Homeopathy was refined 200 years ago by Dr Samuel Hahnemann in Germany, at a time when blood letting and purging were prevalent. He became disillusioned with medicine and gave up being a doctor. While translating a medical text, he was sceptical about the information on Cinchona bark (the source of quinine) as a treatment for malaria and decided to take some himself. What he noticed was that it gave him a chill, a fever and shivering – the very symptoms of malaria. This discovery was crucial to homeopathy, although Hippocrates two thousand years earlier had realised there were two ways of treating ill health - the way of opposites and the way of similars.

Hahnemann went on to experiment with other substances and later also discovered another principle of homeopathy - that if remedies were potentised, that is, diluted and sucussed, not only were side effects reduced but remedies were more effective.

Where this system of medicine also differs from conventional medicine is that it recognises that symptoms of ill health are expressions of disharmony within the whole person, and that it is the patient as an individual who needs treatment rather than the disease itself. When having conventional treatment, you see a dermatologist for your eczema, a neurologist for your epilepsy and a psychiatrist for your depression. In classical homeopathy, we see these symptoms as reflections of a central imbalance, and if that is treated, the other symptoms will disappear. It treats the problems at its roots, removing the cause of your illness as well as the symptoms, and restoring balance.