It is common knowledge that a diligent homeopathic doctor’s practice is no easy thing.
Most of the problems we face are as old as homeopathy itself and the key to solving them is doctor’s experience. To find a correct remedy that will restore health in the sick person, it is not enough to have the diagnosis and evident markers of the illness – one has to dig deeper, into the core of the disease, and base the prescription on the symptoms hidden deep inside.
So-called repertorization is traditionally a poser for beginners and sometimes for experienced homeopaths as well. Repertorizing is difficult, yes, and it takes much toil and care. We all know how troublesome it is to write out several hundred homeopathic remedies from repertory rubrics, and then to analyse their gradations and patient’s symptoms they cover. The worst case scenario is several hours of writing and counting – can’t we just do it faster and with less effort?
However, mechanical work is only the one side of the coin and not the heads of it, there’s also most important artistic part, that is the skill of taking symptoms of importance and ignoring useless ones. Homeopathic doctor that builds his prescription on his fantasy instead of thorough analysis of patient’s symptoms will surely fail.
To avoid repertorization errors one should stick to classical case-taking rules. These rules haven’t changed for centuries and that is another evidence of their bulletproof reliability.
The doctor who aims at curing the patient, not cheating him, should gather all symptoms with utmost care, select the most important ones and search his repertory for rubrics that correspond to the chosen symptoms. Then he should analyze the list of remedies that lead in the repertorization by weight and/or by coverage and consult Materia Medica to review their field of application. When the most suitable remedy is clear to the doctor, he prescribes it and monitors its action.
So, repertorizing is always a difficult task for a homeopath. And, surely, there are computer programs to help. They do all mechanical work and instantly provide the doctor with repertorization results! Impressive, isn’t it. Hence, a beginner homeopath impressed with search and calculation speed can once become careless and forget about above-mentioned case taking rules – as this quick remedy seems so very evident!
However, the fact is: the doctor neglected the rules, carelessly listened to the patient, followed a wrong opinion and missed objective facts, selected wrong rubrics for analysis, which resulted in a wrong remedy, wrong prescription and worse condition of the patient.
So, a modern homeopath can either work as they did in 19th century and spend several hours per case or use his computer with constant risk of choosing an easy but erroneous path. Where’s the happy medium?
What the doctor needs is a computer program that will do instant repertorization and help him stick to correct case taking, guiding him away from evil temptations. Such a program, called Homeopathy Pro, was released in August 2007.
The most important feature of this program is its correct case-taking orientation according to the principles of classical homeopathy. Surely, the program can perform sophisticated search of homeopathic texts and repertorize selected rubrics, but these functions are really of auxiliary nature. Homeopathy Pro provides its users with more than just mechanical speed and precision, that is – confidence that he does the right thing. And – it helps doctors save tine and rpeserve quality of their work.
So, how does it work? The doctor listens to the patient’s story and writes it down, asks additional questions and writes down the answers together with his notes on the case. This results in a source text, that is, the basis for further analysis and search for the remedy.
It should be taken for granted that most of the patient’s story will be useless for the doctor, as it will cover quite common symptoms characteristic of all the people in the similar state of health. But if the conversation was carried in a professional way, the doctor will surely fish out those rare, strange, peculiar and specific symptoms that will be his guide to the remedy capable of curing the patient or dramatically reducing his sufferings. The doctor will select such symptoms from the source text and put them into the special analysis tab of the program. This is the second stage of case-taking, separating useful from useless. This will result in 6 or 7 symptoms, which will make the skeleton for repertorization.
When all the symptoms have been chosen, it’s time to start finding repertory rubrics that correspond to them. Rubric search is a complicated task, as the doctor has to translate from the language of the patient into the repertory language. Again, Homeopathy Pro will be of help here, as it will constantly display the source text of the symptom to the doctor so that he could select several rubrics corresponding to the symptom and narrow down their numbers when repertorizing and analyzing results. Also, intellectual repertory search will help find rubrics corresponding to this or that symptom.
Now that the doctor has a list of symptoms accompanied by corresponding repertory rubrics, he is ready to move to the next stage, that is, analyzing the resulting list of homeopathic remedies with the help of classical repertorization table Homeopathy Pro offers.
The table corresponds to the one used by master homeopaths since the 19th century and helps the doctor stick to correct repertorization principles. While analyzing, the doctor can include or exclude rubrics, change weight/importance of symptoms and review repertorization results from different angles. Also, he has Materia Medica articles at hand to verify prescription – the articles are just one click away from the repertorization table.
At last, the analysis produces the desired result and the doctor comes to the conclusion about the remedy his patient needs. He makes a corresponding note in the program, the patient gets the remedy and leaves. It seems that homeopath’s work is over, but actually it has just started. Homeopathic remedy is no aspirin, it will act for months and it is very important to monitor its action during future visits of the patient or via phone calls or email conversations.
All these aspects are also covered by Homeopathy Pro. All additional conversations are recorded as separate parts of the case file, hence the doctor has a single file that displays all the progress of the case from beginning to the present moment. And should it become necessary to direct the patient to another doctor, ask for colleagues’ help in a difficult case or share a successfully cured case with fellow homeopaths, this case file can be sent by email or transferred to another computer on some mobile carrier.
All this makes Homeopathy Pro a must-have tool for anyone keen on homeopathy – from students and lay people to professional doctors.
Paul Gorlow, homeopath
Homeopathy Pro - software for classical homeopaths
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