• Two ways to make homeopathic remedies
• How to: The procedure spelled out
• Let your strongest home remedy be akin to C30
• Homeopathic remedies that won't cost you much

Two ways to make homeopathic remedies

There may be good money to save.

For your family-care and self-care you may want to get good, cheap homeopathic remedies. Have you thought of preparing some yourself? It is really simple, and making the remedies costs little. Here it is described. One part is just as homeopaths have done it for more than two hundred years. Another part is a shortcut to make it easier. Both of these ways come with no guarantee about how the outcomes may be. It is up to you to find out, wisely and well too.

Are home-made homeopathic preparations cheap?

Yes, they may cost next to nothing, and work just as well as those you buy at pharmacies according to Dr Karin Lenger's research findings - it is the same way of making homeopathic remedies that all homeopaths used before machines were set to produce such remedies.

Are they plain humbug?

Recent research has detected formerly unproved sides to them by magnetic resonance research (Dr Karin Lenger). Besides, there is somewhat unconvincing research that tends toward a belief that homeopathy works for some ailments too. You may have to check for yourself, or try it yourself. Getting good evidence is a good thing. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" in many ways.

Do they work?

That is a good question. Theoretically speaking, the results of a homeopathic attempt at cure can stem from faith in a treatment, coincidence and/or the treatment itself. If the faith does the "trick" and helps persons to lasting or long-lasting improvements and getting well again, well and good.

As for the "tricks" of the homeopathic remedies, the results of sucking them gently for a period of time may depend on many factors that get combined. How well the remedies have been made and how cool remedies have been stored are among them. Then there is the "trick" of choosing the seemingly most apt remedies in a case. It is also a matter of how long you get them, and their dosage. In homeopathic practice and theory there are lots of requirements to be met. And still homeopathy is used for self-help. Medical doctors and homeopaths have written books about how to do it, how to proceed.

Anyway, you are free to try and make homeopathic remedies and see for yourself - or buy some and use them as the source of your own home-made remedies. You may take off from globules and pellets you buy and make them last tens of times longer.

You may produce very cheap home remedies that are as good as machine-produced ones

The "shake them up yourself" method is as old as homeopathy itself, and stems from its founder, Samuel Hahnemann. It is still in use. Hand-shaken homeopathic remedies are advertised for sale in some countries, such as the UK. On this page I show how to make your own remedies fast and quite costless. There should be benefits to that approach.

In some countries, such as the United States, there are tens of millions that have problems with the sky-high prices of pharmacy-produced remedies, health insurances and the like. In many countries homeopathic remedies cost much too. But that can be countered by "home shakers". Read on to see how to make homepathic remedies at minimum costs.

A few years ago a medical student in Moscow wrote me. She was concerned about the homeopathic treatment and the difficulties in getting remedies in Russia. A week ago an immigrant in this country told me how expensive homeopathic remedies are in Norway, where they cost over ten pounds per glass. For a round or cure, at least three such very small glasses or bottles are needed, according to a much used schedule. Hence, there are good reasons to learn about home-made homeopathic preparations - availability and low costs are among them.

I will show you (1) how to produce your own home-made remedies at very little cost; and (2) how to make use of the homeopathic remedy you bought so that it can last very long with very little cost. These things are easy, but not fool-proof.

Samuel Hahnemann and many, many others "diluted and shook" their bottles of ingredients to get homeopathic remedies according to schedules. You are free to do the same, whether you live in Russia or Poland or Jamaica. And such knowledge can become a part of your family tradition, a little thing of fun and delight to because of close contact with nature too. (I found it helps a bit against commercialised alienation too).

