Imagine Homeopathy E-Book

Christian Kurz

• Herausgeber: Thieme
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Seitenzahl: 383

Beschreibung

The art and science of truly successful homeopathic medicine. With the recent resurgence in the practice of homeopathy—whether practiced alone or as a complement to other types of medicine—comes an unprecedented demand for well-educated, highly trained practitioners. What type of education will lead to true success? Can the art of homeopathy be taught alongside the scientific concepts? Generations of homeopaths have mastered such concepts as homeoprophylaxis, genus epidemicus, and constitution, but only the truly successful practitioners have achieved a level of understanding far beyond simply dealing with patients. In this unique book, homeopath Chris Kurz offers a highly effective—and fun—approach to learning and importantly, retaining, all of the important concepts of homeopathy. Using vivid analogies and informal language, Kurz emphasizes the importance of true insight rather than rote memorization. Infusing a student's personal experience with creativity and imagination creates the most fertile ground for discovering and developing true insight and knowledge of homeopathy. Each chapter explores a concept through the lens of an experiment, metaphor, or image. For example, an intense examination of a common lemon brings home the notions of totality and the law of similars; a road map unlocks the mysteries of Miasms, and a game of golf illustrates important issues of case management. The result of years working with students, Kurz's inspirational and thought-provoking approach places the patient at the center of the learning process, as in everyday practice. Imagine Homeopathy is invaluable as a guide for teachers, an introduction for novices and laypeople, and a provocative refresher for seasoned practitioners.

Leseprobe

Imagine Homeopathy

A Book of Experiments, Images, and Metaphors

Chris Kurz, Ph.D.

Private Practice Eisenstadt, Austria

34 illustrations

ThiemeStuttgart • New York

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kurz, Chris.

Imagine homeopathy : a book of experiments, images, and metaphors / Chris Kurz. p. ; cm.

ISBN 3-13-139221-5 (alk. paper) -ISBN 1-58890-331-1 (alk. paper) 1. Homeopathy.

[DNLM: 1. Homeopathy. WB 930 K96i 2005] I. Title. RX71.K87 2005 615.5’32-dc22

2005008510

Photo credits:

Fig. 3, p. 35: Roland Schuller

Fig. 6, p. 71: www.photosphere.com

Fig. 25, p. 254: www.philipgreenspun.com

Illustrator: Adrian Cornford

© 2005 Georg Thieme Verlag, Rüdigerstrasse 14, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany

http://www.thieme.de

Thieme New York, 333 Seventh Avenue,

New York, NY 10001 USA

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Typesetting by Satzpunkt Ewert GmbH, Bayreuth

Printed in Germany by Appl, Wemding ISBN 3-13-139221-5 (GTV) ISBN 1-58890-331-1 (TNY)

Important note: Medicine is an ever-changing science undergoing continual development. Research and clinical experience are continually expanding our knowledge, in particular our knowledge of proper treatment and drug therapy. Insofar as this book mentions any dosage or application, readers may rest assured that the authors, editors, and publishers have made every effort to ensure that such references are in accordance with the state of knowledge at the time of production of the book.

Nevertheless, this does not involve, imply, or express any guarantee or responsibility on the part of the publishers in respect to any dosage instructions and forms of applications stated in the book. Every user is requested to examine carefully the manufacturers’ leaflets accompanying each drug and to check, if necessary in consultation with a physician or specialist, whether the dosage schedules mentioned therein or the contraindications stated by the manufacturers differ from the statements made in the present book. Such examination is particularly important with drugs that are either rarely used or have been newly released on the market. Every dosage schedule or every form of application used is entirely at the user’s own risk and responsibility. The authors and publishers request every user to report to the publishers any discrepancies or inaccuracies noticed. If errors in this work are found after publication, errata will be posted at www.thieme.com on the product description page.

Some of the product names, patents, and registered designs referred to in this book are in fact registered trademarks or proprietary names even though specific reference to this fact is not always made in the text. Therefore, the appearance of a name without designation as proprietary is not to be construed as a representation by the publisher that it is in the public domain.

This book, including all parts thereof, is legally protected by copyright. Any use, exploitation, or commercialization outside the narrow limits set by copyright legislation, without the publisher’s consent, is illegal and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to photostat reproduction, copying, mimeographing, preparation of microfilms, and electronic data processing and storage.

I dedicate this book to Kathi and Alex.

They have shown me how much magic there is in imagination.

Foreword

I am honored to have been asked to write this introduction by the author. Although I have known Chris “on-line” for about ten years, I finally met him in person when I visited Slovenia in August 2004. I was not disappointed.

