[My grateful thanks are due to Dr Gheorghe Jurj MD, Romania, who inspired this essay]

In considering the problem, and to delineate the differences between the two systems, it is useful at the outset to compare their conceptual allegiances. The primary conceptual allegiance of homeopathy is an empirical one to Nature, a faithfulness in compiling a natural, an accurate and complete image of the sick person in all their aspects - mind, body, modalities, generalities, sleep and dreams, preferences, etc.

Such a descriptive or ideographic approach to the sick person contrasts sharply with the mechanistic and quasi-explanatory mode that typifies 'scientific medicine' [allopathy]. While allopathy searches for an alleged 'cause' of the main symptoms and a disease name, based on generalities, homeopathy seeks only to build a complete picture of the patient's suffering that stresses its rich individuality.

The primary conceptual allegiance of allopathy is not really to Nature but to a theory of how life is: to a preconceived and fragmented view of the patient as a mere collection of parts, never conceived as a whole. A view of the patient that is simplified, distorted, splintered into fragments and disfigured by an arbitrary system of disease classification that springs solely from the heads of physicians. An arbitrary system imposed upon nature from outside, as if pressed like a mould upon it, misleading and oversimplifying the human construct. This system filters out much authentic patient symptom data, which is automatically dismissed as irrelevant as a first doctrinal step because it does not conform to the preconceived 'disease state' that the patient is assumed to harbour. Allopathy can thus be seen to ignore Nature in preference to a theory, an approach it has adhered to in various guises since the 1600s.

A second important distinction between the two systems concerns their therapeutic aims - aims that flow naturally from their conceptual allegiances. While homeopathy aims to gently and safely induce a full restoration of healthy autonomous functioning of the whole organism through natural healing by enhancing the innate vital powers, allopathy chemically picks symptoms off one by one or in clusters, willy-nilly, with no regard to the likely longer term consequences of such interventionist actions. It is not driven by any recognisable theory derived from observing Nature [as required by an inductive science], yet it claims to be scientific because of its entrenched allegiance to chemistry, which cannot even confer upon it the credentials of a truly empirical science.

The third major difference between them concerns their practical method. Allopathy uses relatively large doses of unnatural drugs, synthesised in chemical laboratories, tested in vitro in test-tubes and in vivo in animals or sick persons. These chemical drugs derange the innate physiological mechanisms by removing symptoms, often in small groups which are conceptually aggregated into alleged 'disease entities'. Disease entities are in truth merely quite arbitrary demarcations of the patient totality, having no reality beyond the mind that conceives them and can rightly be termed 'imputed unnaturals,' for they are made rather than found. This solely palliative and short-sighted approach inevitably engenders first remission, then relapse, followed by a woeful medical dependency, that ever after swings between both extremes. It cannot lead to true cure or even fundamental improvements in patient health except through inducing dependency and new disease states which continually spring up for years in the wake of its suppressions. It is therefore both fundamentally uncurative and damaging.

By contrast, and as is common knowledge, homeopathy employs infinitesimal potentised doses of natural drugs derived from plant, animal and mineral sources. These natural substances have been previously tested on healthy volunteers [provings], whose aggregate symptom totality [drug pictures] is very precisely matched to the symptom totality of each individual patient in all its rich and diverse idiosyncrasy, excluding nothing and involving no false demarcation of the patient totality into arbitrarily conceived fragments or 'diseases.'

Therefore, it can truthfully be stated that allopathy treats [suppresses] imagined 'disease entities' with drugs manufactured in laboratories that have been tested upon animals and sick persons. These are required to conform to a preconceived mould of 'disease states,' imagined to abide in populations of the human herd rather than in individuals, and imputed from statistical averages - while homeopathy treats real whole persons as individuals with natural drugs in tiny potentised doses.

Homeopathy follows the lead of Paracelsus and Hippocrates, being rooted in similars and allopathy still mostly follows the contraries of Galenic medicine, even though it has abandoned the 'bleed and purge' approach and Theory of Humours that once typified that method. It abides in no specific medical theory rooted in empirical data other than the simplistic views of chemistry and physiology, both of which are conceptually incapable of grasping, depicting or applying the true holism and complex dynamic functioning of living organisms.

It is therefore valid to conclude that allopathy is demonstrably wrong in its claim that disease is a thing and a person is a mere collection of parts, mechanisms and pathways to be chemically fixed and tinkered about with willy-nilly. This doomed approach patently leads the patient into a predictable cycle of remission and relapse, dependency and suppression and always spawns the same woeful concatenation of new diseases breaking out from old ones further down the time-line.

Observed closely, allopathy amply demonstrates the very injurious doctrines of disease and cure first enunciated and exposed by Hahnemann two centuries ago, which he had distilled from almost three decades [1777-1805] of historical study. These are the doctrines of palliation and suppression through contraries and strong doses on the one side versus cure through small doses, similars and patient totality on the other. Truly, therefore, allopathy demonstrates and proves the doctrines of homeopathy regarding the dangers of suppressing symptoms, but the reverse is not the case.


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