the basic principle of psychoanalysis is recovering repressed memories (as the sexual assault on Divina's patient) - the recovery of childhood trauma relieves the neurotic/symptomatic defences established in the meantime by the patient's unconscious process. in this way, as others, i have felt for some time there is a pretty deep parallel between psychoanalytic and homeopathic ideas and practice. the analytic reconstruction of an individual's psychic history can be enormously rich and rewarding and healing (L. Bryce Boyer, 'Working with a Borderline Patient,' The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1977, vol. xlvi no. 3, pp. 386-424); the homeopathic cure is more 'direct' and certain - i am unclear how much occurs in terms of recovered memories with homeopathy, but certainly enrichment of experience is not to be faulted.

carol's question cuts across methods and clinical assessment. one psychiatrist dressed up as julius caesar to confront his patient with the same delusion, and cured the guy, or at least snapped him out of it momentarily. you run into this kind of story now and then. similar cures similar can probably be viewed symptom by symptom as well as more globally: matching the total personality to the remedy (roughly, constitutional assessment vs. symptomatic description, or, pyschologically, character analysis as compared to DSM-IV symptom collections).

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"The need to perform adjustments for covariates...weakens the findings." BMJ Clinical Evidence: Mental Health, (No. 11), p. 95.... It's that simple, guys: bad numbers make bad science.