Dear Bettina,

So many questions! I hope I remember them all.

For the average person who's not on a constitutional remedy, it's really a good idea to take an acute remedy--30C--to stop a trauma in its tracks: a head injury, burn, beginning of a flu or cold....You never know what horrible thing you may be preventing by giving an acute remedy. You may stop a cold that might have progressed to pneumonia without the remedy given early.

This is called etiological prescribing (sorry for the big word!) It means prescribing based on the cause--which is a legitimate form of homeopathic prescribing. If you know the cause of something, sometimes that's all you need to know. Barb has a post here about how she prescribed on nothing at all except that the patient had slept all night under the air conditioner! In homeopathy, "Ailments from Cold Dry Winds" is an etiology for Aconite. She said, "Give Aconite!" and the patient got better in short order.

Unfortunately, people who choose to take one dose of a high potency as their constitutional, really
tie themselves down to that remedy, and lose the flexibility to treat acutes with homeopathic remedies because of the possibility that one remedy will antidote the other. Even so, in a really serious emergency, like a head injury, yes, you really should take Arnica 30, repeat as needed--usually 3 times a day for a couple of days, but this is not a hard and fast rule, just a guideline.

The alternative to one-dose-high-and-wait chronic prescribing is daily low potency prescribing, which gives you the flexibility to treat acutes with homeopathy. You don't have to worry that your chronic remedy will be antidoted because you're going to take it again tomorrow! The idea is that you suspend the chronic remedy while the acute is active, give the acute remedy, and when it resolves, return to chronic treatment.

Snoopy

[ 06 January 2002: Message edited by: Snoopy ]</p>