The homeopathy guide: this classic mind/body therapy uses tiny doses of natural substances to help your body's own healing energies overcome illness and restore balance

THE HIVES were so severe that Laura Godsey went to the emergency room twice. But despite her taking large doses of antihistamines, the swelling and welts didn't improve. With no relief in sight, the San Diego resident turned to an alternative therapy with a storied past: homeopathy.

It was an opportune decision: "The hives were almost entirely gone in a week, which was amazing," she says. Then Godsey underwent homeopathic treatments for the chronic asthma that had dogged her since childhood. A year later, she was able to discontinue her conventional asthma medications, and even ran in a 5k race. "It was a breeze," she says.

Proponents of homeopathy believe its remedies can cure or improve many forms of acute and chronic disease, including earaches, colds, flu, allergies, migraines, fibromyalgia, arthritis, depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, and chronic fatigue. And because no two people are exactly the same, homeopathy takes into consideration just about every aspect of a patient. "We really are treating the whole person," says Amy Rothenberg, N.D., a naturopathic physician and specialist in classical homeopathy in Enfield, Conn. "In my eyes, it's a very elegant way of practicing."

the homeo path

THE CONCEPT behind homeopathy was first recorded by Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C., but the practice as we know it is traced to Samuel Hahnemann, an 18th-century German physician who disdained the medical procedures of his day--which included bloodletting, blistering, and toxic overdoses. Intrigued by another doctor's successful treatment of malaria with quinine, Hahnemann found that quinine itself produces signs of malaria. After further research, he theorized that dilutions of natural substances causing symptoms of illness in a healthy person could cure those same symptoms in an ill person.

Particular remedies, Hahnemann came to believe, could be matched to different symptom patterns to stimulate the body's natural healing response. He called this principle similia similibus curentur ("like is healed by like"), and modern homeopaths still adhere to it. Another tenet of homeopathy is that any symptoms must be analyzed in the context of the entire person and the totality of his or her systems.

"A symptom of disease does not represent something wrong with the body," says Dana Ullman, M.P.H., co-author of Everybody's Guide to Homeopathic Medicine. "It represents the defenses of the body in its effort to fight infection or adapt to stress."

By 1900, one out of five U.S. doctors used homeopathy, and the country had 22 homeopathic medical colleges and more than l00 homeopathic hospitals. The therapy fell out of favor by the 1930s, but began to revive in the 1960s. The number of U.S. practitioners jumped from less than 200 in the 1970s to about 3,000 in 1996. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 7 million Americans have used homeopathy; its popularity in countries like France and Germany, where homeopathic remedies are sold in virtually every pharmacy, is even higher.

healing power

HOMEOPATHIC RESEARCH has been contradictory. Some results have appeared no more effective than a placebo, while others have been more positive. While the American Medical Association does not accept homeopathy, their official policy doesn't reject it either.

"From a conventional viewpoint, people can't conceive that it could work," says Laura Godsey's physician, Timothy Dooley, N.D., M.D., author of Homeopathy: Beyond Flat Earth Medicine. "It might involve subtle properties that as yet we cannot measure."

Hahnemann suggested that energies in the body--what he called, collectively, its "vital force"--respond to the minute provocations of the remedies. Today, even conservative medical philosophies recognize that the body has its own healing power, which can be temporarily impaired by imbalance (i.e., illness), but is usually capable of bouncing back. When a person's vital force is kept strong, the recovery is all the quicker and more complete; that's why homeopathic practitioners consider so many personal factors that might affect mind and body function before prescribing treatment.

Whatever the explanation for how homeopathy works, patients who have found success sing its praises. "I just wanted to approach things in a more natural way," says Denise Rousseau, who in addition to her conventional physician has seen Rothenberg for a dozen years. "I call her whenever I'm not feeling well."

Other homeopathy experiences are more specific and even startling. Amy L. Lansky credits homeopathy with curing her son's autism. Starting when he was 3, the treatment took seven years. "We were very lucky because we found the right remedy very quickly," says Lansky, a former NASA researcher who wrote a book on homeopathy and autism called Impossible Cure. "Even so, it was a slow, gradual process."