HANP
The Homeopathic Academy of Naturopathic Physicians (HANP) is a specialty organization within the naturopathic medical profession. We are affiliated with the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP). The HANP is a nonprofit organization with no owners or stockholders. It relies on the volunteer work of the HANP Board, student representatives, and focus group volunteers.
Our mission is to promote excellence in the practice of homeopathy among naturopathic physicians. We establish and uphold specialist standards, provide education and mentorship, and are committed to protect and preserve homeopathy as a core therapeutic modality within the naturopathic profession.
HANP Activities Include:
- Encouraging the development and improvement of homeopathic curriculum at naturopathic colleges.
- Distributing our published Simillimum~ a peer-reviewed annual journal of homeopathic practice.
- Offering homeopathic continuing education.
- Providing board certification in classical homeopathy to naturopathic physicians.
- Working with other homeopathic organizations towards the advancement of the homeopathic profession.
The History of HANP
The Homeopathic Academy of Naturopathic Physicians (HANP) formed from a nucleus of dedicated practitioners who sought homeopathic education from one of the few naturopathic schools available in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the National College of Naturopathic Medicine. President Durr Elmore, ND:
The HANP was originally started in 1982 by several naturopaths who felt the need for a specialty organization in homeopathy.
And, once the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP) was formed in 1985, the HANP became one of their first affiliates, which positioned the HANP as a specialty organization within the naturopathic profession. In April 1987, the first annual HANP case conference was held in Portland, Oregon, USA. During that conference, the HANP’s Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation were adopted and a Board of Directors was elected. Doctors’ Elmore, Traub, Albin, Messer, and Herscu were the first board members. Paul Herscu, ND, as Vice President, was the first editor of Transactions, that later evolved into Simillimum.
One of the missions of the HANP was to certify licensed naturopaths in the use of classical homeopathy. The Homeopathic Board Certification Exam (HBCE) that the HANP administered was created by a committee made up of Doctors’ Lamb, Messer, and Traub. Forty-six naturopathic doctors took the test in September, 1988, and twenty seven of them passed to become board certified Diplomates of the HANP (DHANP). Dr. Paul Mittman became editor of Simillimum, and Dr. Durr Elmore followed him in July 1989.
In the early to mid-1990s, Christa Louise became the first official Executive Director. Then, in the mid-1990s, under the leadership of Executive Director, Susan Wolfer, and Presidents, Doctors’ Steve Messer and Bruce Dickson, the HANP reached its zenith with around 1100 Simillimum subscribers and case conference attendees. Dr. Brent Mathieu was recruited, circa 1998, to prepare and administer the HBCE and joined the board in 1999. Dr. Mathieu became President in the early 2000s, then later turned Executive Director.
As more homeopathic continuing education venues became available and travel expense increased after the tragedies of September 2001, HANP case conference attendance declined and resulted in the HANP putting on their last case conference in Vancouver, British Columbia in October 2003. At this time, Dr. Neil Tessler was President. Also around this time, prominent DHANPs began their own programs, conferences, and journals. And, by the mid-2000’s, new approaches to homeopathy started to be studied and taught, which, for anyone familiar with the history of homeopathy can attest, caused discord within the homeopathic community. DHANP’s and other homeopaths divided in their definition of classical homeopathy—something still present in the homeopathic profession to this very day.
Healing this divide has become a goal of the HANP in addition to moving forward with the trends of the time. The HANP has adapted to these evolutionary changes, and despite these shifts, a basic question and principle still guides us: How do we continue vitalistic medicine within both naturopathy and homeopathy? In other words: How do we act in harmony with the healing power of Nature and help to restore holism and vitality to our patients?
Today, the HANP is a community organization made up of motivated individuals within the homeopathic profession who want to shape our profession in positive ways while supporting and connecting the existing infrastructure. The HANP provides a forum for practitioners to communicate, learn, and influence the field of homeopathy. “What is vitally important is our continual learning-studying-communicating, sharing our knowledge, and becoming better homeopaths. This is the purpose of the HANP.” Durr Elmore, Simillimum, October 1989.
HOMEOPATHY
Homœopathy¹‚² is a medical therapy based on the reproducible observation that a disease may be healed by a substance that produces similar effects in healthy individuals³ (Organon, §24). This observation, known as the law of similars (Similia Similibus Curantur), was developed into a therapeutic system by Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843). A homœopath attempts to prescribe a medicine that has been shown through carefully conducted trials to produce similar effects to those of the patient’s illness – the more similar, the more effective the result (Organon, §25).
¹ Greek: όμοιον [omoion, similar] + πάθος [pathos, suffering].
² Genuine, orthodox Homœopathy is practiced in strict accordance with the method described by Hahnemann in the Organon of Medicine, Chronic Diseases, and Lesser Writings and is void of all speculative reasoning (Organon, §6). Homœopathy proper differs from modern techniques, which incorrectly call themselves Homœopathy, yet prescribe mixtures of more than one medication at a time (polypharmacy) and/or utilize speculative theories, such as the doctrine of signatures (as well as other a priori speculations about substance effects based upon smell, taste, appearance, chemical analysis, or the faculty of imagination) in order to select a medicinal substance (Organon, §110).
³ Carefully conducted trials are termed “provings” in the historical homœopathic literature.
Proving is an English transliteration of the German term that Hahnemann used, Prüfung.*
*Hahnemann, S. The Medicine of Experience (1805), Lesser Writings, pp. 452-453.
“Many of the most active medicines have already occasionally found their way into the human body, and the accidents they have given rise to have been recorded.2
In order to follow still farther this natural guide and to penetrate more profoundly into this source of knowledge, we administer these medicines experimentally, the weaker as well as the stronger, each singly and uncombined, to healthy individuals, with caution, and carefully removing all accessory circumstances capable of exercising an influence, we note down the symptoms they occasion precisely in the order in which they occur, and thus we obtain the pure result of the form of disease that each of these medicinal substances is capable of producing, absolutely and by itself, in the human body.³
² If we compare the occasional happy cures effected by these medicines, the most prejudiced person must be struck with the extraordinary resemblance that exists between the symptoms caused by the medicines on the healthy body, and those whereby the disease it cures is characterized.
³ In order to ascertain the effects of less powerful medicines in this manner, we must give only one pretty strong dose to the temperate healthy person who is the subject of the experiment, and it is best to give it in solution. If we wish to ascertain the remaining symptoms, which were not revealed by the first trial, we may give to another person, or to the same individual, but only then after the lapse of several days, when the action of the first dose is fully over, a similar or even stronger portion, and note the symptoms of irritation thence resulting in the same careful and skeptical manner. For medicines that are still weaker we require, in addition to a considerable dose, individuals that are, it is true, healthy, but of very irritable delicate constitutions. The more obvious and striking symptoms must be recorded in the list, those that are of a dubious character should be marked with the sign of dubiety, until they have frequently been confirmed.
In the investigation of these medicinal symptoms, all suggestions must be as carefully avoided, as has been recommended for the investigation of the symptoms of disease. It must be chiefly the mere voluntary relation of the person who is the subject of the experiment, nothing like guess-work, nothing obtained by dint of cross questioning, that should be noted down as truth, and still less, expressions of sensations that have previously been put in the experimenter’s mouth.
But how, even in diseases, amid the symptoms of the original disease, the medicinal symptoms may be discovered, is the subject for the exercise of a higher order of inductive minds, and must be left to masters only in the art of observation.”
Adapted from Homœopathy definition by George Dimitriadis, “Homœopathy in fact, defence against fallacious attack, and definition” and Jamie Oskin, ND, “Polarity Analysis: A Critical Examination,” (AJHM, Winter 2014).