Frequently Asked Questions

• What is homeopathy?
• How long has homeopathy been around?
• What conditions does homeopathy treat?
• Do you use herbs in homeopathy?
• What makes a substance homeopathic?
• Is homeopathy a holistic practice?
• Is homeopathy expensive?
• Is homeopathy safe?
• Does insurance cover homeopathy?
• Is homeopathy effective?
• Is homeopathy scientific?
• Will homeopathy work with my current medications?
• Can I treat myself with homeopathic remedies from the store?
• Is the homeopath a medical doctor?
• Where can I learn more about homeopathy?

What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a holistic health practice that uses safe, nontoxic preparations to stimulate your body's natural healing abilities. In homeopathy the energy for healing comes from within, resulting in easier recovery, fewer side effects, longer-lasting health and a more resilient system.

The practice of homeopathy is based on the Law of Similars: A substance that can cause certain symptoms in a healthy person can help a sick person throw off those same symptoms. The homeopath's goal is to find the remedy that most closely corresponds to your state of health. Such a remedy is said to be "homeopathic" to you.

The remedy that most closely matches you will also be the remedy you are most sensitive to, so the homeopathic remedy cannot be given in a large dose, which might cause more symptoms. Homeopathic remedies are diluted to tiny doses that are gentle and safe. The remedy substance is diluted over and over, and pressure is applied to the solution at each stage ("succussion"). The remedy actually becomes more powerful as it is diluted more. (This preparation is what makes homeopathy different from medical treatments that use similar substances, like vaccines or antigen therapy.)

Homeopathically prepared substances do not overpower your body or compromise your immune system. They stimulate your body to correct patterns of imbalance that create or maintain disease. The power to heal remains with you.

How long has homeopathy been practiced?

For 200 years homeopathy has been applied successfully in epidemics, acute complaints and chronic illness. In much of the world (France, Germany, Mexico, Great Britain, India, Brazil, to name a few) it is used in hospitals for emergency and trauma medicine, as well as for outpatient and long-term care.

Homeopathy as a medical practice was founded by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann in Germany around the beginning of the 19th century. Hahnemann was a young physician and an accomplished linguist with a large family. He supplemented his meager physician's income by translating old medical texts into German. While translating these manuscripts, he began to notice that substances that had been traditionally used to cure certain ailments were the same substances that could, in an overdose, cause similar symptoms to the disease they were meant to treat. Sulphur, for instance, was often used to treat skin conditions with lots of heat and itching. An overdose of Sulphur can cause exactly these symptoms. Cinchona bark (the source of quinine) was traditionally used to treat malaria.

Hahnemann also noticed that giving people measurable doses of such a "similar" substance could make them quite ill, so he experimented with smaller and smaller doses until he began to treat people with very dilute solutions of the original medicines. He found that as the dilutions got higher, the healing power of the medicine was increased. And so homeopathy was born.

Hahnemann's new system was widely ignored by conventional physicians until his spectacular successes a few years later in two epidemics of cholera and typhoid fever. Homeopathy became quite popular in the mid-1800s and remained more popular than conventional medicine into the 20th century. It has had a resurgence since the 1970s as the limitations of chemical drug therapy have become more clearly understood.

Is homeopathy a holistic practice?

Yes. Although it is a Western discipline, homeopathy has a lot in common with Eastern holistic medical practices like traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. In the holistic viewpoint, disease is considered to emanate from the center of the organism, so every facet of a person's health is important in determining a proper treatment.

The homeopath is generally more interested in how you experience your symptoms than in the fact that you have a rash, for example. How that rash feels when you scratch it (does it itch less or more, does it burn or sting or ache, does the itching move around when scratched) is much more important to a homeopath than whether a diagnostician would call it lichen simplex or atopic dermatitis.

Even more important is your mental and emotional state, how you experience the world, what sort of likes and dislikes you have. That is why a homeopath asks questions about seemingly unrelated matters such as whether you like hot or cold weather and what sorts of foods you crave.

Homeopathy is also considered a form of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), although many holistic practitioners take issue with this phrase. Since holistic medicine is often able to improve the lives of people even before they get "sick" by conventional standards, many holistic practitioners think the surgical and drastic chemical techniques of conventional medicine should be considered "complementary" to those holistic disciplines that can treat a much wider variety of ill health.

What conditions does homeopathy treat?

