[ Dr Tongku Rukbo ]
Homoeopathy is a system of medicine created in the year 1796 by Dr Samuel Hahnemann, who also coined the term ‘Allopathy’. Homoeopathy uses pharmaceutically prepared natural plant, mineral and animal substances to help stimulate a person’s defence system and thus helps to maintain good health.
The word ‘Homoeopathy’ is a Greek derivation where ‘homoeos’ means ‘similar’ and ‘pathos’ means ‘suffering’. So homoeopathy may be defined as a curative method of symptom similarity. It is based on his doctrine of ‘like cures like’, which was also mentioned by Hippocrates (also known as the Father of Medicine). It means that a particular substance can cure a disease in an ill person, if that same substance produces similar symptoms of illness in a healthy person.
What constitutes a human being? Is it simply a combination of material units like muscles, blood, skeleton, nerves, organs as well as the mind? If so, in this modern period the modern biochemists know the composition of each and every components of a cell. Are they capable of synthesizing a living cell by combining those chemical ingredients in the laboratory? No, they can’t. Beyond its material existence, there is something super-sensual which cannot be perceived by the senses. Just like if a person sees some offensive things they feel like vomiting. But did that thing touch or had any physical contact with that person? No, it is something that we cannot see but feel the existence of when it acts through the material body by expressing different manifestations of life.
So, life is to be considered as being composed of three parts – body, mind and spirit. This is the trinity of life. The body and tissues are not life, but they are channels through which life functions. It is this super-sensual thing which maintains the body in living condition. This makes all the difference between the living and death.
This thing, according to Hahnemann, the Father of Homoeopathy, is treated as the ‘vital principle’. In healthy condition, it is this vital principle which maintains normal functions and sensations of the organism. But when this vital principle is primarily dynamically deranged by some unhealthy dynamic influence, it causes abnormal sensations and functions which are manifested outwardly through the material body as abnormal signs and symptoms, the totality of which constitutes the disease. In short, disease may be defined as a dynamic derangement of the vitality of the whole organism expressed first in the sphere of sensations (feeling of illness and various unpleasant sensations), then in the sphere of functions (various functional disorders), then in the sphere of material constituents (fluids, cells, tissues and organs of the body).
If a cure is to be established, it is the vital principle that must be aroused from its deviated state to a balanced state, so that it can further go on by itself for recovery, thereby restoring the immune system back to normal to do its job.