Careful searching is at the heart of success with ReferenceWorks.

Let's take a simple example: fear of heights. We type in "fear heights"

  108 Remedies found.

This search will find every phrase where "fear" is next to "heights". (Searches ignore small insignificant words such as "his", " the", "some", "of ", etc.)

The problem with this search is that it misses all of those phrases in the materia medica where a sentence lists fear of heights with other fears such as "Fear of dark, ghosts, death and heights" because the two words have three significant words between them. To overcome this situations type the number 3 between the words:  ( just put the cursor between fear and hights and type 3)

122 Remedies found

The next problem is that some books say "fear of high places" instead of heights.  In order to include this in our search we need to add a / (slash) to say "or"  In other words "fear 3 height/high" which says, "fear within 3 significant words of height or high".

158 Remedies found.

Now if we look at the results of this search, we see a few references that are incorrect, e.g. Aconite "High fever, trembling, fear of death or of the dark, often fright, threatened miscarriage, suppression of the menses; the after-effects of fright when the fear remains". This has nothing to do with fear of heights but is correct in that our two words are found, separated by no more than three significant words.

So, how could we do a tighter search? The phrase we want to find is "fear of high places".  So let's include the word "places".
This search "fear 3 height/high places" reads like this:- look for "fear within 3 words of height or high, next to places".

49 Remedies Found

Now there are too few references. Something went wrong! Somehow we lost all of the references to "fear of heights".
Look closely at what we searched for. What our search really says is "find all references to "fear of high places" (that's good) or "fear of heights places"  (which is a problem). Our search requires the word places to be found in every reference - even those related to "heights". The way to fix this is to use parentheses to link "high" and places" as a single sub-phrase.

146 Remedies Found

Ah much better.

There is another word used for fear of heights that we should probably include: agoraphobia. In this case we want to actually search for two phrases. Press shift/return to get a second phrase and type "agoraphobia".

169 Remedies Found

This results in 169 remedies and we've covered this symptom well. Compare this to the 19 remedies in the Complete Millennium; there are almost 10 times more in ReferenceWorks.

If you want to include this search as a rubric in Mac-Repertory press command/e (Macintosh) or control/e (Windows), switch to MacRepertory, open a Rubrics' Clipboard and paste!