Hi Everyone

I was wondering, why don't and/or can't homeopaths prescribe using disease names.

My logic is that all diseases are named after a certain set of physical symptoms which are found in all patients having that disease.

For example all patients of Malaria, Chicken pox etc. will have a certain set of necessary physical symptoms.

Knowing the disease name will easily point the direction of the homeopath towards a certain set of remedies that cover those symptoms. The only added info that a homeopath might need would be regarding the mental symptoms and then he can prescribe.

This essentially means that lab tests can be used as a very important tool in diagnosis and thus can help the homeopath become a better practitioner.

This might also mean that based on experience of homeopaths around the world we could have a specific number of disease specific remedies that work really well in certain diseases because those diseases affect only a certain type of people, thus making even constitutional prescribing easy.

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Don't take life too seriously, it aint permanent.

The symptoms that go into making the disease diagnosis are common to the disease. In order to find the similimum, it's necessary to find the symptoms that are unique to the person. The common symptoms will not lead to the correct remedy.

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Shirley Reischman

Hello FF,

Shirley said it all with the aphorism, but here's another point you made in your post--

'The only added info that a homeopath might need would be regarding the mental symptoms and then he can prescribe'.

As Shakespeare would say, "There's the rub"--

In other words, this isn't always as obvious as the disease diagnosis and the associated common symptoms.

And how many times do we see people with conflicting diagnoses, based on how many specialists they've seen?

Aph 220: By adding the patient's mental and emotional state (accurately observed by the patient's relations and the physician) to the patient's somatic symptoms, a complete image of the disease is put together. In order to homeopathically cure the malady (if the mental disease had already lasted for some time) a medicine must be sought from among the (antipsoric, etc.) medications which is capable of arousing aptly similar symptoms and, especially, the similar mental derangement.

FF, I just want to add that when you use the common symptoms of the disease, which is what would happen when you use the disease name, you'll get lots of remedies with no way to disctinguish them. Also, if you perscribe based on the common symptoms, there's only a small chance that by luck you got the similimum and it's likely that the remedy will not be curative. Even without reference to the Organon, if you followed enough cases, you'll see by experience that it doesn't work. That's why homeopaths often get patients who know a smattering of homeopthy and have gone to health food stores for years, taking remedies they thought would cure them and the problem keeps coming back.

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Shirley Reischman

Prescribing on disease name

We can not entirly rule out "Not to prescribe" on disease names. It was in practice by Hahnemann himself in his pre-stage when homeopathy was discovered. Later on he put banned on it. There were so many reasons.

In the modern era today, modern devices / equipments / accessoreis are available to pin point the symptoms and name of the disease. Still you can prescribe on diagnosis but not entirely depend upon it.

Come out from your home and visit 100 homeopaths in their clinic and observe them with your own eyes and see some 50 % have adopted this method. Few of them are very successful. We can not ignore this reality.

WE CAN NOT SAY LOUDLY THAT THIS METHOD OF PRESCRIPTION DOES NOT WORK. This method also work but this method is against the soul of homeopathy.

[ 22. June 2003, 19:19: Message edited by: Homeopath Nasim ]

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Dr. Nasim Ahmed<br />Family Homeopathic clinic

This type of thinking also contributed to the downfall of homeopathy in the late 19th/early 20th century. Any book on the history of homeopathy in the US points out this fact. There are many times where the indicated remedy is not listed under the pathological diagnosis in the repertory.

Actually I had recently read an article by Will Taylor where he suggested having success with Puls in 60% of his cases of Chicken pox and he so mentioned that this can be of help.

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Don't take life too seriously, it aint permanent.

Our 50% customer bring prescription based on disease names.

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Imran Achkzai of marala

I've been rereading old papers since engaging in this site because it's so easy to make mistakes in homeopathy and it helps me resolve outstanding dilemmas in my own understanding of it. Indeed, it is such a difficult subject and so easy to make mistakes -- 10, 20, might as well as be a gazillion times more difficult than any other subject, especially considering the misrepresentations of it by the no-rules crew and other LPHs and the HPH generalizers who reflexively and prejudicially think of medicines when they hear symptoms rather than simply taking the case without presumptuous biases -- that a person is lucky if they fail to make other than mistakes in their first 10-20 years every time they open their mouths about homeopathy. P.P. Wells reinforced this odd thought by saying that it took him 25 years to get it right. Funny cowinkydink, me too, only I still make mistakes. Fortunately, I have another four months for him to sneer at me from the invisible until I pass beyond that excuse.