In the last 20 years there has been an amazing resurgence of homeopathy. Since 1990 there have been more books published about homeopathy than there were between 1875 and 1885—the “golden age of homeopathy.” Publishing a book about homeopathy is not a money-making proposition. Most authors, now as then, write books either at the behest of their students or because they believe they have something valuable to say. It remains for the readers to sort the wheat from the chaff and it will be a task that will happen over time.

Many of the books written these days concern homeopathic methodology, the “how to do it.” Many of them are based on the author’s clinical experience. In this category we have the books by Rajan Sankaran that introduced us to the concepts of “king-doms"—the need to assess patients in terms of their need of an animal, mineral, or plant remedy—and the books by Jan Scholten that take us through a fanciful exploration of the periodic table where the series and stages can point us to unknown remedies that might be useful in a case. Many of the newer books are about the provings of new remedies: the numerous milks from both animals and humans, the feathers of birds, the blood of several species, and the assorted other elements—hydrogen, neon, plutonium—as well as a number of meditative provings of imponderables like Luna and Sol.

But among all these books there are few, if any, that get to the issues that are underneath it all; what is homeopathy and, moreover, how do we think about it? Those are the big questions the answers to which are found, one step removed, in all those other books.

The grand philosopher Bertrand Russell said: “Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”

What Chris is asking us to do is exactly that: to think about the “why” and not the “how” of it. It is a piece of homeopathy that is not often talked about as people rush into learning the method before asking the basic questions.

Says Chris: “Although this book will not by itself revolutionize educational practices in homeopathy, I conceived it with the teacher in mind. Hopefully, it will encourage more lecturers and educators to rethink their teaching style.” And that is certainly needed. Good clinicians are not necessarily good teachers.

We see this rush into the method and inadequate teaching at many seminars. The speaker presents a case and asks, “What remedy did I give?” Often, no one can “guess” the remedy and the speaker then astounds the audience by discussing a new or unknown remedy. This playing of “guess the remedy” is not a homeopathic way of doing it. We all learn, in § 84 of the Organon, to never ask closed questions. Is “What remedy did I give?” a closed question? It certainly is getting close!

The real questions to be asked are: In what ways can we look at this case? What is important in this case? What methodology would suit this case in this instance? Which symptoms are the most individualizing? To do this requires thinking about it at the level at which homeopathy truly exists, a multi-dimensional discipline where every piece has a direct bearing on every other piece. It is the “holographic entity of a well-planned curriculum” that Chris is talking about.

“Our goal,” says Chris, “should therefore be—put a bit provocatively—to teach all of homeopathy in every lesson.” It is these many parts and the way of drawing them together that Chris discusses in this book. He is not discussing the “how” but rather the “why.” And that is what sets this book apart from all the other introductory books about homeopathy that we find on the market.

As Chris points out, many seem to hang their cases against homeopathy upon its non-intuitive reasoning that appears to be completely illogical: if someone suffers from a disease, he may be cured by a medicine which has the power to produce just such a disease in a healthy subject.

But keeping in mind the duality of homeopathy which is both a deductive philosophy and a practical methodology, we can again quote Bertrand Russell, who says: “the purpose of philosophy is to begin with something so obvious as to not seem worth stating (i.e., the concept of the vital force) and to end up with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it” (like homeopathy!).

It is this very paradox that Chris so eloquently reviews in this book using the grand overview afforded by his images, metaphors, and experiments. It is an approach which, I hope, will open a lot of minds!

Julian Winston Tawa, New Zealand January 2005

Acknowledgment

Before I started writing I had not realized how many people-knowingly or unknowingly—have actually contributed to this book.

For example, when writing the chapter about the individuality of a rose I was mentally transferred to the sunny room overlooking the Pacific Ocean in which I first discussed this idea with Vicky Menear. The idea of using a lemon to explain the law of similars came to fruition during a particularly fruitful discussion with Jo Daly at the sidelines of the 1997 IFH Conference in Seattle. The two cassettes that form the centerpiece of the chapter on homeopathy and its relation to science conjure up the memory of an argument with several fellow physicists who were unfortunate enough to challenge homeopathy one day in my lab at the university.

Then there are the members of the Lyghtforce mailing list. I received valuable feedback from them and would like to thank all of them collectively—and by no means less sincerely—for the bandwidth they shared with me. Among those, I want to mention David Little and Will Taylor in particular; their contributions, albeit via e-mail, are by no means confined to the virtual realm. My thanks also to Misha Norland, with whom I remember a particularly invigorating walk through the Devon landscape during which we talked about several topics that found their way into this book in one way or another. I also would like to mention discussions with Peter König, Massimo Mangialavori, and Jeremy Sherr who focused my thinking and sharpened my understanding.

