Been thinking about this a lot lately and am wondering if you guys can offer your opinions. We always hear that the "usual" symptoms of a disease are of no help to the homeopath in selecting the remedy as we want to find what is unique to the disease in a particular person to determine a remedy. But why is this so? I mean in the provings many remedies are found to bring about the "usual" symptoms of a disease so why do we need to search out an SRP? Hahnemanns first proving of quinine gave the common symptoms of malaria correct? It was the obvious expression of the "common" symptoms that led Hahnemann to his discovery of like cures like, yes? Am I making sense here at all or just rambling? So why do we throw out the common symptoms, is there any other reason other than an SRP kinda clinches a remedy selection for us?

Thanks guys
barb

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Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to animals. For they are without sin and you in your greatness defile the earth by your appearance on it and leave traces of you foulness after you. Dostoyevsky

Hey Barb,

We don't 'throw out' common symptoms. The common symptoms of say, pneumonia or meningitis or tuberculosis, will tell you what sort of medical condition you are facing or that the person's life may be in danger. But as far as repertorization goes and finding the simillimum, the common symptoms are simply common to a great number of similar remedies and disease states. It is the unusual, strange, exceptional and odd characteristic symptoms that define the individual symptom complex upon which we base a prescription. These characteristics define and individualize the state of disease specific to the person who is suffering with those symptoms. Concomitants are the key.

Chris

Dear Barb,

What a great question! Steve Messer, who's head of Homeopathy at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, has a lecture out on this subject on tape which you can probably buy at
www.minimum.com but here's what he says:

The common symptoms get you to the group of maybe 10 or 20 remedies that historically have been known to treat a particular problem--like a fever, for instance. It's common sense that your remedy will have to be able to cause a fever in a healthy person in order to cure it in a sick person. But then which fever remedy?
What's peculiar or individualizing about your fever? Maybe you're thirstless during your fever; well that's very peculiar. So you go to the repertory and look up
Fever, thirst, little thirst-ars., gels(2),
puls(2). So, from over 100 remedies in the main rubric, you're down to 3, just cuz you were able to find a peculiar symptom.

Barb, it's just that the common symptoms make too many remedies show up.

Sometimes it's the modality that's crucial--the person's better in the fresh air, or needs to lie down, or needs company, or is restless, or < on least motion. These things are very important to us. Or the aggravation time; or keynotes of a remedy. If you see a keynote of a remedy in a case, it's a real blessing. Like, the problem started on the left and moved to the right--Lachesis.

Hope this helps,
Snoopy

Dear Barb,

This great case just fell into my lap which I think really speaks to this topic.

It's case 25 in Sankaran's book THE SYSTEM OF HOMEOPATHY. It's about a 5 yr. old girl, covered with a rash--itchy pustules oozing a yellow discharge, < cold draft, and the allopathic diagnosis was post-infective nephritis--kidney infection. She had generalized edema with scanty output of urine.
The most peculiar symptoms in the case were the mental concomitants. She was angry, abusive, screaming, scratching, biting, striking, irritable, hateful, rude, jealous; but she would cool off quickly and apologize.

Sankaran's associate prescribed on the peculiar symptoms, seeing a perfect Lyssin case before him, Lyssin being the potentized saliva of a rabid dog, and for good measure, she had a fear of dogs.

But, it didn't work. It didn't work because it didn't cover the pathology--the common symptoms of the case. Lyssin isn't in the nephritis rubric or the rubric for pustules oozing yellow discharge.

The remedy Sankaran gave was Hepar Sulph. It not only covered the pathology, the rash, the yellow discharge the < cold drafts, but also the anger and irritability.

So, as Steve Messer says in his presentation on characteristic symptoms, the common symptoms really are important in terms of finding a remedy that will cause this state in a healthy person. The common symptoms, or allopathic diagnosis, might get you to 25, 50 or 100 remedies. But then, hopefully, one of those remedies will match what is peculiar in the case. In the above case, the characteristic symptoms were the modality
< drafts, the color of the discharge, and the anger and the irritability.

Snoopy

gpm
Member
Member # 2660

posted 21 July 2002 07:10
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Hi Barb,

Great question! Hope there are lots and lots of answers.

In treating animals, at least at the lower ability level (mine!), it is often very difficult to get anything that is strange, rare of peculiar. Most often there are simply physical symptoms with nothing much else to guide. For instance, I have a cat that is growing thinner, has a little (once in a while) mucus discharge in inner canthi, coat a little dry......and that's it. Nothing else (behavior/habits/eating/drinking) about him has changed, at all, in any way. And nothing about him is odd or strange, in catdom world. I understand about prescribing on what is different. But in cases like this, the only differences ARE the physical symptoms! With wildlife there is rarely anything other than dis-ease symptoms to use but they are generally acutes.
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From: new jersey, us | IP: Logged

__________________
Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to animals. For they are without sin and you in your greatness defile the earth by your appearance on it and leave traces of you foulness after you. Dostoyevsky

Thanks chris and snoops. I understand that the SRP in a casse will help lead to a remedy selection but what if there really aren't any?

