natural substances. This came about because Hahnemann was testing very toxic substances and didn’t want to poison anyone. It was sheer coincidence that in diluting them to make them safer, Hahnemann discovered that the medicines worked better with fewer side effects. More about how homeopathy works here.)
Using the minimum effective dose is important for managing cases so that we have the best healing outcomes with the fewest complications. But, as we have been discussing throughout the article, homeopathy isn’t just about using a low dose.
Why this all matters
You are looking for healing for your child. You want to put PANS/PANDAS in the past. You want to not have to worry every time someone gets sick. You want to visit your relatives whose house smells a bit musty, without worrying about an impending flare for weeks afterward.
Homeopathy can provide all of this – if it is consistent with the principles outlined here. These principles have stood the test of time for centuries. It has helped people who used it in epidemics survive at significantly higher rates than those who used conventional medicine. It has given 1000’s of kids their lives back after conventional medicine said, “you just have to live like this.”
If you are considering classical homeopathy to help get your child back, the next best step is to fill out this form to connect with a member of our team and get your specific questions answered.
