Saturday, January 10, 2009

Homeopathic Materia Medica

Best Web Design Services : If you're looking for affordable web design services, GetAFreelancer.com is the answer! We have thousands of professional web designers ready to design a custom website that meets your requirements. You can post your project with us for free and get bids from quality providers within minutes!


Homeopathic Materia Medica are encyclopedia of materials which may be used to prepare homeopathic medicines. They list the materials along with details of the provings which establish the symptoms and conditions for which they seem suitable. They thus constitute a homeopathic prescribing reference guide and are often used along with the Homeopathic repertory.[1]
Ford Prices

Vintage Cigars


Samuel Hahnemann started the practise of homeopathy while translating the botanical Materia Medica of the Scottish physician William Cullen from English into German in 1790. Twenty pages in that work are devoted to Peruvian chinchona bark which is used to prepare the medicine quinine. This substance produces fever-like symptoms while being used to cure intermittent fever or ague and this led Hahnemann to conceive the principle of similars - that like may cure like. He went on to develop the materia medica along these homeopathic lines and others then continued this work to produce great volumes of potential ingredients.[2]

Although there are various homeopathic Materia Medica, written by different authors and covering different specialities, the term Homeopathic Materia Medica is often used to reference the total sum of homeopathic preparations and prescribing options. Hahnemann developed the first Homeopathic Materia Medica by a system of homeopathic provings, where a substance was ingested by the "prover" and the symptoms that the "prover" developed were recorded in great detail. Materia Medica may also include accidental poisoning and some information from clinical treatment.

Homeopathy and allopathy

Allopathy is a term coined in the early 19th century by Samuel Hahnemann , the founder of homeopathy, as a synonym for mainstream medicine. It was used by homeopaths to highlight the difference they perceived between homeopathy and conventional medicine, and its use remains common among homeopaths. The term derives from the Greek ἄλλος, állos, other, different + πάϑος, páthos, suffering. The distinction comes from the use in homeopathy of substances that cause similar effects as the symptoms of a disease to treat patients (homeo - meaning similar). The term allopathy was meant to contrast the homeopathic approach with those conventional medical treatments that are different from or which directly counter a patient's symptoms; hence the terms allopathic and antipathic. Homeopaths saw such symptomatic treatments as "opposites treating opposites". However, many conventional medical treatments do not fit this definition of allopathy, as they seek to prevent illness, or remove the cause of an illness by acting on the etiology of disease.