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A Combined Remedy

A Bunch of Remedies against Colds and the like

In the case of a beginning common cold or flu, see the remedy mixtures in a Remedy Finder if you want inspiration. I have also designed a remedy blend based on those ingredients. It is designed for common cold, head cold, and influenza, all combined:

1. Dahlia 'Inca'
   
2. Eupatorium purpureum B
   
3. Hamamelis virginiana B
   
4. Mercurius corrosivus (Influenzas)
   
5. Micrococcin
   
6. Natrum hypophosphoricum
   
7. Saxifraga tridactylites
   
8. Stachys byzantina (= S. olympica)
   
9. Viburnum obovatum fruit: Cassioberry.

They may supplement one another. You may be able to buy at least some of the remedies at a well-equipped pharmacy. If they don't have any of them at hand, they could try to get them all, or the ones of your choice, ordering them from a producer. Tip: A tiny glass of Natrum hypophosphoricum D30 could last you and your family for tens of years. Take a look at how - it is explained in detail further down.

Note that if you should want to try any of the remedies I have brought together (above), stay away from toxic doses. Potencies above D6 potency are thought to be safe, but Micrococcin up to the D30 "potency" is not, and it is the same with other so-called nosode remedies. However, if you start using ◦MGA equipment, as I did some 36 years ago, there are no such restrictions, no dangers of toxic poisoning at all.

Simple Things - another Avenue

There are many remedies to "shake up" and try out against a beginning cold apart from pepper, salt, lemon and onion. Find ingredients that can make your tears flow, can make you sneeze, and so on, quite as a beginning cold [or hay fever], and shake them well.

A rule of the thumb for the home-shaker: Homeopathic remedies that have some key symptoms of a common cold, may be tried, if non-toxic. I have tried 2 drops garlic, 2 drops onion, a few drops lemon juice, a few grains of table salt (Natrum chloricum, potassium) with or without iodine added; and some grains of black pepper. Salt, pepper, lemon, and onion - and use garlic if you wish. Further, in books on homeopathic remedies, Materia Medicas, you could read about these ingredients converted into homeopathic remedies, the symptoms that are classified under each. A Materia Medica (survey of homeopathic remedies and what symptoms they are typically used for or against) may tell more of each ingredient. I have often used William Boerickes' Materia Medica. It is claimed to be very helpful among homeopaths.

Let us say you have found your non-poisonous ingredients. It is not unlike cooking and baking, where you gather your ingredients and tools you need to do your work. In fact, several of the much used Bach's Remedies are made by cooking and adding a preservative. There is an estimate that the "potency" you get in this way, is about c8 or so. (It depends on the weather!) So maybe onion soup or broth with salt and pepper could help you a bit too. It is yummy anyway.

Here is the homeopathic way to produce the preparations: a little bottle with a cap, and some boiled, (destilled, rinsed) cold water. The water may be up to 25 centigrades, but preferably lower. The bottle may be anything from ten or twenty ml (milliliter) and a liter. I suggest fifty ml is quite enough, for you are going to dash it against your thigh or hip or on a book repeatedly. To save yourself from toil and bruises while you prepare the homeopathic remedy, a little bottle is best, accordingly. And remember the method is as old as homeopathy itself and still used. See for example: ◦UK handmade remedies for sale and ◦US handmade remedies for sale. Even though the American producer boasts of superior products made by hand, Karin Lenger (above) has detected it does not matter whether a machine or a human has shaken and dilited up the remedy; the results are similar. Hence you may learn how to "shake up" your own remedies without great fear of screwing up things a lot - not a bit.

But the main point here is that you can make some remedies yourself, easily and at very low costs. To take off from remedies you buy, is even easier, and the costs are negligible.

Ingredients - what you need

1. Twenty grains of ground, black pepper. They don't have to be freshly ground.
2. A few (5) grains of table salt.
3. 2 drops of fresh onion juice pressed out of an onion.
4. 3 drops of lemon juice, preferably freshly pressed.
5. A few ground or torn "flakes" of freshly pressed garlic. Press 2-3 drops of juice out of it too.

6. 1/2 or 1 litre of boiled water (distilled water may be bought at pharmacies in some countries, if you want that, and bottled, rinsed water is commonly sold in groceries too)
7. One or two 30 ml bottles for the water will do all right, or something else, provided it is clean and the surface does not contaminate the water..
8. A pair of latex gloves (rubber kitchen gloves) for shaking the bottle - but the gloves can be dispensed with for home use.

