The essence of homeopathy is that the body contains its own healing properties and defence mechanisms which can be activated to treat illness. It rejects the modern day view that a disease underlies the symptoms or that the disease is the symptom. Instead homeopathy takes the view that the symptoms are the body's effort to eliminate the disease. Fever, for example, is increasingly being recognised as the body's attempt to try to heal itself. Suppressing the fever by taking aspirin is thus counterproductive.
Symptoms are therefore very important in homeopathic medicine.
Homeopathic doctors will look in detail at all the patients symptoms no matter how small before making a diagnosis. These symptoms will be both mental and physical as homeopathy does not distinguish between the mental and physical being, but focuses on the person as a whole. The law of similars refers to the previously discussed theory of treating like with like. A practitioner seeks to find a substance which would cause similar symptoms to those a sick person is experiencing. When the match is made, that substance then is given in very small, safe doses, often with dramatic effects.