C4C marks World Homeopathic Week

C4C Homeopathic Hospital, with branches in seven regions of the country, has marked the World Homeopathic Week with an educational programme on the efficacy of homeopathic treatment in Ghana.

Dr Michael Kojo Kyeremateng, Medical Director of the C4C Homeopathic Hospital and the President of the C4C Group of Companies, who led his team during the educational programme, also shared the history of homeopathic treatment.

The day, celebrated worldwide on April 10, is used to commemorate the birth anniversary of the founder and father of homoeopathy, Dr Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, who was a great scholar, linguist and acclaimed scientist.

Dr Kyeremateng said Dr Hahnemann, born on April 10, 1755 in Meissen to a porcelain painter in Germany, died on July 2, 1843 in Paris at the age of 88, and is entombed in a mausoleum at Paris’s Père La Chaise Cemetery.

“Homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine created in 1796 by Dr Samuel Hahnemann, based on his doctrine of ‘like cures like,’ a claim that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people,” he disclosed.

Sharing some facts about homeopathic treatment on Dr Hahnemann’s 261st birth anniversary, Dr Kyeremanteng explained that homoeopathy is the practice of medicine that embraces a holistic, natural approach to the treatment of the sick. “It treats the person as a whole, rather than focusing on a diseased part or a labeled sickness,” he stated.

He explained that the term ‘homeopathy’ was coined by Hahnemann and it first appeared in print in 1807.

“Homeopathy achieved its greatest popularity in the 19th century. It was introduced to the United States in 1825 by Hans Birch Gram, a student of Hahnemann,” he added.

Dr Keremanteng said homeopathy uses animal, plant, mineral and synthetic substances in its preparations, adding that currently, homoeopathy is practised in more than 80 countries in different forms.

The government has established a Traditional and Alternative Medicine Directorate (TAMD) to give focused attention for the growth and development of traditional and alternative medicine treatment in Ghana, which includes homoeopathy.

“Homeopathic remedies are regulated as medications under the Food and Drug Act (FDA),” Dr Keremanteng disclosed.