To the point, I said the following just before naming the three common symptoms I spotted in the cat's case (Dempstra's in Trouble): "That [oozing-blood-n-pus element of the case] has to be an uncommon/characteristic symptom I missed in this case but will never again because it must also belong to the drug, WHICH IS NOT ALL WAYS THE SITUATION BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION" [emphasis added].

This is a major fact in homeopathy that's felt important to get right early on, for much literature from HPHs and well-meaning Hahnemannians instead has it that the characteristic symptoms of patients must match the characteristic symptoms of the drug. I will provisionally grant that for the polychrests (drugs with "many useful purposes") but caution against it in general as misleading and a backward view of homeotherapeutics, for Hahnemann never said that except marginally or mildly twice about Boeinghausen's formal identification of characteristics of drugs. He instead repeatedly simply said that the uncommon or characteristic symptoms have to exist in the pathogenic record of drug provings ("tests or trials") we call materia medica.

Those are two completely different dicta. The former is ideal but seldom found outside the polychrests because 1) except for "fixed or specific diseases" (by which Hahnemann specifically referred to infectious diseases but to which we can now probably add many well-defined chronic diseases due to advances in pathology -- I cringe saying that), cases of disease are each unique and appear in "endless variety" never to be seen again exactly the same way (Art. 81 and THE LESSER WRITINGS, pp. 442, 499, 525, 622, 712 & 741), and 2) we are always adding characteristic symptoms to the materia medica and know so few of them except for most of those belonging to the well-known and often-prescribed drugs.

On the other hand, the latter view that cases have uncommon symptoms we thus match in the materia medica irregardless of their status there is not fraught with the hazard of so-called contraindication simply because it lacks the one or more recognized characteristic symptoms of the drug being considered. There is a fine line here I must stipulate about contraindications before proceeding.

We can perhaps best show this stipulation with examples of drug characteristics that Hahnemann demonstrated in the case of the washerwoman (THE LESSER WRITINGS, pp. 766-73), or we can show additional contraindications of well-known and often-prescribed drugs (also meaning by implication polychrests). It would, for instance, be difficult or impossible to justify Arsenicum album in a case that is not chilly, fastidious, restless and constantly thirsty for sips of cold water. Likewise, Bryonia alba patients won't move due to pains on any motion, and Pulsatilla often wants fresh air at any price. People requiring the snake venoms in dynamization characteristically have neck problems, which is easy to remember because they're just one long neck with a usually vicious head, so we would logically question such prescriptions in cases lacking neck pains and something at least similar to being snide if not cruel. These examples go on and on about the polychrests.

But I don't refer to this level of characteristic symptoms of drugs, nor to the polychrests. I mean simply that these cases are ideal and permit us to prescribe those drugs rather easily when they're well known (not my level of materia-medica knowledge), but the actual simillimum will more often be found if we instead think first of matching characteristic symptoms of cases with the materia medica and ignore that they are ideally characteristic symptoms of some drugs. Hering, from the Preface to THE GUIDING SYMPTOMS OF OUR MATERIA MEDICA, says:

"The definition of a characteristic being 'a symptom not found under more than one remedy' is quite erroneous. Such a unicum occurring among a large collection of symptoms should be looked upon with suspicion. On the contrary, all our approved characteristics, as they have been corroborated time and time again, are never such as are found in one medicine alone."

The number of recognized characteristic symptoms is constantly increasing, so it seems an important fact to bring forward about what we do. Now I again quote Hering about this from the Preface of his magnum opus, THE GUIDING SYMPTOMS OF OUR MATERIA MEDICA:

"[The pointing-finger symbol] indicates an approved characteristic, BUT IS SELDOM USED [emphasis mine], by reason of our not wishing to appear authoritative. It is to be hoped that the combined experience of many practitioners, solicited from all sides [Hering's nature was ever generous and solicitous of Truth], will enable us in a future edition to designate many more symptoms with this mark."

I will refine these thoughts and add references over time, but I wanted to offer them for consideration of like-minded people. Moreover, a recent question or two here precipitated it, so I wanted to take a stab at addressing the issue of specific drugs for specific diseases since that underlies the thought of characteristic symptoms of drugs with which Hahnemann and his crew gained command of the infectious diseases and raging epidemics, then command over syphilis and gonorrhea and subsequently proceeded to identify particular drugs as principal curatives for various chronic diseases, which of course we were first to identify as such by their common symptoms. Stress is laid here that the common symptoms sometimes help us think of classes of drugs for conditions, while the uncommon symptoms permit us to prescribe for individuals in those pathological categories.

