Dr Rajesh Shah is a well-known homeopath, researcher, and teacher and Director of Life Force Homeopathy in Mumbai, India. He is a pioneer of online practice and has treated patients from 180 countries. He has developed many new homeopathic medicines, including those from biological sources such as HIV nosode, Hepatitis C nosode, Mycobacterium Tuberculosis nosode, and more. He has also conducted double-blind, placebo-controlled Drug Provings, Clinical trials, experiments in animal models, as well as in-vitro studies with many new homeopathic medicines, doing this in collaboration with reputed institutions such as Haffkine Institute, ICT (UDCT), IITB, etc. He has introduced a scientific method of development of nosodes. His research papers are published in peer-reviewed, international journals. He has authored several books, including ‘My Experiences with Ferrum Metallicum’, "Lichen Planus treatment", "Vitiligo treatment", "Urticaria", and "Phenomena and Facets - A New Approach to Homeopathic Prescribing".

He is one of the founders and Organizing Secretary of the Global Homeopathy Foundation, which conducted the World Homeopathy Summit in India in April 2015. He is on the advisory committees of CCRH under the Ministry of AYUSH, Govt. of India. Dr. Rajesh has initiated a petition to the Minister, AYUSH for setting up a mechanism for new drug discovery in homeopathy. The petition can be signed and supported at http://chn.ge/2cy7asI

01 Dr. Shah, welcome to Hpathy! You are the epicenter of the movement to create guidelines for introducing new homeopathic remedies in our pharmacopeias and Materia Medica, especially in India. Why and when did you feel the need to raise this issue on a wider scale?

Dr. Rajesh Shah: Thank you, Dr. Manish for this interaction.

I must start by saying that new drug discovery in homeopathy has been a neglected area, not only in India but also across the world. While I started working on developing new drugs in 1998, it was also observed that there were many issues in the making of old drugs as well, which needed to be addressed. If homeopathy has to stand up as a scientific system of medicine, the core sector of drug development would need serious attention.

As a strategic move, my initial focus is on the new drug discovery; eventually, we shall also look into the challenges with the old or existing drugs in the materia medica. If you want to know how my journey of new drug discovery started, I must say that it started with the first nosode of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (initial version) developed in 1998. To my surprise, the old nosode Tuberculinum was made around 1880, which was found to be ‘not reproducible’! The fact of ‘nonreproducibility’ of our nosodes was intimidating news to me that opened the windows and doors to my future journey in this space.