If it is true, as I assert, that the odds are that the most similar remedy to your patient is a rare, poorly understood remedy how could we find it? When we turn to the repertory for help we find that we are encouraged to prescribe a polychrest. This is not surprising. The polychrests are terribly, grotesquely overrepresented in the repertory (and materia medica). For example, in Kent Sulphur is found in 8,789 rubrics, and Silica 5,470, while Hecla lava is found in only 21. However Hecla is a very useful remedy, similar to Sulphur and Silica. And since grades in the repertory are based on how many provers had the symptom rather than the closeness of the symptom to the picture of the remedy, the polychrests are also far more likely to be found in bold or italics (Sulphur has 1289 bolds, Silica 847 and Hecla 0).
Here we can be helped by groupings of remedies. Remedies can be grouped as a way to prescribe more accurately. The most famous homeopathic grouping is the miasms but hundreds of other useful groups are possible. A few simple examples... The snake remedies share sensitivity to clothing around the neck, sepsis, bleeding, annual periodicity, and the sense that some is behind them, etc. You'll also tend to see duality (one-sided), forsaken, seduction and constriction. If I see that Lachesis is first in my analysis I think, "Ah, the remedy may well be a snake" as I know that no matter what snake is needed Lachesis is so well known, so common in the repertory and shares so many symptoms with other snakes that it is likely to come first. The spiders are generally similar to Latrodectus and Tarentula with nervous system complaints, restlessness, industriousness, deep chilliness, amelioration from smoking, a need for their troubles to be noticed, etc. If I see Tarentula first in the analysis I always look at other spiders as well since from the repertory's rather mechanical point of view Tarentula is a sort of rubric-prototype for any spider. Remedies made from seeds tend to share the symptoms of being held in, suppressed or frustrated either by choice or by external conditions and to suddenly burst out (think of Anac., Nux-v., Staph., Ign., etc.). The sunflowers that grow in waste places where they receive much abuse are very effective in injuries (Arn., Mill., Cham., Bell-p., etc.). A group can be based on any shared characteristics. The usefulness of the group is dependent on the importance and precision of these characteristics. This process of moving to a model of families is the same as the direction taken by botany, allopathy, psychiatry, geology, and every other science in the early 1800's. You don't need such a system when you only work with a few items but as the number of items in your science grows a structure becomes necessary. In this way homeopathy has largely remained frozen since Hahnemann. I believe that the next dramatic increases in the accuracy of our prescribing will come through defining and understanding groupings of remedies. |
This leads to very
misleading analyses. For example, imagine that the ultimate, perfect
Hecla lava case comes in your door. If you repertorize every one of
Hecla's twenty one rubrics and you'd find that Silica, with some
italics, got more points than Hecla! If you entered a couple of rubrics
that Hecla has, but is not known for in the repertory, you'd see Hecla
disappearing down the list of remedies.| Previous |
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