Many thanks also to Roland Schuller for providing some sorely needed images of excellent quality at short notice.

A project is only as good as its critics. Therefore I want to mention Julian Winston and Uta Santos-König who took it upon themselves to read the unfinished manuscript and shared their thoughts with me.

Last but not least, my sincere and heartfelt thanks go out to all those people dear to me, who endured me, made amends, and cut me sufficient slack that I could afford the luxury of taking so much time out to finish this book.

Contents

1

Introduction

2

Note to Educators

A Shift in the Paradigm

Integrative Teaching

Teachable Moments

Hands-on Approach

Lessons Versus Workshops

3

The Lemon and the Dolphin

The Meditation

The Totality

The Law of Similars

The Scope of the Law of Similars

4

Cutting the Wire

The Two Meanings of Disease

The Metaphor

Suppression of Symptoms

Definition of Homeopathy

5

The Individuality of a Rose

The Meditation

The Unbiased Observer

Some Notes on Case Taking

Dimensions of a Symptom

6  A Game of Golf

The Meditation

Short Pitches and a Long Shot

Simillimum and Simile

Mapping the Terrain

The Next Shot

7  The O-Ring

The Experiment

Chaos and the Vital Force

Health, Disease, and the O-Ring

Acute and Chronic Diseases

A Layered Case

Miasms

A Soil for Disease

8  A Map of Disease

What Is a Miasm?

The Exercise

Different Views on Miasms

A Map of Disease

The Roots of Suffering

Isopathy and Nosodes

Mappa Mundi

9  Invisible Ink

Invisible Ink

Constitution

The Frozen Lake

A Homeopathic Proving

10  The Sunflower

The Experiment

The Process of a Remedy

Timelines

11  The Iceberg

Polypharmacy

12  The Hammer

The Structure of a Repertory

Limitations of a Repertory

Repertorization Pitfalls

Computer Repertories

13  Solving the Puzzle

Strange, Rare, and Peculiar

Totality

The Signature of a Remedy

Doctrine of Signatures

14  A tape recording

Empty or Not?

The Street Lamp

Homeopathy and Science

The Three Questions

15  The Dam

A Historic Detour of Posology

The Dam

Preparation of LM Potencies

Case Management with LM Potencies

Some Case Examples

16  A Well-Guarded House

The Metaphor

The Vaccination Strategy

Childhood Diseases

Treatment of Vaccination Side Effects—Vaccinosis

Homeoprophylaxis and Genus Epidemicus

17  Above and Beyond

Mind and Matter

Dramatic Conflict

Placebo and the Evolution of Science

References

Register

1Introduction

We live in an exciting time in which alternative therapies are beginning to reemerge from their long hibernation. Of those therapies, homeopathy is among the fastest growing and most widespread. On the one hand, this creates great opportunities to establish homeopathy as viable and often preferable to orthodox medicine. On the other hand, the explosive growth inherently comes with a challenge: the homeopathic community needs to find ways to meet the growing demand of capable practitioners.

In a historical context, homeopathy has already taken a wrong turn under similar circumstances. At the beginning of the twentieth century the popularity of homeopathy reached a peak in the United States, which led to a rise in the number of schools, practitioners, and homeopathic hospitals. Sadly, this rise was followed by a steep decline only a few decades thereafter, which almost led to its extinction. Dr. Daniel Cook, in a presentation at the 1995 Ohio Homeopathic Meeting, said, “If we don’t identify what caused the problems and conditions that led to homeopathy’s decline back then, we may overlook them if they happen in our time. And there are certainly a number of parallels between homeopathy at the end of this century and homeopathy at the turn of the last century. So, it’s more than just academic interest that should make us wonder about this question.” 1

There were several reasons for its near demise. The root of the problem, however, appears to me to have been the exchange of quality in favor of quantity. Never before had there been so many practicing homeopaths with so little grasp of the art and science they were practicing. Homeopathic schools and colleges failed to turn out competent and well-grounded homeopaths and graduated half-homeopaths in large numbers. The reputation of homeopathy was lost with this dilution of knowledge. By the 1940s, homeopathy had the status of an obscure and inconsequential treatment modality in America and most other parts of the world.

