Before I moved to Mexico I had never heard of homeopathy, an approach to medicine developed by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann in 1796.
After living here only a few months I found that every time I had a cold someone would say:” You are getting a gripa? You should take Aconitum,” or “That bruise will feel a lot better if you take Arnica,” and then they would hand me a bottle of little sugar pills soaked in alcohol, popularly known as chochos.
So I learned that my friends, relatives and neighbors claimed they could cure anything from a stomach ache to a bone spur (I kid you not) with homeo pathy –everyone except people with a medical degree. They, on the contrary, thought the whole thing was hilarious: “Homeopathic Aconitum napellus is made by putting one drop of extract of highly toxic wolfsbane (matalobos) into a liter of potable alcohol and agitating the bottle vigorously. Then the homeopath takes one drop from that bottle and puts it into another liter of alcohol and shakes that up and so on ... ha ha ha, how could it possibly work?”
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