Alternative Medicines Growing in Canada

Every year, more of our Canadian friends in the north embrace alternative medicines such as homeopathy, an interesting and controversial two hundred-year-old system of medicine. In fact, its adherents swear by its unconventional focus on treating symptoms rather than diseases and reliance on all-natural remedies, taking its claims to heal everything from sores to colds as a matter of faith.

What is homeopathy?
Homeopathy is a system of treatment based on a theory of healing called The Law of Similars. In a nutshell, the law says that a condition with a given set of symptoms can be cured by a medicine that is known to produce a similar set of symptoms; for example, a homeopath might prescribe coffea cruda (unroasted coffee) for sleeplessness and allium cepa (red onion) for watery eyes caused by allergies.

"It's a law of physics," says Verspoor. "If you have two similar waves of energy coming at each other, the two cancel each other out." Dr. Heather Boon, an associate professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, doesn't recommend homeopathy but says that from a scientific point of view, physicists won't dismiss its theories as entirely impossible. They are familiar with other cases of matter and energy interacting in ways that are sometimes counter intuitive. "More research is needed," stresses Boon. Verspoor admits that the theory that disease is energy, and that there are energy signatures in homeopathic remedies, is "complete nonsense" when judged by current medical and scientific knowledge.