The credit for rekindling the fire and causing homeopathy to rise from its ashes goes in large part to a few charismatic and dedicated men and women who saw clearly what was needed. They recognized the need for high standards in training, modern teaching methods, and a firm grounding in the science and philosophy of homeopathy.

If we are to learn anything from history, it is that growth is impossible without proportional numbers of well-educated practitioners. This issue, to me, determines the lasting growth and recognition of homeopathy, and ultimately its success in lessening suffering in this world.

The term well-educated, in my opinion, encompasses all areas of knowledge: materia medica, history, philosophy, case taking, case analysis and case management, not forgetting the basics of medical science such as anatomy, physiology, and pathology. Yet someone who is knowledgeable in all of the above may still lack the necessary understanding to become a good homeopath. All truly exceptional homeopaths I know have one thing in common: they share a deep understanding of homeopathy that goes beyond their interaction with patients and gives them the ability to experience and discover homeopathy everywhere, in every facet of life. They have become skilled in the science as well as in the art of homeopathy. What the diligent but otherwise uninspired student of homeopathy is lacking turns out to be the same thing that, in a musical concert, transforms mechanical notes into an artistic performance. We refer to homeopathy as an “art and science,” quietly admitting that the scientific part is amenable to being taught, studied, and learned. But what about the artistic part? Can it be taught too? Or does a person have to be genetically endowed with it?

As I see it, the art of homeopathy has something to do with allowing homeopathy to permeate one’s view of life. It grows stronger as the distinction between homeopathy and all the rest diminishes. This is not a process of blurring and neglecting. On the contrary, it is all about sharpening one’s perception to recognize the common foundation upon which health and disease, life and death, rest. One way to start this process is to internalize and become intimately familiar with all important concepts of homeopathy. Not only on an intellectual but also on an intuitive and emotional level.

Practicing homeopathy requires a holistic and open-minded approach to all information pertaining to the patient’s persona, disease, and homeopathic materia medica. If this is indeed the case, should homeopathy not be taught in the same way in which it is intended to be practiced afterward? The idea for this book emerged as a result of my lecturing and teaching engagements in study groups and at various seminars. It quickly became clear that students understand and retain conceptual homeopathic knowledge best if they become engaged in the material in a holistic way. It emerged that there are four key elements which, when emphasized in every learning experience, make it much more successful and even enjoyable: analogies are the main vehicle connecting different parts of knowledge; the emphasis is on insight rather than rote knowledge; personal experience irrigated with imagination yields the most fertile ground for insight; and true learning is always and solely trying to remind you of something you already know.

This book is written for people who want to take the time to understand things at a deeper level. People who like to draw parallels, think in analogies and have fun milking a metaphor for every bit of insight. And of course people who are looking for ways to explain the often difficult framework of homeopathic science to other inquiring minds. It is intended for those who have just started a course of study in homeopathy as well as for those who would enjoy a new perspective on things learned long ago.

And, not least, this book is for those in the homeopathic community who have taken it upon themselves to pass on the knowledge and teach.

To reach a profound level of understanding requires a good, solid foundation in basic homeopathic philosophy. Terms and concepts like totality, miasms, and constitution are, although ubiquitous and frequently used, in many cases poorly understood and not internalized. I am fully aware that there is no one correct interpretation of the concepts presented. Homeopathy is already too diverse a field for that. But just as I learned much from other people presenting their views to me, I hope you will find what I collected in this book useful for yourself.

In keeping with Hahnemann’s warning that theoretical speculation and fruitless theory can never be the goal of a true healer, the new-found knowledge must have an impact on our prescribing to merit the effort. For myself I can say that whenever I was confronted with new insights on some basic aspect of homeopathy, my ability to help patients also took a step forward.

In this book, each chapter is devoted to one experiment, metaphor, or image which throws light on a particular area of homeopathy. It is by no means unintentional that some concepts are covered in more than one chapter. There are always different ways of looking at things and examining them in various contexts. Correspondingly, this book need not be read from cover to cover, page by page. You can pick and choose, jumping from one chapter to another; just follow your curiosity.

Toward the beginning of most chapters you will find instructions for a little experiment or meditation. I urge you to take the time and go through with this before reading on. You will benefit from it in several ways: setting aside the few minutes’ time ensures that you are in a calm and receptive state of mind; performing a physical task opens up new neural pathways for learning and involves more of your brain in the act; looking at a three-dimensional object better focuses your attention; and it is simply more fun than dry mental exercises.

Make sure you have pen and paper handy before starting on an experiment. There will be many interesting thoughts crossing your mind which will be lost to you if you do not jot them down. Modern research tells us that if you skip this step you are depriving yourself of more than 40% of the learning effect.

