THE HIVES were so severe that Laura Godsey went to the emergency room twice. But despite her taking large doses of antihistamines, the swelling and welts didn’t improve. With no relief in sight, the San Diego resident turned to an alternative therapy with a storied past: homeopathy.

It was an opportune decision: “The hives were almost entirely gone in a week, which was amazing,” she says. Then Godsey underwent homeopathic treatments for the chronic asthma that had dogged her since childhood. A year later, she was able to discontinue her conventional asthma medications, and even ran in a 5k race. “It was a breeze,” she says.

Proponents of homeopathy believe its remedies can cure or improve many forms of acute and chronic disease, including earaches, colds, flu, allergies, migraines, fibromyalgia, arthritis, depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, and chronic fatigue. And because no two people are exactly the same, homeopathy takes into consideration just about every aspect of a patient. “We really are treating the whole person,” says Amy Rothenberg, N.D., a naturopathic physician and specialist in classical homeopathy in Enfield, Conn. “In my eyes, it’s a very elegant way of practicing.”

the homeo path

THE CONCEPT behind homeopathy was first recorded by Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C., but the practice as we know it is traced to Samuel Hahnemann, an 18th-century German physician who disdained the medical procedures of his day–which included bloodletting, blistering, and toxic overdoses. Intrigued by another doctor’s successful treatment of malaria with quinine, Hahnemann found that quinine itself produces signs of malaria. After further research, he theorized that dilutions of natural substances causing symptoms of illness in a healthy person could cure those same symptoms in an ill person.

Particular remedies, Hahnemann came to believe, could be matched to different symptom patterns to stimulate the body’s natural healing response. He called this principle similia similibus curentur (”like is healed by like”), and modern homeopaths still adhere to it. Another tenet of homeopathy is that any symptoms must be analyzed in the context of the entire person and the totality of his or her systems.