What led me to this question in the first place was David JK's reply to snoops on the shingles thread. Ryan had no overriding SRP's no mental, emotional concominants and just a few modalities - this was in his own wording. So snoops prescibed a remedy based on the symptom picture of the shingles and David says that it isn't enough - we must have SRP's - but why? If we have the symptom description and any modalities of the case and the patient says that is all there is then why isn't that enough?

When Hahnemann first proved quinine were there a lot of SRP's that jumped out at him? I have always heard he had the "common" symptoms of malaria and that is how he discovered the law of like cures like - through the common symptoms.
Now quinine was generally used to treat malaria and it worked correct? It was routinely given withoput regard to how malaria effected eackh individual, yes?

Also - with regards to gpms contribution, I can imagine in the case of animals that getting SRP's must be difficult as I know that finding the SRP's in babies and young kids can also be tricky - so what do we do then?

That reminds me of something actually - hmm I'll post about later when I have more time.

thnaks

__________________
Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to animals. For they are without sin and you in your greatness defile the earth by your appearance on it and leave traces of you foulness after you. Dostoyevsky

also - is bad typing considered an SRP? :razz:

__________________
Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to animals. For they are without sin and you in your greatness defile the earth by your appearance on it and leave traces of you foulness after you. Dostoyevsky

Dear Barb,

the provings brought out symptoms that resembled a particular illness, but that illness did not exist in the prover. That made the symptoms rare, strange and peculiar. Once the illness acutally exists in a person, the symptoms become common. They no longer help you to find the remedy, because everyone with the illness will produce those symptoms.

If you prescribe on the common symptoms alone, then there is a high chance you will suppress or palliate the illness. That is because those symptoms do not reflect the unique characteristics of the person, of their vital force, which is the true source of their problems. If this were not true, over the counter homoeopathic prescriptions for allergies, teething, migraines etc would all work. For that matter, a doctor could use homoeopathy much the same way as he uses his own medicines, and they would hardly argue with us about homoeopathy's power.

Hahnemann was very clear - the case must always be individualised. The common symptoms must be understood but discarded for the sake of the homoeopathic prescription. The case must also, as much as is possible, cover the totality of the case. The totality may only include the acute illness, but still must involve the generals OR at the very least the peculiars. You don't need to know the influenza patitent's relationship with their mother or what their birth was like, but you would need to know if they were thirsty, what they craved, how the temperature affected them etc. You could not use symptoms like Aching pain, Fever, Headaches, Photophobia to find the remedy. Every person with the flu will have those symptoms.

You must use what cannot be explained by the pathology. The most important things are those that you would NOT expect in someone in the same situation. Why is this?

When someone reacts to an illness, the react in a way that helps them to survive it. Thus they produce certain symptoms - a diabetic has thirst, sugar in urine, excessive urination, increase in food intake etc. The body must do this to survive. Everyone's body will do the same thing. Otherwise they die.

Does this tell us what morbific influence is affecting the vital force? Remember, as Hahnemann said, the cause of disease is not physical, it is spiritual - non-material. The body has diabetes and it must do certain things to survive. If you take these symptoms away, you seriously cripple the person's attempt to remain alive.

What is behind the diabetes - what is the unseen influence that is creating the illness? You are unlikely to see it in the common symptoms - everyone has to have those to cope with the specific illness. But the peculiar ones do not represent the pathology - they represent the vital force's derangement. They are unique to the person because they are not needed to survive diabetes (or whatever).

Snoopy also made a good point - from a practical point of view, the peculiar symptoms narrow your focus considerably. A single peculiar is worth many common symptoms.

[ 22 July 2002, 04:30: Message edited by: DavidJK ]

__________________
David Kempson.<br />Dip.Homoeopathic Medicine.<br />Lecturer Australian College of Natural Therapies (Brisbane Campus)<br />Member AHA, AROH, HMA<br />Member Australian Homoeopathic Association. Member#0442.

Hmm...bad typing...sounds serious, Barb; but I'll leave that to the experts. I think the problem here lies in the word peculiar, which true enough often means odd-ball, but most of the time, maybe a better word would be "characteristic" or "individualizing"; for instance, not everyone with a rash, as in the case above, is worse for cold drafts; in fact, with an itchy body, it might be more common to desire cold, rather than be worse for it. The yellow discharge was individualizing, which means for all the remedies with pustules that ooze, you're only interested in the ones that ooze yellow. The concomitant of being angry, irritable and rude with an illness, is again individualizing, especially in children who more often would be clingy and weepy.

In Ryan's case, the stinging sensation of the eruptions was individualizing, as was the modality &gt; cold applications. As you pointed out, we investigated etiology, mental concomitants and physical concomitants and asked what changed since the illness and we got nothing.
I gave examples of what I meant by modalities because if I asked him what makes it better or worse, we'd have gotten the answer we always get from new-comers, which is "Asprin, Tylenol, cortisone cream" and so on.

I agree with you and gpm that sometimes all you really have are the physical symptoms, but even then, they have Sensation, Location, Modalities,
Onset, Etiology, Concomitants and Discharges that have colors and textures and odors, and, lest we should forget, a diagnosis; and the ever-important question: what changed since you got sick? So, with all this information, we should certainly be able to individualize a case.

Snoopy

Dear David,

Thank you for the wonderful comment! Really beautifully expressed, at least it's my humble opinion. I'm sure your students have enjoyed your teaching. Sorry, I could not resist,

HelenaZ