As a book like this is never finished, I am, of course, keen to learn about your ideas and suggestions. What really interests me is how you “imagine” homeopathy. You can send me a note with your thoughts by email to the following address: [email protected].

1 Quoted from J. Winston, The Faces of Homoeopathy. Tawa, New Zealand: Great Auk Publishing; 1999:226

2Note to Educators

Homeopathy is a holistic approach to healing which rightly puts the whole human being at the heart of its practice. Without acknowledging the indivisibility of body, mind, soul, and spirit, perceiving the totality of the individual disease will remain an elusive goal. We certainly expect every well-trained homeopath to practice with the individual patient at the center of his/her attention and with the patient’s unique wholeness in mind.

If we expect graduates of any school to subscribe to this philosophy then the same standards should be set for the teachers— with one significant difference: as educators we have to realize that we are practicing homeopathy every time we are interacting with our students. Therefore our curriculum, our lessons, our teaching style, and our entire approach to teaching must be holistic. The message we convey in a course in homeopathy is very much affected by the way the course is taught, not just by what is said in each lecture. I will try to explain exactly what I mean by this in the following paragraphs.

A well-planned and effective curriculum is very much a holographic entity. The message we want to convey has to be present at each level of student interaction. Teaching is not about baffling students with our knowledge but rather about surprising them with how much they themselves already know.

A Shift in the Paradigm

The traditional teaching style has changed little over the past 150 years. We still meet the teacher preaching to the students in most instances. Yet our understanding of the learning process and how it can be facilitated has grown considerably in the past decades. It is high time, in my opinion, to let the stale air out of our courses in homeopathy and unleash the true potential of our students’ minds.

I would like to touch briefly on several features which are the key to effective teaching. Let me start with an example. If you want to explain to somebody how to get to a certain place, you have two choices. You can either tell him where he is supposed to go or how he is supposed to get there. The former is a goal-oriented approach, the latter process-oriented.

Conventionally, when we teach a class, we have a goal in mind. We want to “get” there, “cover” the material. This attitude is not good homeopathy; we would not interact with a patient in this way, with the thought of getting the remedy first and foremost into our mind. Therefore, a goal-oriented attitude when teaching is counter to the message we want to send out. Just think of tourist guides. Their job is to show people around a certain place, make them familiar with it. Their primary job is not getting them from the entrance of the castle to its exit.

If I wanted to introduce the remedy Sulphur, I would not aim to teach Sulphur but rather teach homeopathy using Sulphur as an example. In practice this is a subtle difference in teaching style which nonetheless has a profound impact on the climate and success of a course.

Integrative Teaching

It is a well-known fact that new material is better absorbed and retained if the way in which it relates to already familiar knowledge is apparent to the student from the beginning. This means that we have to make contact with the everyday world as much as possible and draw our examples and metaphors from there. But there is also a less obvious application of this principle. Let me explain.

Our goal, put in abstract terms, is to convey knowledge of a certain area up to a certain (minimum) depth. We can get there by two principally different routes. One is to go over small sections of the material in great detail, covering a different section in each lesson. When we piece together all the sections near the end of the course, we have reached our goal. Another approach is to cover large chunks of the material in each class period but go into proportionally less detail. In this manner we are covering a lot of ground each time but need to come back several times to reach the required depth of knowledge.

For many teachers the first approach is more familiar since it allows them to “check off” parts of the material as they are covered in class. The students are exposed to each topic in turn and to the required level of detail. However, they are thereby deprived of the big picture from the outset and only start to get a grasp of it towards the end of the course. By sacrificing depth for breadth, as the second approach suggests, they are able to see an outline of the whole from the very beginning. Every lecture then strives to add detail to the already existing picture. In this manner the students have a place to put the new knowledge and see it in context with what they already know. Our goal should therefore be—put a bit provocatively—to teach all of homeopathy in every lesson.

Teachable Moments

There is a right time for everything in life. From our practices we know that there is a right time for healing, and any attempt to force a cure onto someone is bound to fail. Similarly, there is a time for the mind to learn. If the mind is not open, no amount of teaching skills will fill it with new knowledge. A teacher needs to be receptive for those magic moments when a mind asks for knowledge and be able to take advantage of them. It is not good enough to say: “Today we are going to learn about Sulphur,” without first opening the minds for Sulphur. We have to create the need to know, make room for those teachable moments, before presenting the information.