Then it is time to prepare the remedy of your choice.

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How to: The procedure spelled out

HERE IS how to work on the ingredients, all of which are homeopathic remedies found in books of homeopathy: If you have only four of the five ingredients in your home, it may work well enough. But don't drop the salt. Pepper is to be there too. But "the more the merrier" up to a point. Set the limit at six ingredients, for example.

Mix your 3-4 ingredients in a bottle (50 ml is good). That is, about 7 drops or so in all, and a few grains of "this and that" from the list, starting from the top of the list and downwards, ordinarily. Add water: Fill half of the bottle with water and shake well. A small bottle (30 ml) will make the boiled water last longer, so that you can make more and higher potencies, if that seems to be fit.

Very much depends on how the bottle is shaken, according to homeopathy. The doctors Andrew Lockie and Nicola Geddes describe it in detail in their book [2000: 20-21]. I'll describe the process I have advocated for people of many countries here:

1ST POTENCY IS MADE: You have mixed the ingredients and added water. Now shake the bottle violently for some time. I recommend a force equal to that of 3 kilograms falling 40 centimetres onto a firm book. That is, you dash the bottle, which you hold in your rubber-gloved hand, to something firm, and do it 30 times.

2ND POTENCY IS MADE: When you have shaken the bottle thirty times with enough force and speed (as specified), empty all of what is in it, but just a few drops. Leave three drops in the bottle, fill up with boiled water again, till the bottle is half full (or half empty). Three drops will do and is plenty. Now, shake again in the same way. When you have done it thirty times, you have come up with the second home potency, your H2 potency (H for "home" or "hand-shaken", just as you please)

3RD POTENCY: Let three drops remain in the bottle. Add water till half full, and shake 30 times again.

4TH POTENCY: When you pour out what's in the third potency bottle but for three drops, and shake the bottle once again as prescribed, you get the forth potency. This combined process of shaking and diluting is called succussion in homeopathy.

5TH POTENCY CAN BE USED AS A "MOTHER BLEND" TO GET MANY FUTURE BOTTLES FROM: I suggest you make a fifth potency too: Empty the 4th potency fluid from the bottle, but for three drops, fill up with water till half full and shake the dilution thirty times as before, just as prescribed. This gives you the fifth potency, which is perfect as a "mother blend" to keep for a long time, after you have tried out your home-made remedies or put faith in "homeopathy cook-books", like Boericke's Materia Medica.

PUT "ASIDE": Your fifth potency bottle is half full. If you want a set of potencies, like pharmacies have and homeopaths use, you may want to pour three drops from your 5th potency bottle into another small bottle (30 ml is enough still), fill the bottle half full with boiled water and shake as before: thirty times with enough force and speed - and then you have a sixth potency to go on with if you please.

The sixth potency does not contain significant amounts of the substances you started with at first, but the homeopaths claim the world over that it does not matter, and that here is a good potency to administer in something acute. Add "maybe" to it yourself.

You can preserve a fifth potency fluid - add some convenient preservative and keep it out of sunlight and heat. From this bottle you can from time to time pour 5-6 drops into another, empty flask of up to 100 to 200 ml - add water or ethanol or something even better, and shake. The "mother bottle" easily produces enough remedies to last you a life-time; at least many years.

6TH POTENCY - THE ONE TO USE: Pour 5 drops from your "mother bottle", that is, the fifth potency bottle with or without added alcohol or some other preservative that is not unhealthy, but safe. You may want to use a 100 ml flask this time, to save some efforts later. Add pure water till half full, shake well (30 times) as prescribed earlier, and there you have your home-opathic flask. When you have used this 6th potency homeopathic preparation, you should wash and rinse before re-using it: 5 drops from the "mother fluidum", add pure water till half full, shake as specificed, and you have your second flask of the "good stuff", or whatever you wish to call it.

