Dear fitness first,

Regarding your list of questions, I'll comment on a few of them. Here in North America, certain designations are a good tip-off to a proper education: CCH, DHOM, DIHOM, CHOM,
RSHOM, DHANP, DHt, and possibly a few others. All are indications that the practitioner has had reasonably good training. Without such a designation, you'd have to rely on reputation and referrals from satisfied customers.

A positive spin can be put on a lot of your questions. Many practitioners are using LM's, for instance, but totally arbitrarily
or just as they would use a "C" potency, without any awareness that LM prescribing is a whole discipline in and of itself.

Homeopaths should not be specializing, because we do not treat diseases, per se. One should be able to see "a Belladonna state" in a patient regardless of whether she has menningitis, appendicitis or an ovarian cyst.

Regarding lab tests, the homeopath really should be working with a doctor so that the remedy's action can be verified through testing. We had a perfect example of this here recently, someone wrote in to say that her homeopathic remedy for hypothyroid was making her sick, and she admitted that she was on synthetic thyroid, and without the lab testing, it was apparent that the synthetic thyroid should have been withdrawn and wasn't. What a mess that was.

The use of software doesn't matter.

I will tell you one thing though, a good homeopath is trained to be totally nonjudgemental.
If you are ever with a practitioner who begins lecturing you, or telling you you're wrong or misperceiving, or you're not trying hard enough, etc., this is not a good homeopath! Everything to a homeopath is a symptom, even if you walked in and made an outrageous statement like, "There are aliens in the room," the job of the homeopath is to act as though you are perfectly sane and inquire only as to their whereabouts and what they wanted.

In general, asking questions only has value if you know the answers, otherwise, it seems that every homeopath has studied with George Vithoulkas and Rajan Sankaran and graduated from a school called "Hahnemann"!

Snoopy