Homeopathy
History
Homeopathy was developed by Samuel Hahnemann in 1790. While he was translating a materia medica from English into German, he came across a reference that the prevalent prescription for malaria at that time was cinchona bark. The reason stated for its efficacy it stated was that it was quite bitter. Dr. Hahnemann was well versed in the current use of medicine and decided there must be another reason besides its bitter qualities that made it work. He reasoned that other medicines were bitter but were not useful in the treatment of malaria. To prove his point, he experimented on himself by taking cinchona bark and observed the effect. Within a short time he experienced chills, fever, palpitations, sweats, in short, all the symptoms of malaria. He wrote down these effects in the text that he was translating as a footnote.
The more he studied and translated medicine and medical texts, the more he observed this phenomenon. If healthy people took massive amounts of a particular drug, the drug would actually cause the same symptoms it was supposed to cure. Hahnemann began to wonder what would happen if you matched the symptoms of a sick patient to symptoms that a drug produced. He began experimenting with this method and developed a new branch of medicine, which he called homeopathy. This is actually the definition of homeopathy, homeo, meaning the same, and pathos, meaning illness.
Hahnemann and some of his healthy colleagues, while in a healthy state, began taking many of these drugs to find their effects on the healthy. They carefully recorded and collated the symptoms that each drug produced. This testing and recording of a homeopathic drug on healthy people is called a proving. Provings are recorded and collated, and then assembled together in a reference text called a materia medica.
The current materia medicas have up to 5,000 proven drugs listed. The drugs are derived from plants, minerals and animal substances. The remedies are listed in alphabetical order in the materia medica. The materia medica has grown to include not just symptoms that were proven but also to include toxicological symptoms as well as symptoms that were actually cured in sick patients using that particular remedy. The symptoms in the materia medica are categorized in order from the top of the body on down. So all the symptoms in the head are categorized together, then the eyes, ears, nose and so on until the extremities.
Some remedies have only 40 symptoms listed in the materia medica, while others have 15,000 symptoms. Since it is impossible to remember all the symptoms of each remedy, about 150 years ago the information was collated into a reference form. All the remedies that affect a certain place in a certain way were placed under a particular category. The book that contained these categories is called a repertory. The categories listed in the repertory are called rubrics.
The repertory of the materia medica is actually a reference tool that lists all the symptoms cured or produced and list every remedy that has treated that particular category/rubric.
For example, a rubric might list: Head: pain, above left eye, 3pm lasting to 6pm, with one remedy listed under the rubric. Rubrics can be very specific like this one, or very general. A general rubric would be Head; pain, and that general rubric would contain hundreds and hundreds of remedies. The more specific the rubric the better for a homeopath, as it truly indicates a closer match. However, specific rubrics are likely to be too specific and incomplete and therefore misleading.
Over the years, there have been many changes and additions to the repertories. Ten years ago, repertories were computerized into several, databases to speed up the search process. Six or seven years ago, an expert system was added to one of the databases to further help with remedy selection by setting certain guidelines that will then give more weight to some rubrics and less weight to other rubrics.
Essentially, homeopathy is a very simple medicine to practice. You simply try to match perfectly the symptoms of the patient to a remedy. There are, however, a few difficulties. For instance, it's impossible to match all the symptoms of a patient to a remedy. Mathematically speaking, it stands to reason that when all the patient's symptoms are included the remedies with 15,000 rubrics will come up more often than those with only 50. This means that the repertory has a natural leaning to show the large remedies as the right remedies if you take into account each and every symptom the totality.
It then becomes a question of taking the logical totality of a patient. In other words, which symptoms shall practitioner consider that truly represent the whole disease state of the patient.
The hardest part of homeopathy then is in the symptom selection. Depending on how you select your symptoms, you will either be led to the correct or incorrect remedy. There can only be one correct remedy at a time for a patient.
There are several theories on how to select the appropriate symptoms, but there are no clear designations of when to use which theory, so one is left with confusion as to which symptom to choose at any one time.
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