FROM ACORNS

MacRepertory was created out of passion.

In 1986 a friend lent me a computer to help me write up teaching notes for my classes at the Hahnemann College; I was using a very old non-correcting royal typewriter that was torture and she thought the computer was a vast improvement. I wasn't enthusi-astic as my major at UC Berkeley had been Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and I had hated it. I felt that the computers brought a kind of cold, dead quality to everything and had sworn never to use them again. But my friend was persistent and one Thursday I brought the Macintosh home and gave it a test drive. I was stunned. There were little pictures and something called a mouse - radically different from the text only computers I knew. It was actually fun! By Sunday I was hooked and had bought my first computer.

Of course then I wanted to use the computer for homeopathy; homeopathy has the data, computers excel at illuminating data. With a bit of searching I found three homeopathic programs had been made. They all required you to type everything, had no graphics, didn't even have a repertory where you could select the rubrics. Plus none worked on a Macintosh - my new enthusiasm.

Maybe I could make my own program?!? I remembered enough of computer science to make a start but after six months realized that it was more than I could do. I had this vision of a program that had the repertory on the screen and you could just click to select rubrics. Then graphs... ah, it would have a bunch of beautiful graphs showing the results (after doing a thousand patient repertory sheets I could appreciate the program doing that tedium!) I couldn't just let go of the vision.

One day at a friend's house I ran into a programmer who I immediately liked. Clearly brilliant and enthusiastic it turned out that Mike had worked on projects that were very similar to my repertory idea. And, amazingly, he worked on the Macintosh! But of course he wanted to be paid and I had no money. The Hahnemann Clinic (Roger Morrison, Nancy Herrick, Jonathan Shore, Peggy Chipkin, Bill Gray) had seen a sample of what I envisioned and offered to lend me enough to get started. If I could sell the program to fifty people I could pay off the start-up costs and the project would be finished!

It never occurred to me that this was anything more than a one-off project. But of course it became FAR more complex. Having the repertory typed was a huge, expensive job; being abbreviations instead of words makes for challenging typing. Finally a year later we had a version that worked. There were pictures for the sections of the repertory, graphs, the remedies could instantly be hidden or shown.

The response was amazingly gratifying! Such enthusiasm! They had caught my bug and then of course everyone wanted the program to do a bit more. There were lots of growing pains as it became clear that this was more than just a small short term project. I hired people to ship the programs, answer the phones and handle the money. The next year I dove into the internet starting the world's first international network for homeopaths, Homeonet. And a year after that, realizing that analyses would be even more accurate if we could use the materia medica directly, ReferenceWorks was born.

The growth, success and demands just continued to increase - and things haven't slowed down yet.

So deepest roots of MacRepertory were a vision; the business came to support the vision. And always the vision, innovation and drive to advance homeopathy have been the heart of what we do. Our goal is not to develop a product but to develop homeopathy.

And so, perhaps as one might expect, virtually all the innovation in homeopathic programs has come through our programs. The programs were the first to allow rubric selection, use a mouse, analyze and graph results, include color, use picture for sections, offer multiple repertories, philosophy, new provings, and materia medica, accommodate custom analyses, include miasms, include families, analyze by families, analyze directly from the materia medica, display rubrics central to any family, run on both PCs and Macs and the first to utilize video.

We have succeeded - the programs have advanced homeopathy: directly by enhancing prescribing and an awareness of other possibilities and indirectly by supporting the visionary homeopaths as they leap into new territory. And that is our pledge to you: we will continue to do all that we can to support and advance homeopathy and improve your prescribing.

Of course it isn't obvious where innovation is needed or useful for homeopathy. It makes sense that we develop towards the strengths of the tool, the computer. Computers excel at doing calculations quickly and drawing conclusions from large amounts of information. Analyzing cases is a good use of the computational abilities of computers. Probably the best use of a computer for homeopathy is in noticing family patterns.

I'll share my tentative views on families in the next article.