In practice I have learned that the time spent preparing a lesson is more than half devoted to finding ways to open the students’ minds. Filling them with the required information is comparatively easy. In this, a delicate balance is required between guiding the class and being guided by it. Those teachable moments are the “strange, rare, and peculiar” symptoms in our cases: we have to have an antenna out for them all the time, otherwise they slip by unnoticed.

Hands-on Approach

Hands-on learning has become a buzz word in modern education; it is much talked about though seldom practiced. Everybody knows from experience that learning by doing is much more effective than learning by listening. I have never heard of a carpenter who has been taught the theory of carpentry for several years before actually using a hammer for the first time. If comparatively simple concepts are best taught hands-on then how much more must this be true for abstract and complicated ones?

The patient is at the center of homeopathic practice; the patient must likewise be at the center of our teaching. This means that we have to teach following a case-centered curriculum. There is very little in homeopathy that cannot be taught using a case. Studying materia medica is noting more than taking the case of Mr. Silica, Mrs. Lachesis, or what have you. Repertorization, analysis, first and second prescription are other examples.

History and philosophy are easily taught with a case-centered approach.

For these reasons we have to find ways that allow students to observe and interact with cases as early as possible. True to the integrative approach described earlier, exposure to cases is not something that comes at the end of the course but rather an element of the curriculum which the student meets early on and becomes increasingly acquainted with throughout the course.

Hands-on learning also requires that the teacher minimize the time spent addressing the class in a traditional lecture style. Different interaction styles, used judiciously and in a varied manner throughout each lesson, are necessary to capture the interest and creativity of the class. There are many good books available which are a helpful resource for the teacher on this topic.

Lessons Versus Workshops

The paradigm shift in teaching, once instituted, will necessitate a gross shift in course and lesson planning. In practice, it is impossible to follow a hands-on, case-centered, holistic curriculum while maintaining a traditional 90-minutes-per-lesson format. In my experience, 2- to 3-day workshops are best suited to this way of teaching. Unless we make room for this amount of time, we will not be able to harness the power of group dynamics, allow an at-ease atmosphere to establish itself, or synchronize everyone’s creativity in a constructive way.

Although this book will not by itself revolutionize educational practices in homeopathy, I conceived it with the teacher in mind. Hopefully, it will encourage more lecturers and educators to rethink their teaching style. To this end I offer the images, metaphors, and experiments presented here as starting points to develop your own. I would certainly appreciate feedback from you about any new ideas you might have which you would like to contribute to make a second edition of Imagine Homeopathy even more useful and thought provoking.

3The Lemon and the Dolphin

The law of similarsThe totalityCase takingKeynotes and characteristic symptomsA context for the law of similars

Hahnemann was not exactly what you would call a diplomatic, round-about kind of person. He did not mince words and would get to the point right away. That is also why he devoted the beginning of the Organon to defining the centerpiece of homeopathy, which has since come to be known as the law of similars. “Let likes be cured by likes” is the English translation of what Hahnemann put in succinct Latin as “simila similibus curentur."

Many have taken this statement on which to hang their cases against homeopathy, since what it says appears to be completely illogical: if someone suffers from a disease, he may be cured by a medicine which has the power to produce just such a disease in a healthy subject.

Should not the exact opposite be true? If you are too cold you do not need more of the same but rather the opposite, namely heat. If a piece is bent to the right you give it a good whack to the left. Banging it on the right some more is not going to straighten it. All this seems true enough and is in fact the basis of common medical practice. If your heart beats too fast you need something which has the primary effect of slowing it down. A person with a high fever requires a drug which has the power to reduce the body temperature. The underlying pattern seems to be that one should be looking for something opposite to the patient’s symptom. This is the law of opposites, or “contraria contrariis” in Latin.

It is easy to see how, with the emergence of homeopathy, the stage was set for the conflict rattling at the basic tenets of medical thinking. It is either “simila similibus curentur” or “contraria contrariis.” There seems to be no middle ground between these two camps.

The Meditation

I would now like to invite you into a little meditation. You will need a lemon for the full experience but in case you are reading this book at an inconvenient time with no lemon at hand, take a look at the picture on page 14 and join in the meditation.

Take five to ten minutes to investigate the lemon inside out. Look at it, feel it, poke it. Cut it in half, taste it, smell it, study it in any way imaginable. I am sure there will not be too many surprises since this is only an ordinary lemon just like the ones you have squeezed the juice from or cut into slices many times before. But it is important that you refresh your memory and paint a vivid image of this lemon before your mental eye. Close your eyes and become a lemon.

