Homeopathy

[Pallas]

I’m starting a thread on homeopathy because it may be the medicine of the future.  For those of you who have experience with homeopathic remedies and know something about homeopathy, please skip down to the What I Want To Know section.  If you’d like to know some basic information about homeopathy, please see the Background section, below.
Background
For those who are not familiar with it, homeopathy is a system of health care that is based on the idea of “like cures like”.  This means that in order to cure a condition, you administer a substance that produces symptoms identical to the condition in a well person.  For example, when a well person comes in contact with poison ivy, they develop a painful rash that is extremely itchy.  As a homeopathic remedy, poison ivy could be given to a person experiencing a painful, itchy rash (no matter what caused the rash) as long as the symptoms matched.
By contast, mainstream medicine is considered to be “allopathy” – the use of a substance whose effects in a well person are unrelated to the symptoms of the illness the substance is used to treat.
Homeopathic remedies are prepared from all kinds of substances: plants, minerals, animal tissues, even immaterial “substances” like sunrays.  The potency of the remedy is inversely related to the degree of its dilution in the remedy; in other words, the more dilute the remedy, the more powerful.  At the potency levels typically used to treat chronic conditions, there are no detectable molecules of the substance in the dose of the remedy.  This has led modern practitioners to believe that homeopathy is a form of energetic medicine; an energy signature of the substance is believed to be imprinted on the carrier (often a sugar pill).  In fact, some practitioners claim that thinking about the curative substance has the same effect as taking a homeopathic dose of it.
Homeopathy as a medical practice originated in Germany over 100 years ago and continues to be used throughout Europe and parts of Asia extensively, even in hospital settings.  The scientific evidence that the efficacy of the remedies is greater than that of a placebo  is mixed (search Google Scholar using “homeopathy placebo” as search terms).  Establishing that efficacy is not due to a placebo effect is  difficult because the determination of a remedy is highly individualized, both in terms of the diagnostic approaches of practitioners as well as the symptoms expressed by a given patient, making it difficult to compare case results in a controlled fashion.
What I Want To Know
With more than 3,000 remedies to choose from, a key challenge in treating illness with homeopathy is finding the best possible match between the person’s symptom picture and a remedy.  I have used homeopathy in clinical setttings, sometimes with good success, at other times, not so much.  Your answers to the following questions will help me to gain a better understanding of how to improve the treatment process.  You don’t need to disclose the remedy you took, or the condition you were treating.

1. Why did you decide to try homeopathy?What were your beliefs and expectations at the time you took the remedy?How did you determine what remedy to take?What kind of remedy(ies) did you take:

·         simple (one remedy)
·         complex (more than one together)
·         sequential (more than one, but taken one at a time in a sequence)?

1. How did you determine what dose to take?How many doses did you take, and how far apart where they spaced?On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 = no effect and 10 = complete cure, how well did the remedy work for you?What negative effects, if any, did you experience?What, if anything, would have made your experience better?Would you use homeopathy again?

 
Thanks SO much for your input!