The popularity of complementary medicine may seem to be a somewhat recent development - but the experience of Dr Elizabeth Ogden would indicate otherwise. When she moved to Dublin over 20 years ago to work as a homeopathic GP, such was the demand, that she was soon working up to 70 hours a week.

Dr Ogden's father was a "lay homeopath", and during her medical training she tended to look down on what he was doing. But when she qualified she saw people with illnesses being treated with orthodox medicine, whom she knew would fare much better with homeopathic remedies. She decided to train at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital.

"I was treating children with measles who would never have reached hospital if they had been treated homeopathically. They are given a remedy to help bring out the rash, and then a different remedy, and they seldom run into problems."

At the beginning she was seeing people who had previously gone the conventional route. Now she is still seeing those patients - and their children, who are now adults. "Conventional medicine cannot be put down. If someone needs surgery, they need surgery. However I have had quite a few cases where people were told they needed surgery and opted for the alternative route and did not then need to have it.

"Women with fibroids would have been advised to have a hysterectomy, but once they have complementary treatment the heavy periods would stop. They would still have the fibroids but not the symptoms. I have had patients who are alive and well who opted not to have certain treatments, including patients with cancer, who are still trotting around today.

"People say that we spend more time with patients and that is true; certainly in some cases there can be a placebo effect, but you can also have that in orthodox medicine. I have had total disbelievers who take a remedy and it works. All things human, including plants and animals, can react to homeopathic remedies."

Dr Ogden explains that homeopathy works on a principle that "like cures like". Homeopaths work on the symptoms but also on the emotions, treating the entire person. The remedies work to stimulate the body to do its own healing. There are no instruments to measure the potencies because the dilutions are enormous. "With a plant remedy you first make a tincture, then you take one drop of the tincture and you mix it with 99 drops of alcohol and shake it. The shaking is very important because if you simply dilute it you do not get the same reaction," says Dr Ogden, explaining that in some cases you cannot physically measure it because it is so dilute you are then dealing with an energy.

"My orthodox colleagues say this is ridiculous and how can it work. But we should remember that it was 200 years ago when Hahnemann, a Prussian, first evolved this form of treatment. At that time if he had said instead that there was an energy that you cannot see, cannot hear, cannot smell or cannot touch but can give you cancer they would have said `off to the stake with you'. But in an age of nuclear physics we accept it because we now have instruments to measure radiation which has existed since the dawn of time."

In the 1800s when Hahnemann visited a house where there were children with scarlet fever, he noticed that one child had not fallen ill. That child was being treated with atropine, which comes from belladonna, for an eye condition. "He treated the children who had scarlet fever with belladonna and they got better. The results were so good that the Prussian Government said all people with scarlet fever had to be treated with belladonna in its homeopathic form."

DR Ogden rarely prescribes antibiotics, always trying homeopathic remedies first "because they usually work". Between her own three boys they only had four antibiotics between them as children. "In total that's 63 childhood years up to the age of 21." Her patients come at the beginning of the winter months for their remedies for colds, 'flus and tummy upsets and these top-ups can be as cheap as £10 for all the family.

Dr Ogden also does work with Turning Point, a group that gives counselling to people with life-threatening illnesses. Now in her 60s, although she looks nowhere near it, she is not taking on any new patients.

She is a member of the Irish Medical Homeopathic Association, but does not dismiss those homeopaths who are not medically trained. "Homeopathic courses last for four years and there is a lot of study and commitment so that would cut out the cowboys. Some people are very genuine and very good - sort of instinctive healers, whatever they are doing - and they are getting results. Others are just in it for the money."