Dear Shirl,

Hahnemann says the real homeopathic agg. comes at the end of treatment when a formerly suppressed symptom reappears, implying the vitality of the organism has been restored.

He says that what we've been accustomed to calling "the aggravation" is really an error in prescribing, an indication that we over-prescribed (either with regard to amount or potency), that it is not a true aggravation. I should have continued the quote of paragraph 276. Here it is:

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Excessively large doses of an accurately selected homeopathic medicine, especially if frequently repeated, are, as a rule, very destructive. Not infrequently, they endanger the patient's life or make his disease almost incurable. Of course they do extinguish the natural disease in the feelings of the vital principle--the patient no longer suffers from it as soon as the overdose of homeopathic medicine acts on him, but he is then more seriously ill from the completely similar but far stronger medicinal disease, which is extremely difficult to eradicate.

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Shirl, it's like if I take antibiotics and they cause a stomach ache, it's easy to distinguish this "medicinal disease" from the natural one I'm suffering from because they occupy different areas of my body.
But if the medicinal disease was SIMILAR to my natural disease, I might mistakenly say, "The antibiotic caused an aggravation!" This is why Hahnemann uses the phrase "so-called homeopathic aggravation" because he's saying, This isn't an aggravation at all, this is a medicinal disease.
You gave the remedy in over-dose.

In other parts of the Organon, which I'm sure I quoted elsewhere, he says, if you make a mistake with a low dose, it's a small mistake, and the patient easily recovers. So, it's true, as Shirley says, it's possible to aggravate on a low potency or an LM, especially if you keep repeating it.

Danielle, on another thread, one time wrote in to say that her practitioner had prescribed Nat-mur LM/1 and it was causing an aggravation, but he told her to keep on taking it!
So, we all said, "Stop taking it!!!!!" In 24 hours she had recovered! This is what Hahnemann means by, "If you make a mistake with a small dose, it's a small mistake."

Snoopy

[ 25 June 2002, 04:19: Message edited by: Snoopy ]