The sixteenth-century philosopher and physician, Paracelsus is quoted as saying, "Those who merely study and treat the effects of disease are like those who imagine that they can drive away the winter by brushing the snow from the door. It is not the snow that causes winter, but the winter that causes the snow." This illustrates one of the basic therapeutic principles in homeopathy that recognizes all symptoms of illness are merely expressions of imbalance and disharmony within the whole person, and that it is the patient who needs treatment, not the disease.

Homeopaths have observed for the past two centuries that unless the entire person is healed, the symptoms that are driven away by medications will reoccur as the same or similar condition. You may also witness a decline of health as symptoms are suppressed by ongoing medications.

Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, chemist, linguist, and historian of medicine, discovered a different systematic approach to medicine in the late 1700s that would become homeopathy. He was dissatisfied with the state of medical practice and thought that the methods he was taught did more harm than good. In Organon of the Medical Art (Hahnemann 1996), he writes about the current state of medical treatments. "This is a very faulty, much symptomatic treatment wherein only a single symptom, thus only a small part of the whole, is one-sidedly provided for." He continues to describe the quick, but temporary treatment of persistent diseases during his era. "Frequently reoccurring pains of all sorts were suppressed for a short time with feeling-benumbing opium, then they always came back heightened, often intolerably heightened or other far-worse maladies came in their place."

Organon of the Medical Art, written by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, was first published in 1810. The sixth and final edition was completed in 1842, the year before he died. The book was written for the general public, not just medical professionals. His work documents the evolution of his thoughts on the nature of disease and healing.