Parenthetically, allopaths and LPHs don't do this because they don't understand this basic premise of uncommon symptoms pointing to individualizing prescriptions according to the Law of Similars. It's really stupid of them to overlook this obvious fact, because the whole object of pathology ("study of suffering," i.e., of symptoms in particular and diseases in general) is to know what is to be cured. Thank God, some of them are finally trying to turn away from battling diseases to curing patients. Better late than never. However, no matter how far they proceed in this correct direction of individualizing prescriptions via DNA researches, which will be forlorn since it identifies only comparatively useless predispositions to diseases by name rather than identifiable and useful symptoms for individualized prescriptions, they will forever be hamstrung in the search for specifics without the Law of Similars, and LPHs constantly prove that they will never be able to cure without ultramolecular drugs. To whit, they might as well spit into the wind and keep us from doing it to them, and go back to school along our lines since we cure and they don’t! Argh... I despise them! Fortunately, heaps of them are finally ready for the big quantum leap out of the Dark Ages into 25th-century medicine. I try to remember that, really I do.

An epitomal reference here is Georg von Keller's "Psorinum, Psora, and Miasms" from HOMEOTHERAPY, Vol. 9, No. 3, May-June 1983, pp. 74-81. It's in four holdings: the NCNM (Portland), John Bastyr (Seattle), Nat'l Lib. of Med. (Bathesda) and Northwestern Health Sciences University (Bloomington, Minnesota). If I had a secretary, she'd type this up with a really big smile. In lieu of that, I begin it myself through a few paragraphs pending interest.

"HERING ENDEAVORS TO FIND A PREVENTATIVE [PREVENTIVE] FOR PSORA

"Jenner introduced cowpox vaccination in 1798. We can imagine only with difficulty what that meant to the people of the time, what hopes this awakened in the suffering populations. The medical world of Hahnemann's time was deeply marked by the great epidemic diseases, by the helplessness with which they confronted any acute disease, including the exanthematous diseases of childhood. Even measles often ended in death.

"Something that would protect against one of these life-threatening diseases must have seemed miraculous. Naturally, people investigated the possibility of vanquishing other diseases in the same way. What better to do than to eliminate the source of all ills, that age-old scourge, Psora?

"Hering experimented with Psorinum and wrote, 'I wanted above all to have a general prophylactic for scabies, something which [that] seemed to me to be far more important than just another new remedy.' And elsewhere he said, 'Finding a medicine that would protect against Psora would be the greatest discovery of all.'

"HAHNEMANN ENDEAVORS TO FIND A SPECIFIC REMEDY FOR PSORA

"Even without these high-reaching plans, homoeopathy had been, from the beginning, spectacularly successful in the treatment of life-threatening acute diseases. It was above all a use of remedies 'specific' to a given epidemic which [that] succeeded in keeping mortality to an astonishingly low level compared with the usual methods of treatment.

"'Specific remedies' meant that a collective disease picture had to be assembled, one which was characteristic of the entire epidemic, not just individual patients, and that the remedy most similar to this collective disease picture had to be found and then administered to every individual patient alike. This same method of treating with specifics also worked with venereal diseases, when the primary lesions had not been suppressed by external treatment. The remedies for epidemics had to be determined anew for each new epidemic, even if the new appearance went by the same name as before; but the specific remedies for the chronic venereal diseases were always the same, Thuja with Nitric acid for Sycosis, and Mercury for Syphilis.

"Up to this point homeopathy was a complete success. But the more Hahnemann turned his attention to treating chronic diseases the less permanent his successes were. Hering wrote, 'Hahnemann made the same discovery that we all do: some patients get well, some don't. When the remedy was exactly similar [the possibility of which increases with more well-known drugs] he did of course obtain cures, but in chronic cases they often didn't last. Hahnemann's unusual powers of observation allowed him to see the difference between cases that remained cured and those that didn't. He discovered that symptoms must be removed in the reverse order of their appearance; that the most recent symptoms are always the most important ones in the selection of the remedy; and that when the symptoms disappear in the reverse order of their coming, the patient remains cured, but not if they disappear in any other order.'

"'The same abilities allowed him to recognize that improvement was greater and lasted longer in those chronic cases in which an eruption appeared, than in those where internal symptoms went away without anything appearing externally. That gave Hahnemann the idea, the hypothesis [for contagious psora as the cause of all other diseases]. In the same way he would put together pictures of current epidemics or intermittent fevers, he now put together the picture of those who had had scabies which [that] had been suppressed, and who thereafter suffered from chronic diseases.'