Homeopathy is the closest thing to comprehensive healthcare. It has been used to treat extremely serious acute infectious diseases (cholera and typhoid fever are two of the earliest epidemics treated successfully with homeopathy; leptospirosis, or swamp fever, is a more recent epidemic treated with homeopathy; see video here). Homeopathy is used in hospitals across the world as an adjunct to trauma medicine and surgery, to treat infectious disease and to treat serious degenerative disease.

Because nearly any chronic medical condition can have different causes in different people, and because each person responds to disease in a slightly different way, homeopaths do not base remedy selection on medical conditions, syndromes or other broad categories of disease. Instead, the homeopath seeks to match a remedy to what is most characteristic about you, to the particular ways in which your particular system has been affected by ill health.

The goal of homeopathy is to make you stronger so that your body can heal itself. What we observe is that as you begin to feel better in yourself, your physical complaints begin to improve as well. This holistic approach makes homeopathy useful any time your health is less than optimal.

Certainly, it would be helpful to be able to list for your information all the medical conditions that we have seen improve under homeopathic care. But because homeopathy is an unlicensed practice in North Carolina, it would be illegal for us to suggest that a certain medical condition has been treated or cured by homeopathy. There is a long list here of conditions treated by a pair of Indian homeopaths who are guest lecturers at the Caduceus Institute of Classical Homeopathy. Elsewhere on their website is a sampling of cured cases from their practice.

Homeopathy is not miracle care. It cannot stimulate your body to re-grow organs that have been removed or revivify tissues that have been irreversibly damaged. It cannot set a broken bone or remove a cancerous tumor. These latter are jobs for the surgeon. However, even in clients with advanced disease, homeopathy can help people to live the best life possible.

Do you use herbs in homeopathy?

Only after they have been prepared homeopathically. In other words, a homeopath will not tell you to drink an herbal tea or mix up a preparation using powdered roots. That is the province of the herbalist or naturopath.

Homeopaths prescribe remedies that may have been made from herbs or minerals or animal products, but they have been homeopathically prepared. That is, they have been diluted and succussed so that what you see is not a root powder but a small white pill or a liquid solution.

What makes a substance "homeopathic"?

The way it is prepared and the way it is prescribed. We say a substance is "homeopathic" to you if that substance might cause your disease state in a healthy person if taken repeatedly. This is an example of the homeopathic Law of Similars, or "Like cures like." The homeopath chooses a substance that produces symptoms most "similar" to your own.

The remedy that most closely matches your symptoms will also be the remedy you are most sensitive to, so the homeopathic remedy must be given in a tiny dose to be safe.

We prepare the substance by diluting it over and over again, each time applying pressure to the solution ("succussing") before diluting it again. The end product we call a "potentized" remedy. The more it is diluted and energized by succussion, the more powerful its potential effect on the body.

Is homeopathy expensive?

Not the way it is practiced here. Some practitioners charge large fees for an initial appointment. However, at Dynamis, we strive to keep our fees low so that all can afford homeopathic care.

The remedies themselves cost only $15 each and tend to last 4-8 weeks. The vast majority of clients need only one remedy at a time, so this is a huge money-saver over conventional treatment.

Most importantly, successful homeopathic care can free the client from future expense. When a remedy has been successful, the client no longer needs to take the remedy or keep regular followup appointments with the homeopath.

The American Medical College of Homeopathy's 2007 National Homeopathic Patient Survey found that the average homeopathic client spent roughly 40 percent less per year on homeopathy than on conventional care.

Here at Dynamis, we do our best to make homeopathic care affordable for all clients. Our intake fees are low, and we offer discounts for children, students, veterans, seniors, active-duty military personnel and those on public assistance.

Is homeopathy safe?

Homeopathic remedies are safe, gentle and nontoxic. Although the remedies are made from some of the most powerful substances on earth, even the lowest potencies have been diluted to one part in a million, or even one in a trillion. Most of the potencies used in practice have been diluted to the point where the original substance is no longer detectable in the solution. It may sound paradoxical, but these higher potencies actually exert a more powerful influence on the body.

The remedy that most closely matches you is the one to which you're most sensitive, so sometimes there are aggravations of existing symptoms when you first start a remedy. Aggravations are usually mild and transient, and are easily managed by adjusting the way the remedy is taken.

Because homeopathic remedies are so dilute, they are completely nontoxic. They never overwhelm the body's defenses with chemicals, and they do not put strain on the organs responsible for filtering foreign substances out of the bloodstream.

Does insurance cover homeopathy?

Regrettably, most insurance companies do not cover homeopathic care.

