A practitioner asks: “Can you address homeopathy, its effectiveness, and how it works energetically?”

This is a modality with a rich history and many adherents, many proponents, and much literature and lore about the potential values of the approach for healing. This is based on the principle of the ability of the body to retain a memory of what it is exposed to that is viewed as being a stimulus of some kind, either because the body is exposed to high concentrations or the material in question is particularly noxious in some way, viewed as being "foreign," that is to say, "non-self," and might trigger an immune response. So the idea is to use a kind of treatment with something representing a component of the difficulty associated with illness or an infirmity in order to trigger the body memory to mount defenses, much like one would decrease an inappropriate immune response to an allergen through a process of desensitization. By slowly exposing the individual to higher and higher concentrations of an offending substance the person is allergic to, it will train the body over time to reclassify that material as being a normal part of things and the immune system will be increasingly constrained and eventually will not react at all to the substance. The idea of homeopathy is somewhat like that in the mechanistic action, but more the opposite, that it takes something of a physical or chemical nature that resembles a key player in a physiologic response, or represents an aberrant change within the body that would be seen as "pathological" to a scientist and introduce from the outside a portion of that troubling material. And this creates an interplay with the body via consciousness present within the substances themselves so that the chemical effects are registered with the conscious awareness of the body at a cellular level to the nature of the stimulus. And this produces a kind of training where the body can use that stimulus to create a memory of what it represents and then echo that on its own with an amplification, in order to provide a counterpart or a counteracting response in some way. And in this fashion, be used to either create changes in the body that are more favorable that are being blocked or inhibited by an infirmity of some kind, a malady producing symptoms, or to add back something that is desirable to have but has been depleted. And so this is providing a cue to the body that more is needed and will trigger a response by the body itself to produce its own ramping up of capability and a source of what might be needed that has therapeutic value. This strategy works better in some circumstances than others and it can also be quite specific to the individual, so not all persons suffering from the same condition will benefit from a homeopathic stimulus designed to help that malady. This is only in part a problem of precise diagnosis or identification of the primary cause underway for the condition. It is also the case that humans will vary in the way in which their body will manifest symptoms of a disorder, so all in the diagnosed group may have identical symptoms and pathologic changes but yet will vary greatly in their response to homeopathic remedies where some will see an effective resolution but other subjects will be refractory to treatment in this way, and that is a complex phenomenon and discussion that needs to wait for another time. But the consequence of this state of affairs is that homeopathy is a relatively minor player, and for this reason: that it is so variable, and it may work for a time and then lose its effectiveness as well. Its claim to fame, such as it is, has been the instances for treatment of something where a homeopathic remedy can cause a shift in what takes place within the body for a long enough interval to tip the balance towards a resetting of the homeostatic setpoints that will bring a person back into the normal range in the way their body is functioning, and this will resolve ongoing symptoms. In many instances, that might not occur for a sufficient length of time and then will be considered a failure, so it is a question of the variables involved as to whether any particular individual will benefit, because many will not and this has always kept the modality under a cloud, but that is not undeserved. If it were uniformly robust, it would have been championed further and would be widely in use today because this was looked at intensively again and again and again during much of the more Modern Era, where people sought remedies actively with the resources to do some chemical refinements of natural products, plant and animal sources of potential bioactive molecules, and so on. The other drawback is the very, very wide series of substances already claimed to have medicinal value that are largely unsubstantiated convincingly, and this creates quite a challenge for the would-be practitioner to even make sense of what is being recommended and why, and what it might actually consist of, because records vary with respect to accuracy, and the standards for evaluation have been so highly variable that the anecdotal reports that have served heretofore in supporting various homeopathic remedies are still poorly catalogued and highly unreliable. So those things that can work are lost amid a sea of many with little value and this detracts from the perceived worthiness of the approach, so it is an open question to what degree enough careful and effective, planful, clinical research will be done to help refine this approach and identify those things with greatest promise.