Two thousand years ago Hippocrates said that one can be treated by “the opposite” as well as by “the similar”. 200 years ago German doctor S. Hahnemann during 40 years of his successful practice developed and described the basic laws of homeopathy which we use today as they were. The fundamental law of homeopathy is based upon the idea that “like cures like”. What does it mean? The genius of Hahnemann is that he was the first who came to believe (and all 200 years of his students’ practice proved his point of view) that, if a substance in a material toxic dose causes a symptom in a healthy person, by giving to a person, whose symptoms are analogous to those of poisoning, a very small amount of the same substance may cure the illness. Then Hahnemann and his students began to record all existing symptoms’ descriptions of an accidental poisoning. Substances, which toxic effect could not be found, would test on volunteers in toxic doses. All symptoms found were carefully collected and enlarged by the following practicing homeopaths. As a result, guides were written with the help of which homeopaths perceive its medicine. In conventional (allopathic) medicine they teach that if there is a high temperature or such-and-such blood so this is pneumonia, and if it is pneumonia then any patient should be prescribed one and the same standard of treatment, in other words in allopathy a disease is treated. Homeopathy teaches in a different way. For example, if a certain patient running a temperature feels feverish from infrascapular region, skin integuments turn blue, he puts away the blanket in spite of the shiver, refuses to drink, asks to open the windows, cough increases while moving head too far back and while talking, he feels better when he lies on his left side,- so his constitutional remedy is lachesis. It will cure the patient even if the primary care physicians will argue what diagnosis to make: pneumonia or pleuritis, or neuralgia plus tracheitis, or myocarditis. A lot of examinations will be prescribed, as any of these diagnoses requires its standard of treatment.
In homeopathy we treat a patient, not a disease. The most remarkable thing is that if the same patient has a headache next time, it will be frontal headache or in the left temple and it will occur at night or in the morning, following by the nosebleed. It does not matter what diagnosis will be made by the allopaths: pressure build-up, neuralgia or migraine. For a patient with the constitutional type “lachesis” any disease state has its certain symptoms, which had been described while testing the envenomation (lachesis), and this remedy will help this person in any painful conditions, as a person is ill with one and the same illness all through his life.
Thus, for the correct prescription of a remedy, a homeopath should know what symptoms your disease has now and what symptoms had before. It is very essential for us, which pattern, let us say, your pneumonia followed 10 years ago and what course are taking your “flushes” now , because for the homeopath now and before you have had one and the same illness. Simply your illness now and before has been on different stages of progress and occurred with different symptoms, but the homeopath then (with pneumonia) and now (with the “flushes”) prescribes one and the same remedy, called like Your constitutional remedy.