Word: hahnemann
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BORN: Jan. 31, 1943, Jersey City, N.J. EDUCATION: Franklin and Marshall College, A.B., 1964; Hahnemann Medical College, M.D., 1969 FAMILY: Wife, Rhoda; two children RELIGION: Jewish MILITARY: None OCCUPATION: Physician POLITICAL CAREER: None ADDRESS: P.O. Box 860803, Plano...
...happens, homeopathy was born out of frustration with mainstream medicine as it was practiced in the late 18th century. It was founded by Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician who was horrified by such standard therapies of his day as bloodletting, purging and blistering. Hahnemann eventually abandoned his medical practice and started looking for safer ways to treat patients. One of his investigations focused on quinine, then (and now) the treatment of choice for malaria. Though he was healthy, Hahnemann dosed himself with the drug and observed that he experienced the same fevers and chills that characterize the disease...
...experiment led him to formulate his famous Law of Similars. If a substance produces certain debilitating symptoms in a healthy person, he reasoned, then a small dose could be used to treat the same symptoms in an ill patient. Hahnemann called his new method of healing "homeopathy," from the Greek homoios (like) and pathos (suffering). Using his seven children as guinea pigs, he began testing hundreds of plants and minerals, eventually compiling the list of substances and symptoms that forms the core of today's Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia...
...Hahnemann was a great believer in minimal intervention. To find how little medication could be given while still promoting healing, he began diluting his remedies. He would mix one part of an active ingredient with nine parts of water or alcohol, shake the solution briskly, then repeat the process as many as 30 times...
According to Hahnemann, the vigorous shaking transferred the "spiritlike" essence of the medicine to the solvent. And each successive shaking "potentized" the solution even further. Hahnemann believed that the extremely dilute solution, when taken by a patient, would jump-start the body's dormant "vital force" to combat illness. Hahnemann's Law of Infinitesimals--his belief that the more a remedy is diluted, the stronger its effect--is homeopathy's second major tenet...