Once you are satisfied, come back out of your peel and try to name as many properties as you can think of which make up the whole of the lemon. Jot them down on a piece of paper, one after the other. Do not be too analytical or too critical about this. You should have at least ten items on your list, the more the better. Your list may begin like this:

    roughly 5–10 cm in size

    yellow peel

    wrinkled peel

    citrus-like smell when scratching peel

    …

The Totality

There are so many features that make up a lemon, for example, its size, weight, and color, the texture of the peel, the smell when you scratch the peel. Then there is the color of the inside of the fruit, its taste, the shape of its pips, the amount of juice, etc. By the sum total of all of these you can recognize a lemon and tell it apart from other things.

You will probably agree with me that however long your list might be, it is by no means exhaustive. By using chemical analysis, for example, we could begin to include the amount of each and every chemical compound found in the object of our investigation. That would easily add many hundreds of items to the list. We might just as well decide to use a microscope and describe the cell structure in minute detail, which would contribute another big bunch of properties. And there is no end in sight.

Within the five letters of a lemon we have encountered what we call its “totality.” On one level it is almost impossible to describe a lemon in minute detail, yet on another it is almost trivial. Otherwise we would all be completely lost on our next shopping trip. This is a common experience with all totalities. In fact, in everyday life we often tend to think in totalities. Pretty much every object that surrounds us is a totality. From lemons to carrots, from chairs to chandeliers, from you to me including everyone in between. Incidentally, other words for totality which you might encounter are gestalt, quality, or entity.

It is fortunate that our thinking is well adapted to working with totalities. If I just say “fruit, yellow, tart, juicy” I bet you will discover pretty quickly that I was thinking of a lemon. We do not need complete information to identify a totality. Our mind works well with incomplete information and, by filling in the blanks, conjures up a rich, detailed, and life-like image which we recognize immediately.

In order to relate the lemon to homeopathy let me turn to § 6 of the Organon:

The unprejudiced observer, even the most sharp-witted one–knowing the nullity of supersensible speculations which are not born out in experience—perceives nothing in each single case of disease other than the alterations in the condition of the body and soul, disease signs, befallments, symptoms, which are outwardly discernable through the senses. That is, the unprejudiced observer only perceives the deviations from the former healthy state of the now sick patient, which are felt by the patient himself, perceived by those around him, and observed by the physician.

All these perceptible signs represent the disease in its entire extent, that is, together they form the true and only conceivable gestalt of the disease.

As instructed by Hahnemann, the physician needs to make a list of all observable symptoms just as you compiled the list of all lemon symptoms, so to speak. But it is not any individual symptom that is important to us; it is the entity which gives rise to all our observations in total that we seek to recognize. This is what Hahnemann calls the gestalt or totality of the disease. As such it is an elusive concept since we cannot nail it down on paper or teach it to a computer. If, however, we use our brain’s capability to think in entire images, we can accept the notion of a totality as the complete and entire image which is hinted at by an incomplete list of individually observable properties. Suppose you wanted to teach someone what a lemon was. Would you give him your list from before or would you rather just hand him a lemon? I bet that showing him a lemon has a much better chance of success.

In the previous experiment you actually went through the very process of a homeopathic patient interview (just allow me to neglect the fact that your patient was a lemon). During such an interview we see the gestalt of the disease sitting right in front of us and we cut it up into little bits and pieces which we write down on paper; these are called symptoms. If we are not careful we might end up with useless bits and pieces and no chance to recognize the totality, which expressed them, ever again. In order to make us see the whole we have to be careful what we write down. Let me give you an example.

Fig. 1 With just the right set of identifying features, our brain is able to recognize the underlying totality and fill in the blanks. Despite its lack of details, you will probably agree that this sketch shows a lemon.

Suppose you were allowed three statements to characterize a lemon and you chose the following:

    fruit

    edible

    has seeds

What are the chances of someone recognizing these as symptoms of a lemon totality? If, on the other hand, you put down:

    sour

    yellow

    juicy

the likelihood of guessing right is much higher, simply because these three properties are more characteristic of a lemon than the previous three.

It requires some experience and practice to take a good case which retains the characteristics of the disease totality. To help you focus on what is important, try asking yourself this question: “What makes this person unique?”

Have you ever been to one of those tourist places where street artists offer to draw a quick sketch of your likeness? The artist is trained to zoom in only on those features that are characteristic of you and distinguish you from everybody else. Anybody who knows you would recognize the totality which sat model for the drawing. And that is exactly what a good homeopathic interview should be like: the totality of the disease is expressed by the symptoms you notice and choose to include in your transcript.