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The Highest Potency Recommended for Home-made Preparations is about C30

What you have ended up with, resembles the D6 potency, but it should be even safer, as it contains no particularly harmful ingredients in the first place, and secondly, they have been terribly diluted. In fact, your home-made product has its own potency scale, the H (home-made) scale. It lies between the common D scale and C (X) scales. With the D scale the regulated dilution is 1 : 10. With the C scale the regulated dilution is 1 : 100; which means 1 drop to a hundred added drops of water. That is the proportion.

Now you want to know how to ingest the liquid you have toiled with for maybe a quarter or half an hour the first time - time was added because you were inexperienced. But now you have a "mother fluidum" to last you - say - ten years if you want to. And from it, it may take just a few minutes to make another sixth potency flask the next time - cheap and time-saving.

And you are alerted to that you may make still stronger potencies if you want to. I recommend that your strongest home kit potency is about C30. Leave the higher potencies to experienced folks, as a "golden rule". You may have time to become one too, and good luck with that.

C30 DOSAGES: 12 small (pharmacy-bought) pellets 2 times a day. Or 12 (home-made) drops 2 times a day, morning or night. Keep in mouth for 6 minutes - 15-20 minutes before or after meals or other things one puts or pours into the mouth - just to be on the so-called safe side. That is how to do it according to homeopaths the world over.

Dosages of Daily Intake for C6 Remedies

1. 15 drops 3 times daily may do well. Four times daily may work well too. In the morning, before going to bed - and spaced out in between. For children: half doses. For little children: one third of the doses.
2. Keep the drops in the mouth - under the tongue is said to be best - for 6 minutes.
3. Take the drops 15-20 minutes before taking food or drink - especially hot food and drink - or wait 15-20 minutes after a hot meal before you take them.
4. In acute cases the drops may be taken four or five times. To take them three times a day is good.

The example is an acute case of common cold. You may keep on taking these drops for 5 or 6 days, for example.

Seek to get more rest than usual if you have got a cold and strive to keep it down by these means (and onion soup too).

So now you know the secrets of making your own home-opathic remedies for getting rid of common colds by grabbing some food stuffs and shaking them in a particular way. To the question, "Does it work?" - "Try and see" is the answer.

There is perhaps one more thing you should be made aware of if you apply homeopathic remedies to chronic (long-lasting) troubles. According to homeopathic tradition, a so-called healing reaction may set in bewteen 2 and 7 weeks, give and take. But it may not ever come. At any rate, you may discontinue taking your homeopathic preparations till you feel better enough - let the intake be resumed three days after you feel OK. That is a tip. According to homeopathic tradition, a "healing crisis, distress, reaction" is followed by betterment, which was sought after.

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Homeopathic remedies that won't cost you much

Now comes another secret to make life easy. First buy a tiny glass of the homeopathic remedy you are after. Next dissolve 2-3 pellets (pills) from it in water. You should crush them first, then add clean water. Then shake well for, say, fifty times. And there you have your own remedy made on top of a tiny fraction of what you bought.

To spell out the advantages: One bought glass may serve you in this way, on and on, for years. Otherwise, if you take the pellets "bare", you may have to buy dozens of glasses, each glass costing quite a lot. This is how to save you such expences. To some it matters very much.

At any rate, take off from homeopathic remedies that can be bought at pharmacies or special shops. The way to cut down costs to a fraction is shown to you here, in graphic details

If you are arthritic or feeble, maybe "shaking up" your own home remedy is a bit hard to do. A round of diluting-and-shaking might go well in such cases too. it is up to you, after trying out the home-making process just a bit.

One remedy

Buy one glass of the remedy you are after. Pour a big pellet or 6 small pellets or 3 drops of the homeopathic liquid into a little (50 ml) bottle that is half full of distilled, cold water (or cold, boiled water). Let the pellets dissolve by stirring the bottle gently for a while. You see when they are dissolved. Then shake the half full bottle (a 50 ml bottle is plenty) thirty times with the same force and speed that 5 litres of milk would get if dropped onto some leather-bound bible from 30 cm (a foot) above it: Samuel Hahnemann used to dash his bottles against a bible bound in leather to produce remedies, or, as Lockie writes, he kept "banging it [his bottle] down on a hard surface". Use kitchen rubber gloves (latex) while you do this "dirty work". Ilana Dannheisser and Penny Edwards [1998:18] show how to do it too. It is a traditional prrocedure.

