I feel the biggest flaw in our education is understanding remedy reactions. Inexperienced homoeopaths (and inexperience seems to bear little relation to how long you have been in practice) often mistakenly believe after administering a remedy that any reaction is a good reaction. And if there has been sufficient disturbance caused then it must be a "healing crisis". This is manifoldly untrue.

If a remedy is the simillimum all symptoms will pass through with amelioration quite quickly. If the dosage or potency is too strong there will be an initial (similar) aggravation followed by amelioration.

A dissimilar aggravation occurs when the wrong remedy has been prescribed and new and troublesome symptoms appear that were not there initially. If the aggravation is too severe to let the case settle on its own, these new symptoms as well as the original symptoms must be antidoted with a remedy that covers the whole disturbance. Boenninghausen's Concordances are highly useful here.

Accessary symptoms are similar to 'proving' symptoms and are produced by over-repetition or too strong a dose of a partially similar remedy. They are symptoms that do not belong to the patient but are produced by the remedy itself. If the remedy is close enough to the centre of the case, these accessary symptoms/aggravations if not too severe should not interfere with the eventual cure.

A partial simillimum will produce amelioration of symptoms in one or more areas of the case up to a certain point in time. When a partially similar remedy is repeated too often, regardless of low or high potency, it will begin to produce accessary symptoms which are counterproductive to the ultimate cure. There is the risk here of engrafting remedy side-symptoms on to the patient. Many cases are lost at this point because these accessary symptoms are wrongly perceived as new symptoms of a new deeper layer. In fact they are practitioner-induced symptoms that require skilful zigzag prescribing to eventuate in cure. Hahnemann and Boenninghausen were experts in zigzag prescribing because they had such a limited Materia Medica to work with. Hahnemann's experiments with the LM potency scale were an attempt to overcome this phenomenon.

A healing crisis occurs when an outlet is found to rid the body of a suppressed eruption or discharge (often to correct some deeper organ system mistunement). The symptoms will follow the Direction of Cure and should not be mistaken for an "acute episode" requiring a new "acute remedy".