NVP USA

LMHI Member Associations in the United States

• American Institute of Homeopathy (full member): homeopathyusa.org

A Welcome from the National Vice President

The history of homeopathy in the United States is a history of freedom and foundation. American physicians built some of the strongest institutions homeopathy has ever had, and then watched them weaken from within when the profession opened its doors without holding its standard. That lesson belongs to every country, and it shapes how the United States contributes to the work of the LMHI today.

Status of Homeopathy

Homeopathy has long legal standing in the United States, but there is no single national license to practice it. The states regulate who may practice, and the federal government regulates homeopathic medicines.

Who may practice. Any licensed physicians or health care provider who has legal prescriptive authority may practice homeopathy (MD, DO, DDS, DMV, ND, NP, PA).  Some providers including Naturopathic Doctors, Naturopathic Physicians and Physician Assistants may prescribe homeopathic medicines within their scope in the states that license them.  In a few select states there is a license of homeopathy that people may qualify for.  That qualification is based on homeopathic training and not medical training, meaning people with these licenses may have no medical training.  

Homeopathic medicines. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 recognizes the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States (HPUS) as an official drug compendium, and homeopathic medicines are regulated as drugs. The HPUS is published by the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia Convention of the United States. In December 2022 the FDA issued final guidance, Drug Products Labeled as Homeopathic, which sets out a risk-based approach to enforcement for products marketed without FDA approval. Since 2016 the Federal Trade Commission has held health claims for over-the-counter homeopathic products to the same evidence standard as other health products.

The definition gap. No federal or state law defines homeopathy as a practice. The 2026 consensus definition adopted by the major American homeopathic organizations is the profession's own answer to that gap.

Education

Homeopathic education in the United States follows the practitioner's license, with board certification as the highest level of recognition.

Naturopathic medical schools. Four-year naturopathic medical programs accredited by the Council on Naturopathic Medical Education teach homeopathy as part of the core curriculum. These include Bastyr University, National University of Natural Medicine, Sonoran University of Health Sciences, and National University of Health Sciences.

Postgraduate training for licensed providers. MDs, DOs, NDs, and other licensed providers train through multi-year postgraduate programs, such as those offered by the Academy of Homeopathy Education, and through AIH and HANP conferences, case conferences, and webinars.

Credentials

The DABHM is the highest credential a licensed homeopathic physician can hold in the United States. It requires documented clinical cases and demonstrated mastery of Hahnemannian prescribing.

Organizations

The American Institute of Homeopathy is the full LMHI member for the United States. Below you will also find the other national organizations, who they serve and their role.  

Past LMHI Congresses in the United States

The United States has hosted the LMHI World Congress four times (LMHI congress record).

The 2027 LMHI Congress will be held in Canada, returning the congress to North America.

Where American Homeopathy Began

Homeopathy arrived in the United States in 1825. Ten years later Constantine Hering founded the Allentown Academy in Pennsylvania, the first homeopathic school in the country, where courses were taught in German to serve the large German community of the region. On April 10, 1844, the anniversary of Hahnemann's birth, physicians gathered in New York City to found the American Institute of Homeopathy, with Hering as its first president. It was the first national medical organization in the United States, three years before the American Medical Association.

The founding resolution of the AIH set out two duties. The Institute would restrain those who claimed competence in homeopathy without having studied it carefully, and it would reform and expand the materia medica so that homeopathic medicines were properly proven and documented. From its first session, the AIH defined and protected both the standard of practice and the medicines that practice depends on.

What Strict Adherence Produced

In 1848 Hering, Jacob Jeanes, and Walter Williamson founded the Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. From 1864 to 1869 Adolph Lippe led the school and required that every subject, from chemistry and physiology to pathology and surgery, be taught with homeopathy as the spine running through it. Few American medical schools of the time held any comparable standard. His graduates included Ernest Farrington, Edward Berridge, and Samuel Swan, among the finest prescribers in the history of the profession. This was the era that gave the world Hering's Guiding Symptoms, T.F. Allen's Encyclopedia of Pure Materia Medica, the work of Henry N. Guernsey, H.C. Allen, E.B. Nash, and Cyrus Boger, and later Kent's Repertory and Lectures on Homeopathic Philosophy. Homeopaths in every country still study these physicians. 

