Gerasimos Stouraitis
Founder of the Hippocratic Centre of Classical Homeopathy.
President of the Association of Greek Homeopaths
Member of the Society of Greek Writers
Graduate Engineer (Dipl.-Ing)
The year 1796 was the year homeopathy was born, through Samuel Hahnemann, who was one of the seven most important chemists of his time. His formulation “similia similibus curentur” (like cures like) had also been formulated in Greek antiquity by Hippocrates, “ὅμοια ὁμοίοις εἰσὶν ἰάματα”, which means that for every disease the right remedy is only the one that, in a nominally healthy person, causes a state similar to the state of the disease.
But the whole edifice of this therapeutic method, down to its last detail, is owed to Hahnemann.
The Swiss nuclear physicist Heitler writes at the end of his first book: “If we want to reach life, we must knock at the door of another domain.”
This is exactly what Hahnemann did with his teaching, which embraces the whole of the human being, and it is exactly this whole that it tries to heal. It goes without saying that psycho-mental states, such as anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy and so on, and even the various desires, dietary and other, express the state of Being of a particular person. This state of Being is a dynamic state that cannot remain static. So it is a matter of time before it is expressed outwardly, that is, before it is somatised, and then the various physical symptoms appear too.
This state, which expresses the objective truth of the person, gives us the answer to the question of which method should be followed in order to heal the disorder. And that is the dynamic method, healing from the inside out, the therapeutic method of homeopathy, whose remedies have no side effects whatsoever on patients.
So in homeopathy the concepts of health, disease and therapy are understood as processes taking place in a dynamic field:
- Health as the all-embracing balance of the human being,
- Disease as an imbalance of the vital force,
- Therapy as a return to the harmony of the person himself, but also with everything else in which he lives, moves and exists.
The World Health Organization gives the following definition of health:
“Health is physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of complaints or disease.”
For us in homeopathy, health, as a state of life, means eurhythmy, harmony with everything, and both organic and mental balance.
This idea must have become an inner experience of every true student of homeopathy and be present in all his reasoning.
Consequently, disease is another state of life. Real disease, which changes a person completely, which alienates him from his environment and turns him against it, is an equally natural and equally all-embracing state of life as the normal one. This state of life, which is called disease, is evidently nature’s perceptible effort to restore the normal state.
It is precisely this effort that produces a series of symptoms or phenomena with whose help our nature seeks to return to the state of health.
After what has been said, it is easy to understand that in homeopathy there are no diseases, only sick people! In homeopathy a medicine will never be given because of the name (that is, the diagnosis) of a particular disease. What matters is the person, the particular patient!
It therefore becomes clear that homeopathy understands health and disease as a dynamic reality. So when one understands life (that is, health but also disease) as a dynamic reality, one realises that therapy too must be placed and applied on the same level, that is, on the level of the effort to restore balance, which is health.
In closing, we can conclude that homeopathy is an independent therapeutic method; it has its own foundations and educational criteria, as well as its own criteria of competence and professionalism.