If you have a medical savings account, check with the company. Some medical savings plans will allow you to withdraw funds for the cost of homeopathy. It's still your money, but at least it's tax-free.

Is homeopathy effective?

Numerous studies authored over the last hundred years and more have shown homeopathy's efficacy. Here is a webpage with some of the good recent studies. There are more links on our studies page.

If you wish to read the dissenting literature, there is plenty of it online, much of it funded directly or indirectly by a certain industry. The detractors are so prolific that one wonders where they find the time to write so much about something they have no intention of ever trying for themselves. (We have remedies for that, too.)

Is homeopathy scientific?

In the opinion of this homeopath, homeopathy is the most scientific of the healing arts. That is because it has (1) a theory of health and healing (the Law of Similars) and (2) drug trials that are the most scientific in the field.

Homeopathic trials are called "provings." Provings start with healthy subjects who take a remedy until they feel symptoms. The subjects and their proving supervisors record all symptoms as they occur. These records are then compiled by the proving administrator and submitted to the homeopathic community for use in matching the characteristic effects of that remedy to the characteristic symptoms of individuals under homepathic care.

The strength of the homeopathic proving model lies in its use of a healthy pool of subjects who have not been vetted. As suggested by a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the practice of culling trial subjects based on criteria chosen in advance by the researchers has the potential to introduce large biases into drug trials.

Will homeopathy work with my current medications?

Homeopathic remedies do not contain enough of the original remedy substance to interfere with the biochemical action of conventional medications. So the answer is generally "yes." This is also because homeopathy, even when it still contains trace amounts of the original substance, works on a different level of the organism than chemicals do.

Long experience shows that homeopathy works even alongside some pretty intense drugs. However, there are certain drug types that are so powerfully suppressive of the immune system that they may prevent the body responding well to a remedy. The homeopath manages such a situation by giving a low potency remedy in frequent repetition and during times of the day when the effects of the pharmaceutical drug are not as strong.

Can I treat myself with homeopathic remedies from the store?

Absolutely. Most health food stores carry at least some of the single homeopathic remedies. It is possible for a lay person to choose an effective remedy for mild, transient symptoms by researching her symptoms in a book like Boericke's Pocket Manual of Homeopathic Materia Medica. However, constitutional, long term care is best supervised by a homeopath who can get an objective look at your symptoms.

CAVEAT: In almost any store that sells homeopathic single remedies you will also see some other preparations labeled "homeopathic." These often claim to treat some specific condition like sinus congestion or earaches or teething. As explained above, the very idea that a certain preparation would treat some specific medical condition is antithetical to homeopathy itself. What's worse, the pharmacies that sell these preparations do not prove these mixes to find out what their effects are. They just mix together a certain number of the most common single remedies for a particular complaint.

It is possible that one of the, say, ten remedies in a "sinus" mix might ameliorate your sinus congestion, but this is homeopathic roulette. There are hundreds of remedies that have an effect on the sinuses. Normally, any relief from these "combination remedies" is fleeting. A properly chosen single remedy can do much more.

Is the homeopath a medical doctor?

No. Hart Matthews is not a medical doctor or physician. He is not a licensed health practitioner. By state law, he cannot diagnose or treat disease or claim to have treated or cured any medical condition or patient. Homeopathy is not a substitute for licensed medical care. As a professional homeopath, Hart Matthews works with clients who are already under the care of licensed physicians.

There are licensed MDs who also practice homeopathy, although they're pretty rare. The most well-known in the region is Dr. George Guess, originally from Durham, who now practices in Charlottesville, Va.

Where can I learn more about homeopathy?

If you want to learn more about homeopathy or about Dynamis Homeopathic Healing, you may give the office a call at (919) 286-7626 or email dynamis.homeopathic@gmail.com.

You may also browse this website for more information. There are links to other homeopathic sites that could keep you busy reading for years. There is a recommended reading list, as well as a links page. I recommend the American Medical College of Homeopathy's 2007 National Homeopathic Patient Survey, which addresses questions about the average individual cost of homeopathy, client satisfaction and what kinds of people respond best to homeopathy. Eighty percent of clients participating in the survey had positive results from homeopathy!

I've also recently added a page of links to information about the science of homeopathy and some of the studies that have been done proving that highly diluted solutions can exert a physical effect not only on people but also on solutions, plants and animals.

Call for an appointment or for more information.

Dynamis Homeopathic Healing - 919.286.7626
dynamis.homeopathic@gmail.com.

 

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