Freedom and Foundation: Carroll Dunham, 1870

The AMA's Code of Ethics forbade its physicians to consult with homeopathic colleagues. In some states physicians were fined for homeopathic prescriptions, and graduates who adopted homeopathy were disowned by their schools. In June 1870, in Chicago, Carroll Dunham gave the annual address to the AIH. Dunham had studied with Boenninghausen, prescribed a single homeopathic medicine on the totality of characteristic symptoms, and never set aside the law of similars or the minimum dose. He refused to answer exclusion with exclusion:

"Let the Institute be an open forum, in which truth shall be so distinctly proclaimed, and so pervasively enforced that error shall have no chance."

Dunham was right about the principle. What followed was not his mistake but the organization's. By 1874 the AIH had removed knowledge of homeopathy as a requirement for membership. The door had opened and the floor had disappeared at the same time. By first appearances this open door was very successful.  By 1890 more than 9,000 American physicians practiced homeopathy of some kind, about eight percent of the profession. By 1900 the country had 22 homeopathic medical schools, more than 100 homeopathic hospitals, and over 1,000 homeopathic pharmacies.

The Thread Held

In 1880, physicians who would not accept the loss of the standard founded the International Hahnemannian Association, led by Lippe, H.C. Allen, and P.P. Wells, one of Dunham's closest friends. They stood on the Organon, the law of similars, the single homeopathic medicine, and the optimal dose. The IHA never had more than 215 members, yet its Transactions remain among the finest records of Hahnemannian practice ever published. In 1959 the IHA merged back into the AIH, the organization it had left nearly eighty years earlier.

The Flexner Report: What the Record Shows

The homeopathic community has long told itself that the Flexner Report of 1910 destroyed homeopathy. The record tells a different story. Abraham Flexner held every American medical school, allopathic, homeopathic, eclectic, and osteopathic, to the same standard of laboratory science, qualified faculty, and clinical training. By then the homeopathic schools had already fallen from 22 to 15 and enrollment had dropped by half. Many of their faculties were drawn from allopathic ranks, and homeopathy had become one department among many. Five of the fifteen schools met the standard. The schools that held up best were the ones built on Lippe's model. Flexner did not hollow out homeopathy. He documented what the profession had already allowed to happen.

The Dark Decades

By the 1940s and 1950s the schools and hospitals were gone, and homeopathy in the United States rested on a small number of physicians who refused to let it die. Among them were Julia Green, Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, Mary Senseman, Arthur Grimmer, Herbert Roberts, and Royal Hayes. Marion Belle Rood, who studied physics at the University of Michigan before graduating from the New York Homeopathic Medical College in 1932, practiced in rural Lapeer, Michigan, and gave her life savings to preserve the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States. Physicians trained under Kent and his students, including Pierre Schmidt, John Weir, and Margaret Tyler, carried his teaching to Europe.

Revival and the Same Vulnerability

In the 1960s and 1970s, teachers such as Jost Künzli and George Vithoulkas brought that teaching back to American students. In 1975 an estimated 50 to 100 homeopathic physicians practiced in the United States. By the mid-1980s there were about 1,000. The growth was real, but the profession again opened its doors without a floor. There was no agreed definition of homeopathy, and the word was applied to individualized prescribing, combination products, and protocols alike. One hundred and fifteen years after Dunham's address, the same problem had returned.

Homeopathy in the United States Today

The AIH, now in its 182nd year, is building the tools Dunham did not have. The first is definition. In 2026 the major organizations of the United States homeopathic profession adopted a consensus definition:

"Homeopathy is a system of medicine based on the reproducible observation that disease may be treated by a substance that produces similar effects in healthy individuals."

It rests on three principles: the law of similars, the single homeopathic medicine, and optimal posology. Each was established by observation. The proving comes before the prescription, which is why homeopathy is inductive medicine. The definition states what homeopathy is and what it is not.

The second tool is credentialing. The Diplomate of the American Board of Homeopathic Medicine (DABHM), established in 1959, is the highest credential a licensed homeopathic physician can hold in the United States, and the AIH is working to make it the standard for its highest leadership. The third is coalition. The consensus definition carries the signatures of organizations across the American homeopathic profession, and the AIH is building a professional home where all of them can stand on that shared ground. The AIH has published its journal nearly every year since 1844, first as the Transactions of the American Institute of Homeopathy, then as the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, and today as the American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine.