Found it!! It's in Kent's MM - on page 1436....looooonnnnngggg explanation, so I won't copy all here..but here is the beginning.

"ELIMINATING SYMPTOMS"

This is a new word, but expresses what we all desire in repertorising, and what we have got to be very chary of using too rigidly, lest we lost the remedy we are looking for.

Instances best reveal meanings. Take one. Say your patient complains of dyspepsia, with burning pain in the stomach, and the frequent vomiting of sour fluid. He pours you out particulars, which he has at his finger-tips; since they are just the symptoms that impress his consciousness in a very realistic way. You jot them down till you have got the case as fully as most people go, with all its modalities (i.e. the conditions as to heat and cold, movement and rest, position, hours of the day and night, relation to food and drink, etc., of the stomach condition complained of). You have assured yourself, by careful examination, as to whether the trouble is likely to be organic or functional; or whether some of the symptoms have got to be discounted, as secondary to some gross lesion. And now it is you turn.

You have to elicit the General symptoms of your patient; you have got to switch him off the siding 'my,' and find that he cannot stand heat - whatever his stomach may do; that he is ill if long out in the sun; that he wants a cool room, prefers cold weather and a cold climate; that he never goes near the fire; and you noticed when he came in that, though the weather was cold, he was not buttoned up, or thickly clothed. It is not closeness or stuffiness so much that affects him (you have got to be careful between these!) but HEAT. He is one of Dr. G. Miller's "predominately hot-remedy people." THERE IS AN ELIMINATING SYMPTOM FOR YOU!

You know at once, whatever his stomach condition may be (its particular symptoms might perhaps be equally well-met by Ars., Phos., Nux., Lyc., Nat-Mur., or a host of others); but with that temperament, that warm personality, it would be useless for deep and curative work to think of giving him Ars., Phos., Nux. or Sep. He is a hot patient, and these are predominately cold remedies. You can strike them out at once. For even if one of them, aptly fitting the exact stomach symptoms only, gave temporary relief to the immediate condition, the patient would relapse again and again. It could not hold. It would act as a palliative, not a curative drug. It might provide a temporary organ-stimulus; it could never be the stimulus of the organism. And here you see well the difference between deep and superficial work - between curative and palliative.

The people who get their honest triumphs in SIMILARS, and see at least brilliant temporary results in superficial and acute conditions, and believe honestly that these are the very best attainable by medicine, scout the idea of the lasting triumphs of the SIMILLIMUM. The know well, from years of experience, their own limitations; and it seems to them outrageous that other people should make larger claims. As a matter of fact, when you get the real simillimum, the odds are that, instead of palliating the stomach condition, you will aggravate it a thousandfold - for the moment; aggravate it, once and for all, to cure. And if you do not know your work, you will think that you have got the wrong medicine and antidote or change it; and your patient will be, so far as you are concerned, incurable. But it may be your ignorance only that makes him so!......."

Hope this helps... .
Lisa
PS...I wonder, Djkempson, if the rem will hold for that lady, in view of what Kent says...any thoughts? Interesting to ponder, though.



[This message has been edited by Lisa007 (edited 30 September 2000).]