Totality of symptoms means a great deal and includes of course mercury fillings. I have a patient whose gums started bleeding because he has so many of these fillings, it almost rots his gums. So I prescribed Mercury in potency and he improved considerably. As long as the fillings are not removed, he will relapse. And as for your belief that the goal is cure, rather than being right: HE WHO CURES *IS* RIGHT! The two cannot be separated. It is dangerous to rely on belief, for belief may be suspended at any time, while laws are eternal and the rightness of cure is based on laws.

And a child who needs the nosode to antidote a DTP vaccine is certainly classical homoeopathy. Dogma means to me that a person has a certain way of thinking which does not allow any other ideas to enter. Kent made too many rpovings on himself in too short a time and was a very grumpy man because of it. That may explain his intolerance towards other methods, but he railed against the 'mongrels' as mixopaths and exclusive low potency users. He also thought that you could cure a person completely with a single remedy, which goes against Hahnemann.

Cure is our high and only mission as hahnemann so aptly states. But we cannot leave out the science, at least not in my experience. Your example of the person with the mercury fillings only goes to show that not everyone is thoroughly scientific and may neglect such things. I also take in consideration the environment in which a person lives. Here in Oz, the Aborigenies live mainly in the desert and it is significant that they need Silica a great deal. Many of the sands here contain aluminium, and this manifests itself in the symptoms of these people. In the western part of Oz, Iron is a major constituent of the soil (it is mined for that reason). All the indigenous people living there have issues with work, which Jan Scholten discovered to be a major part of Ferrum metallicum pathology, in the mental sphere.
In the coastal areas you see more Nat.m. and sea-remedies than in the interior, simply because the environment has that type of influence. So to my understanding, the totality includes everything you can possibly discover about a person.

To return again to your example, did the patient tell the other homoeopaths about his fillings, or was the last one so bright to ask and thus remind him? My experience is that even the most thorough anamnesis leaves out certain things, simply because a patient does not remember, or it is forgotten in questioning. Often on the second visit people remember things that they have not mentioned the first time.

My experience is that if I prescribe on the totslity presented before me, the sick organs DO get cured and toxins DO get eliminated - rather the opposite of what you say. The art comes after years of sticking to the science and the laws. If we neglect the laws, we are sick ourselves, for than we go against the laws of the heart, which govern in my understanding all healing. To heal means to me to make whole and holy, the true menaing of healing. To me, to stick with the laws is the antithesis of dogmatism, as dogmatism does not recognise laws but is founded on opinions.

In an analogy we can see what opinions are worth - and I do not mean to offend you, as I do not think this applies to you. Opinions are like the anus - everybody has got one and all are full of excrement. Opinions do not cure people, but remedies prescribed on totality do - and not neessarily one remedy only. If it is a child, you MAY be able to cure with a single remedy, but there is no guarantee you will. Considering the miasms, we will see that most people are riddled with all three from birth, so a single remedy is out of the question as the ultimate cure. So we cannot neglect the laws, as set out by hahnemann, but we can expand homoeopathy within that set of laws. Homoeopathy was not finished with hahnemann, and I think it never will. At the same time, even though he expanded on his own system, he never abandoned the laws he discovered and remained the greatest scientist of his century. It is because of that that he could expand. If he ahd abandoned his discoveries of eternal laws of nature, homoeopathy would have died a quiet death.

[This message has been edited by Ben Rozendal (edited 07 August 1999).]