It is common knowledge today that inorganic salts and trace elements play an important role in staying healthy and that a healthy diet is essential to a healthy body. In modern times more people are turning to the Biochemic method of healing. It is a simple treatment that is easy for people to understand, and it is quite inexpensive. Today, mineral supplements are readily available and easy to obtain, but this has not always been the case.

The Biochemic healing method began as the work and research of medical
Dr. Wilhelm Heinrich Schuessler (1821-1898). Dr. Schuessler was a Doctor of medicine, a Physiological Chemist, and a Physicist who had a keen analytical mind and was able to co-ordinate the far-reaching physiological discoveries of great contemporary scientists. As a practicing physician he put his theories to the test and achieved the formulation of his unique system of cellular therapeutics. He named this system Biochemistry – the chemistry of living tissue.

Dr. Schuessler surmised that there are four simple principles of Biochemistry. Later agreed by Virchow (Principles of Cellular Pathology) and scientifically proven by Stahlkopf (1918-1972). These principles are:

Disease does not occur if cell metabolism is normal.

Cell metabolism is in turn normal if cell nutrition is adequate.

Nutritional substances are either of organic or inorganic nature as far as the body is concerned.

The ability of the body cells to assimilate and to excrete and further to utilize nutritional material is impaired if there is a deficiency in the inorganic (mineral salt) constituent of tissue.

Once Dr. Schuessler reached the conclusion that the normal function of the cell is dependant on a normal dosage of inorganic mineral salts, he was inspired to expand his Biochemic research, eventually concluding that the 12 most important mineral salts are:

Calcium Fluoride
Calcium Phosphate
Phosphate of Iron
Potassium Chloride
Potassium Phosphate
Potassium Sulphate
Magnesium Phosphate
Sodium Chloride
Sodium Phosphate
Sodium Sulphate
Silica Oxide
Calcium Sulphate

Dr. Schuessler believed that the body needed to maintain a proper balance of the twelve mineral salts in order to ensure normal cell function and good health. Any disruption to this balance would cause illness. He also believed that a normal balance of these vital mineral salts could be re-established with the administration of the deficient mineral salt in a readily assimilated form, which would pass rapidly into the bloodstream and body cells. Gunther Stahlkopf proved this simple logic scientifically in his research in the early 1900s.

Therefore the difference in the normal dosage of nutritious inorganic Mineral Salts especially the shortage of them was classified as the reason for the illness. Dr. Schuessler's therapies consisted in the medical supplement of the missing inorganic substances in order to keep the "balance". "One must not think that these supplements were to replace the missing", the idea is to stimulate, or send on information to the cells in order they again start to absorb their necessary inorganic mineral salts from the diet, in order to keep up the internal consistency. "If these mineral salts exist in an incorrect concentration, we have a situation we call illness" – Gunther Carl Stahlkopf ( Biologist).

This natural form of medicine is about – diagnosing which Mineral salt(s) are lacking in the organism – establishing the cause – treating by temporarily supplementing the required Mineral(s) in order to stimulate the cell system.

During the era of natural sciences, these fundamentals were improved upon with the help of Biology, Medicine, Physiology and Chemistry. All of these fields are now a part of common Biochemics. It is a comprehensive discipline, the knowledge of the basic legitimacy of life, where every change, illness, intellectual achievement and spiritual movement is connected with a specific chemical transformation of the cells, both internally and externally. The mineral substances play a major role in these Biochemic processes. The work of the Clinical Biochemist we refer to today is to normalize the disturbed chemical balance of an organism. Schuessler's decision to call his new therapy "Biochemic" must therefore be seen as a historical one.

Although Dr. Wilhelm Heinrich Schuessler died in Oldenburg in 1898 at the age of 76, the story of his research and Biochemics did not end there. His work continues throughout the world to this day, as doctors and scientists strive to make even more progress in the amazing field of Biochemistry.