Don't make the glass break.

You can conserve the liquid in the bottle by adding some preservative, like alcohol (ethanol), if you like. Keep it cool otherwise. And keep the rest of the pellets in their glass, keep it cool and dark, and it is ready for the next few pellets the next time you need to prepare a bottle from the pellets in the glass.

Several remedies "concocted" into one blend

If you want to blend four or five of our favourite remedies in one bottle, it is OK, as these are supposed to go well along together, all of them. Also, if your homeopath has prescribed a blend of remedies for you, there should be nothing to worry about, for it is very common practice in some countries to prescribe several remedies together, and the many homeopathic remedies that are called complex remedies, are just mixtures of single remedies.

Pour four small pellets or one big pellet from each of the single remedies into the same bottle. Fill it half full with clean, cool water (distilled water is best), and let the pellets dissolve in the water. Shake as specified (35 times is fine) when they are dissolved. Now you have made a new potency of the remedy you bought. If you bought the remedy Nux vomica D30, you have Nux vomica D31, which is more or less indistinguishable from D30. This means you can safely use it as D30, and without asking anyone for permission to do so.

You may use this method for single remedies you buy or make yourself, for single remedies that you mix yourself, or for a complex remedy. Or you may mix a complex remedy with a few more single remedies, depending on how skilful you are. But take care: It is not often recommended to mix more than 3 or 4 single remedies.

Dosages

Keep the drops in the mouth for 5 minutes.

• H6: 10 drops 3-4 times daily.
• H12: 10 drops 3-4 times.
• H30: 11 drops 2 times, morning and night.

Adjust for the body weight: For each kg (kilogram) above 110 kg, add a drop for grown-ups, i.e., 12 drops 2 times daily for H30. For children, reduce the amount of drops to about the half.

How long

For acute troubles: Take the drops for as long as the trouble(s) last, for example 5 to 7 days.

For chronic (long-lasting) troubles: A fit "round" can be 6-9 weeks, followed by a pause of 10 days or more. Then repeat, either by using a somewhat higher potency of the same remedy (remedies) if they work well for you - from H6 to H12 could be fit, and from there to H30 the next time. Or you can try some other remedy, or blend remedies, old or new ones. There are really many options.

Observe: Don't go further up than H35 (C35) with your home remedies. There are still higher potencies made, and they are said to work deeper into the system (organism) too, and may be applied in chronic cases. But consult an expert for it, and never neglect proper medical diagnosis and treatment first; there are good reasons for it.

If you have become interested in homeopathic self-care by this, books on it exist.

Confirmations

It is OK to doubt these things, and OK to try and see if things work, even if we at present hardly know all mechanisms involved. Dr. James Stephenson's book on homeopathy was a great source of inspiration to me along such avenues as these in the late 70s. At that time I had my own homeopathic mentor, Heilpraktiker who tutored me in ear acupuncture too.

"Kitchen remedies"

A little look in Boericke's Materia Medica (p. 1015-23) tells that these are among the homeopathic remedies:

Anise, Asparagus, Bean, Beet-root, Blackberry, Buckwheat, Cane-sugar, Cashew nut, Cinnamon, Cloves, Cow's milk, Dandelion, Honey with salt, Huckleberries, Lobster, Marigold, Marsh mallow, Mustard, Oats, Onion, Orange, Panax, Parsley, Pepper (black) Pepper (Cayenne), Peppermint, Potato, Pumpkin seed, Red onion, Rhubarb, Sage, Salt, Scotch pine, Sea salt, Skimmed milk, Strawberry, Sugar, Tea, Thyme, Tomato, Walnut, and Yeast.

In a list of homeopathic remedies such common names are often left out, and only Latin names tell of the origin of the homeopathic remedies then.