There has been much misunderstanding about what exactly the expression “totality of symptoms” means. Some interpret it as being all symptoms, an exhaustive list of all observable changes caused by the disease. In the light of the previous discussion it is clear that no list of symptoms can ever be equivalent to the thing itself. The emphasis is not on the quantity of symptoms but on choosing those among all possible ones that make the underlying totality become apparent. These are the ones that enter in further case analysis such as repertorization and study of materia medica. These symptoms, which are particular characteristics of a disease totality, are often referred to as “strange, rare, and peculiar” symptoms. They are the ones that strike us as odd or out of the norm. A coldness in an extremity which is relieved by cold applications, for example. Nobody would find it the slightest bit odd if the same coldness were ameliorated by warmth. But it is strange, rare, and peculiar if cold should be what the patient craves in that particular case. Hahnemann points us in this very same direction in § 153 of the Organon:

In the search for a homeopathically specific remedy…the more striking, exceptional, unusual, and odd (characteristic) signs and symptoms of the disease case are to be especially and almost solely kept in view.…The more common and indeterminate symptoms (lack of appetite, headache, lassitude, restless sleep, discomfort, etc.) are to be seen with almost every disease and medicine and thus deserve little attention unless they are more closely characterized.

The Law of Similars

Let us do another thought experiment. First, clear your mind for a minute and then recall the image of the lemon from the beginning of this chapter. Starting from there, try to name the one thing most similar to a lemon. What comes closest to it? If you are like most people who have gone through this exercise, you probably thought of a lime. In most people’s understanding a lime comes closest to a lemon.

Now I want you to think of the opposite of a lemon. What is the most dissimilar entity to a lemon imaginable? This is where it starts to become interesting. Whereas most people have no problem settling for the lime in the first part, I have gotten wildly different answers to the second question. One particularly creative person insisted that a dolphin was the opposite of a lemon. He argued thus: The lemon is a fruit, the dolphin is not; the lemon is colorful, whereas the dolphin is a drab gray; the lemon has an uneven peel compared to the dolphin’s smooth skin. But what about the tartness of the lemon or the citric smell? Someone else identified a melon as being farthest from a lemon. The melon’s smooth exterior and its comparatively large size and sweet taste were her arguments.

Fig. 2 What is the opposite of a lemon? A melon? A dolphin?

I hope you begin to see the conclusion: there is no opposite of a lemon. Actually, we have just hit upon the much more general discovery that there is no opposite to any totality. Going back to your list of properties from the initial exercise you might be able to find opposing matches to each single line, just as the person did when he suggested the dolphin. He was looking down his list, picking out a few items: fruit, colorful, uneven peel; then he chose something that has opposing qualities to those. And it turned out to be a dolphin. The other person selected other items from her list and decided on a melon based on the opposites to those.

What conclusions are we going to draw from this experiment? First, whereas it is easy to find a similar totality to any given one, it is impossible to define an opposite. In fact, the only possible relationship between any two totalities is their degree of similarity. The significance of this insight becomes clear if we remind ourselves that a disease is, in fact, a totality. Therefore we are left to conclude that the degree of similarity is the only possible relationship between a patient’s disease and anything else. If there is a law of healing then it can only be based on similarity.

Hence, the law of similars is the only possible law of cure. It is important to point out that the application of this law is not necessarily limited to homeopathy. Any holistic therapeutic modality that uses the overall condition of the patient as its basis for treatment is built upon this law. Homeopathy, however, is the one where it is clearly stated as a principle and therefore most easily recognized as a basic tenant of its philosophy. But homeopathy by no means “invented” the law of similars, nor was it the first therapy to make use of it.

The logical chain of reasoning contained in the previous paragraphs is based on one assumption: that a disease is indeed an indivisible totality. If you agree with this, you cannot escape the law of similars. You may, of course, disagree with the notion of disease being a totality. Let us see where that leads us.

Suppose you do not think of disease as a single state, a totality. Then the list of symptoms you write down during a patient interview is just that: a list of disjointed observations with no underlying entity. In that case you can pick out any group from your list of symptoms and find an opposite to it. Since you do not believe that they are part of an indivisible whole, who is going to stop you from picking and choosing? As we have seen from the second exercise, the one with the dolphin and the melon, you can find opposites to an arbitrary group of symptoms. If a person with high blood pressure, fever, and depression consults you, he or she will likely be prescribed three different remedies: an anti-hypertensive drug against the high blood pressure, an antipyretic for the fever, and antidepressants to treat his or her emotional state. Three “anti”-drugs, signifying that we are dealing with opposites.