This podcast is an excerpt from the Acute Prescribing lecture from Dr. Robin Murphy's Seminar Series and Clinical Homeopathy Certificate Course.

Here Dr. Murphy talks about the background of Homeopathy in the United States and a brief history of how Samuel Hahnemann began Homeopathy.

Acute Prescribing
Acute Prescribing History and Principles of Homeopathy. Acute prescribing methods, case taking and case analysis, potency selection and repetition of dose. Various schools and levels of prescribing, comparing Hahnemannian prescribing versus Kentian. Signs of health, vitality, and vital force. How to use your home remedy kit for sore throats, ear infections, influenza, colds, coughs and fevers. Herpes, vaginitis, sinus infections, cystitis and the vaccination issue are reviewed. Gives easy to understand differentials for these acute topics.

Dr. Murphy's full Acute Prescribing lecture is available for streaming access.

Transcript:

First thing I want to start with is give you a little background on what is homeopathy and some of the history and the golden age of homeopathy. The golden age of homeopathy in the United States was 100 years ago. In the 1880s up to 1910, 1920, homeopathy flourished all over the United States. 15% of all medical doctors in the United States were homeopaths – 15, 20%. You had up to 15,000. And there were 22 homeopathic medical schools.

Some of your most famous medical schools today were homeopathic, that includes Ohio State – [it] was originally a homeopathic medical school. University of Michigan, Iowa State, University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco were all homeopathic medical schools.

The homeopathic medical profession was the first to admit women to their programs. They set up the first homeopathic women's medical college. So, the first women MDs in United States were homeopaths. And in the Detroit Ann Arbor area homeopathy flourished. And in Chicago they had three homeopathic medical schools and Ann Arbor they had a homeopathic medical school at the university - a women’s school and a hospital and in Detroit they had two homeopathic medical schools.

Okay. So, this whole area in the Midwest was flourishing with homeopathy and then when the Wonder drugs came out and the AMA got control of the government accrediting agencies in the Flexner Report (Full Flexner Report) that cut off all federal funds for homeopathic medical schools. And that's – the only reason was financial. They never could disprove it. They can never say it was bad or anything like that.

Many cities were literally saved by homeopathy. New Orleans and the yellow fever epidemic. The doctors there won awards in Louisiana. They have all these statistics – there’s a book out called The Logic of Facts (A Logic of Facts) or something like that and it has statistics of homeopathy and epidemics and it’s just amazing. The 1918 flu – influenza epidemic – homeopathy would have like a 1% death rate, allopathic medicine and drugs and stuff would have a 50, 60% death rate.

And Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy won the Medal of Honor from France for single-handedly – one person stopped the cholera epidemic when Napoleon’s soldiers retreated from Russia – [when] they came back from Russia they brought cholera. And Hahnemann taught a group of doctors and they treated everybody homeopathically and he stopped the epidemic. And they have a statue in Paris dedicated to that. The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was a homeopath and it goes on and on. The man who did the Heimlich maneuver, his wife does homeopathy – Maesimund B. Panos and Jane Heimlich (authored Homeopathic Medicine At Home: Natural Remedies for Everyday Ailments and Minor Injuries). It goes on and on. First x-ray in the United States is New York Flower Hospital. It was a homeopathic hospital.

So, homeopathy has deep deep roots in the United States. It was the greatest area – concentration of homeopathy in the world. And now the greatest concentration is in India, and then second is Europe. And in Europe homeopathy is flourishing, in Mexico it’s flourishing. The National University of Mexico has a homeopathic Medical School, 800 students. [In] Europe, there's 5,000 medical doctors practicing just in France, and Germany is the same way. So, the United States now is at least two decades behind Europe as far as homeopathy. It’s accepted by the royal family, just about every government that I know of in Europe and even United States government. So, never have these qualms about is homeopathy legal. Homeopathy, the legality of homeopathy in the United States was enacted by an act of the Senate and the House. Only the Senate and House can undo homeopathy. Okay. So, all the remedies are over the counter and anybody can purchase them and use them and it's all legal. Whether you call yourself a physician or this and that is another thing. But the right to buy remedies, we still have that and it's very open and legal.

So, I want to give a little of the philosophy of homeopathy and how we call it an energy medicine as opposed to a physiological medicine. Homeopathy was founded in 1793. So, it's exactly 200 years ago. It was by Samuel Hahnemann. And he did an experiment. There was a malaria epidemic in Europe and everyone was doing quinine, which they still do as their only treatment for malaria. The big horse pills. I don’t know if they have improved on the horse pills yet but they were giving quinine bark; [an] extract from the Peruvian bark. And the theory was that it was working because it was a stomachic. And a Stomachic means a tonic for the stomach. And Hahnemann says, well, how do these doctors know that quinine is curing malaria because it's a tonic for the stomach? It was just a theory then. So, he did an insane thing. He took quinine himself. He says, well, I am going to take it and see what happens.

See, modern medicine still has not caught up with that concept. All the pharmaceutical research, all double-blind studies, all triple blind studies are all unscientific. Okay, we’ll talk about that – because they're all prejudiced. They only look for one thing and everything else is a side effect. Okay, the side effect can kill you. I would call that primary effect. Its effect on the joints is secondary. But the researcher - it's all prejudice because the research says, we want to see if this is a good anti-inflammatory drug for rheumatism.

So that's the prejudice right there.

Hahnemann said, we should have no prejudice about what a drug, herb, mineral does. You take it and you record its symptoms and then you will see where its primary and secondary effects are. The primary effects are the threats that are most threatening to the person.

So, Hahnemann took the quinine bark and lo and behold, he got fever and sweats and chills. He got all the symptoms of malaria. So, he came up with a theory that like cures like. Some people say the Law of Similars. I don't believe it's a law. I believe it’s a principle that we have observed in nature. It's not so fixed as a mathematical law. Okay, but like cures like. And all the folklore that we have, “what that man needs is a dose of his own medicine.” So, he's irritable and upset, and we give him medicine – nux vomica right? And nux vomica, if you take it makes you irritable and upset. So, [if] we give a medicine that matches what this person has, it cures it. So, his theory is that if an herb can upset the liver, it has affinity for the live, it has affinity to heal the liver. If it has no affinity to the liver it won't be a good liver herb. That's just common sense. So, what it can cause it can cure. So, if a dog ate a plant and the dog has bloody diarrhea now, that plant is good for bloody diarrhea. Its capability of causing it means it can cure it, can neutralize it. In physics they have a principle that equal and opposite waves meet. What happens? They cancel each other. They neutralize each other. So, in homeopathy we say if a person, this is a person, and they’re putting out symptomatology, a headache, flu-like symptoms, fever and they’re thirstless – they’re putting out these symptoms, and we find a remedy that can produce similar symptoms. And this is gelsemium, the yellow jasmine plant, and we give that remedy and it neutralizes it in an amazing way.

(from Dr. Murphy’s 1993 lecture Acute Prescribing)