Transcript:
Hi I’m Alastair Hay and I help people get well and I help people stay well using homeopathic medicines and I'm known as homeopathical. Mostly what I do is home visits and I cover Kent, Surrey, London, The South Coast and basically I spend a lot of time driving around in my car seeing my clients.
What I'd like to tell you about today or share with you is some of things that people don't know about homeopathy. One of those things is that homeopathic medicines are tested on people before we know whether it becomes a medicine or is capable of helping people get better or not. How that's done is called a ‘proving’. Now, it's called a proving not actually because we're trying to prove something, well, I suppose we are in some respects but actually it derives from the German verb ‘prüfung’ which means examination or trial, like a clinical trial, so it is the homeopathic equivalent of a clinical trial. Why on earth it's German is actually the founder of homeopathy was a chap called ‘Samuel Hahnemann’ and he was German. Homeopathy was founded about 220 or so years ago so it's not been going a huge amount of time but nonetheless it still persists in medicine today.
Now, this idea of a proving… What happens is that the medicine or substance as it is at this point, goes through the clinical trial. What we take is about 30 people who are volunteers, obviously knowing they're going to be taking part in a homeopathic clinical trial but they don't know what they're going to be taking, they don't know whether that is going to be a placebo in fact, or the medicine itself. What happens is they are assigned medicine or placebo usually in something called a 30C potency. C is derived from the Roman numeral C for 100 and has gone through the process of taking the original substance shaking it and diluting it one in a hundred, thirty times. So if something's been shaken and diluted 30 times, at that point a biochemist would say, “You know there's nothing in it don't you?” This is interesting because actually we take a case history of someone before they've taken the medicine and use that as a baseline. Someone would then take either the medicine or the placebo and take that probably the best part of a month and the information that they get from that will then be reported in and ultimately going into something called a ‘materia medica’ and a ‘repertory’. Those are a bit like a dictionary of homeopathic medicines and a full symptom picture of the person that's going to benefit from that medicine. The information that you can get can be information on how someone feels, how it affects someone's emotions, how it might affect their skin, their digestive system, even someone's dreams. What that's got to do with homeopathy in a sense, is that you've got that homeopathy literally means ‘similar suffering’ so you're giving something to someone, that’s like a mirror-image of their symptoms back at them so the body doesn't need to make that anymore.
You have to understand that we consider symptoms to be something that our body’s actually made rather than symptoms happening to us. So, for instance if you get a fever, fever isn't actually something that happens to you, it's actually your body's reaction to what's going on, yeah? So we want to give something that says to your body “I don't need to make this fever anymore… I need to…” because there are people that can be exposed to other viruses and bacteria the same as you and not get a fever. The body is still dealing with it but not having to produce a fever. So that's what homeopathy is doing, working to strengthen you so you don't make those symptoms anymore. But you might have exactly the same virus as someone else and get completely different symptoms and homeopathy focuses on that individuality.
One of the things that got me into homeopathy is actually the fact that there is this homeopathic clinical trial, there is this science to homeopathy and bearing in mind that we don't know who's taken placebo, we don't know who's taken the substance and it produced symptoms on them, better still the people who took this medicine don't actually converse with each other and they produce similar symptoms. I find that amazing!
So, If you see ill people today, think of Alastair Hay, thank you.
Hi I’m Alastair Hay and I help people get well and I help people stay well using homeopathic medicines and I'm known as homeopathical. Mostly what I do is home visits and I cover Kent, Surrey, London, The South Coast and basically I spend a lot of time driving around in my car seeing my clients.
What I'd like to tell you about today or share with you is some of things that people don't know about homeopathy. One of those things is that homeopathic medicines are tested on people before we know whether it becomes a medicine or is capable of helping people get better or not. How that's done is called a ‘proving’. Now, it's called a proving not actually because we're trying to prove something, well, I suppose we are in some respects but actually it derives from the German verb ‘prüfung’ which means examination or trial, like a clinical trial, so it is the homeopathic equivalent of a clinical trial. Why on earth it's German is actually the founder of homeopathy was a chap called ‘Samuel Hahnemann’ and he was German. Homeopathy was founded about 220 or so years ago so it's not been going a huge amount of time but nonetheless it still persists in medicine today.
Now, this idea of a proving… What happens is that the medicine or substance as it is at this point, goes through the clinical trial. What we take is about 30 people who are volunteers, obviously knowing they're going to be taking part in a homeopathic clinical trial but they don't know what they're going to be taking, they don't know whether that is going to be a placebo in fact, or the medicine itself. What happens is they are assigned medicine or placebo usually in something called a 30C potency. C is derived from the Roman numeral C for 100 and has gone through the process of taking the original substance shaking it and diluting it one in a hundred, thirty times. So if something's been shaken and diluted 30 times, at that point a biochemist would say, “You know there's nothing in it don't you?” This is interesting because actually we take a case history of someone before they've taken the medicine and use that as a baseline. Someone would then take either the medicine or the placebo and take that probably the best part of a month and the information that they get from that will then be reported in and ultimately going into something called a ‘materia medica’ and a ‘repertory’. Those are a bit like a dictionary of homeopathic medicines and a full symptom picture of the person that's going to benefit from that medicine. The information that you can get can be information on how someone feels, how it affects someone's emotions, how it might affect their skin, their digestive system, even someone's dreams. What that's got to do with homeopathy in a sense, is that you've got that homeopathy literally means ‘similar suffering’ so you're giving something to someone, that’s like a mirror-image of their symptoms back at them so the body doesn't need to make that anymore.
You have to understand that we consider symptoms to be something that our body’s actually made rather than symptoms happening to us. So, for instance if you get a fever, fever isn't actually something that happens to you, it's actually your body's reaction to what's going on, yeah? So we want to give something that says to your body “I don't need to make this fever anymore… I need to…” because there are people that can be exposed to other viruses and bacteria the same as you and not get a fever. The body is still dealing with it but not having to produce a fever. So that's what homeopathy is doing, working to strengthen you so you don't make those symptoms anymore. But you might have exactly the same virus as someone else and get completely different symptoms and homeopathy focuses on that individuality.
One of the things that got me into homeopathy is actually the fact that there is this homeopathic clinical trial, there is this science to homeopathy and bearing in mind that we don't know who's taken placebo, we don't know who's taken the substance and it produced symptoms on them, better still the people who took this medicine don't actually converse with each other and they produce similar symptoms. I find that amazing!
So, If you see ill people today, think of Alastair Hay, thank you.
RSS Feed
