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his ideas were far ahead of his time, also in many areas outside of homeopathy, such as in the compassionate treat- ment of the insane. His homeopathic theory was original and revolutionary. Homeopaths are criticised for returning to the work of a man from 200 years ago, but physicists delight in studying Einstein. Geniuses are in short supply. Fortunately there are a few working currently in homeopa- thy, which has enabled it to undergo great advances in the last 30 years.
The five homeopathic concepts were initially ridiculed, but subsequently all of them except one are now accepted by modern medicine, which has only caught up with two of them in the last few years.
Let us look at homeopathic principles in the 18th and 19th centuries.
1. Individualised Medicine
This is a medical procedure that separates patients into spe- cific genetic groups. Medical decisions, practices, interven- tions and products are then tailored to the individual patient, based on their predicted response to or risk of disease. To quote Professor Johnson, chief clinician, Cancer Reserch UK: “Personalised medicine is the most exciting change in cancer treatment since chemotherapy.”
Unlike 'conventional' medicine from the 18th to the end of the 20th Century, Homeopathy was always about the indi- vidual. There is no such thing as a homeopathic remedy to treat chronic arthritis in a dog. Each individual dog may require a different remedy. The choice will be based on the exact objective symptoms, character, behaviour, phenotype and a detailed history. This is why homeopathy is not suited to unsophisticated double blind trials. Future conventional medicine won't be either.
2. Serious Chronic Disease is caused by Mental Stress
It has been accepted for a few years in human medicine that stress is an important factor in the development of chronic disease, and recently the veterinary world is beginning to come on board. However in 2010 the Veterinary Times pub- lished a case of osteosarcoma successfully treated using homeopathy, leading to annoyed letters being sent by some vets wondering why the character of the dog and the stresses it had experienced were relevant. One author described the possibility of homesickness causing osteosar- coma as 'farcical'. At that time few people knew about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). These demonstrate an association of stresses experienced as a child with health problems when an adult. This has been a notable landmark in epidemiological research, and has recently produced more than 50 scientific articles and 100 conference and workshop presentations. (3,4,5)
Samuel Hahnemann
Hahnemann had realised very early on in his homeopathic practice that understanding mental stress and emotional history was crucial in the choice of remedy. There are no drugs in conventional practice that take into account the physical pathology together with the mental and emotional state, which may be why this area has been poorly explored by modern medicine.
It is obvious to a vet taking a homeopathic consultation that animals are affected by specific emotional stresses, and subsequently develop disease in exactly the same way as humans. Their prescriptions reflect this. All remedies treat mental and emotional symptoms as well as physical. It is only recently that mainstream science has accepted that animals experience emotions (7). Animal emotions were never mentioned in my six years at Cambridge.
3. Like treats like
This had actually been a concept in medicine for centuries, referred to by Hippocrates and Paracelsus (8,9). However Hahnemann, through experiment and observation, was the first to develop a system that reliably employed the princi- ple. In 1790 he grasped the law of Like Treats Like, or the Law of Similars, when he observed that the symptoms pro- duced by eating cinchona bark (containing quinine) were very similar to the symptoms of malaria. He postulated that this was likely to be why quinine could successfully treat malaria. He then conducted his 'provings' (experiments) on medicines. Groups of healthy volunteers took many differ- ent medicines and recorded the mental and physical symp- toms they experienced with each. These drugs were then given to patients displaying a similar symptom picture. These were the first systematic drug trials performed in the history of Western medicine. Nine years later, again through a process of observation, Jenner proposed vaccination.
While the principle is the same, homeopathy is only broadly similar to vaccination. Jenner used material doses of a
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