Hello RDS,

I think whichever book makes the subject intellectually accessible to the individual person is the best one to start with.

At some point though, when the decision to practise becomes serious, I believe it is vital to study remedies from the proving material such as those polychrests in Materia Medica Pura and Chronic Diseases. T. F. Allen's 'Handbook of Materia Medica' is good because it intersperses the proving material with clinical examples. A remedy proving means nothing without examples of clinical application. But if you learn remedies only by their clinical application you are liable to STEREOTYPE that remedy into a very narrow usage. For example, the remedy Platina has a 101 clinical applications that have nothing to do with nymphomaniacal women when it's prescribed on a number of its characteristic symptoms. Yet I wonder if you saw this remedy rate highly in a repertorization and the male patient had no specific imbalance in the sexual sphere if you would be prone to disregard it. Sometimes the difference between a partial simillimum and the simillimum can be a mere footstep or the difference can be as wide as the Pacific Ocean. In the clinic this difference translates to rapid gentle cure (simillimum) or a long drawn out case with many winds and turns (partial simillimum). We all owe it ourselves to become familiar with the original provings (of old and new remedies) as early as possible in our studies. And then look at how the information has been applied clinically. Many of our homoeopathic MM texts do not distinguish where the information came from, that is, if it is a proving symptom or a clinical finding. You need to be discerning about the quality of some information. Not that I'm suggesting it's wrong. It's just that what works for one will not necessarily work for another and it is a fact of life that we have many different methodologies all attempting to give meaning and clarification to Materia Medica in different ways. Analogy has always been present in homoeopathy.

One further suggestion is, if your health permits, to test some remedies on yourself. You won't experience the full proving symptoms, sometimes it is merely a temporary upset stomach, diarrhoea, or frayed nerves, a headache, a skin rash, or the blues. This enables you to understand the quality of sensation associated with a remedy. Imagine trying to explain how a mandarin differs in taste to an orange to someone who has never even seen them. This is what we more or less expect our patients to be able to do for us when we try to differentiate between a number of similar remedies. There is a difference between reading about something and having an experience of it. Perhaps your wife would be willing to test some remedies as well? Well, anyway, just some suggestions which may be useful...

All the best,
Chris