"This was how the hypothesis of the miasmatic [contagious] nature of non-venereal chronic diseases began. Hahnemann thought that this discovery had put him on the trail of a specific cure for Psora. He wrote in a letter in 1823, 'To find this missing piece of the puzzle and thus to fully clarify the art of entirely eradicating the ancient chronic diseases, is what I have striven to do day and night for the last four years of my life, and finally after a thousand tests and experiments, and after ceaseless reflection I have achieved my aim.'

"IN ANY CASE, A METHOD OF TREATING CHRONIC DISEASES WAS FORMULATED

"Hahnemann and Hering's expectations were not fulfilled. A specific for Psora was not found, nor was it possible to find a vaccine, as Hahnemann had once forseen [sic]. But the hypothesis of the miasmatic [contagious] nature, even of non-venereal chronic diseases, was a definite step forward in the development of homoeopathic theory and practice. Hering wrote the following about this development: 'The Hahnemannian school follows without preconceived notions[,] only plain experience, and when it happens to permit hypotheses, it never considers them to be essential.'

"Hahnemann worked for eleven years to find a specific remedy for Psora. With the help of the hypothesis of the miasmatic [contagious] nature of Psora he thought to be able to find the specific, as we have read in the letter cited above. He soon realized that there was no one, single remedy for Psora, and that the number of anti-Psoric remedies would become larger and larger. In a letter of 1827 he speaks of six or eight remedies; in 1828 the first edition of the Chronic Diseases appeared with 21 remedies, and finally in 1835 there were 47 remedies in the second edition.

"He also reached the conclusion that even in an individual case one remedy was not sufficient, and in 1829, in the fourth edition of the Organon, he came for the first time to the formulation of paragraph 168: 'In non-venereal chronic diseases, therefore those arising from Psora, one often needs to use several anti-Psoric remedies in succession to bring about a cure, each to be chosen because it is homoeopathic to the group of symptoms remaining after the previous one has completed its action.' [Very important that one remember here what Lippe said about zig zagging cases to cure before Apis, for the precision of prescription matches goes up with more well-known drugs.]

"THE SPECIFISTS FOLLOWED HAHNEMANN ONLY PART OF THE WAY

"Many of Hahnemann's contemporaries turned away from this arduous method of treating chronic diseases, in which one is resigned to patiently search for a new remedy whenever a new disease picture presents itself. They stayed with the method of treating by specifics that Hahnemann had used in dealing with acute diseases, and called themselves Specifists. One of their most prominent representatives, Richard Hughes, wrote the following [foolishness] in an article entitled 'The Two Homoeopathies': 'Anything new which a man [here he means Hahnemann] manages to put forth after his 74th year, is not necessarily good in all its particulars. And the fact that Hahnemann established the 30th attentuations as the standard dose for provings and for treatment does not make us bid welcome to the rest of his innovations. To make the Hahnemann of 1830-1843 our leader is, in my opinion, to put ourselves at the mercy of his senility.' Richard Hughes was at that time 41 years old [and never got but dumber].

"Others tried again to continue Hering's investigations of Psorinum, and to be able to use the products of illness, if not to protect against the same disease, then at least to cure it.

"Thorer wrote in 1833: 'The discovery of a class of remedies made from contagious disease substances that were used to treat the contagious diseases from which they came, was what brought about a temporary confusion, a momentary doubt about the correctness of the homoeopathic principle.' Hering and Hahnemann quickly found their way back to the principle, to curing by means of symptom similarity. Others tried repeatedly to introduce this class of remedies that were used against the same diseases which [that] they produced, e.g., Tuberculinum for tuberculosis in the wider sense, and Syphilinum for the imagined syphilitic diathesis.

"The quintessence which [that] finally came from Hahnemann's research from Psora is this: in acute diseases one can expect to get along nicely [in a case] with a single remedy, perhaps even with a remedy specific for the disease; but in cases of developed Psora [chronic disease], that is, in every prolonged and troublesome case of chronic disease, one must accept the fact that one will need several or many remedies in succession [again remember zig zagging and more well-known drugs], since the disease will change its form without being extinguished. Also, Psora often passes into its variable latent state, a state which [that] Hahnemann described as follows: 'The man afflicted with a few or several of these complaints (dormant Psora) takes himself to be healthy and others also take him to be so. He can in this state lead a very tolerable life for years and can carry on his activities relatively unhindered.'

"PSORINUM AS AN INTERCURRENT REMEDY

“… …”

[ 28. June 2003, 03:44: Message edited by: Hahnemannian444 ]

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Albert, also Hahnemannian444B

Edited: "...WHICH IS NOT ALWAYS..."

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Albert, also Hahnemannian444B