The California Homeopath
Journal of the California Homeopathic Medical Society

The way that we have historically come to an understanding of a remedy’s picture is  not as well known as it should be. It is important to appreciate how remedy pictures  are arrived at since the ways that have been used in the past are not the same ways that  are available to us now. We need to know the process not only so that we can follow it  in working with remedies that have not yet been assimilated into the secondary  materia medicas but also so that we can understand the limits of our knowledge about  all remedies, new and old.   

It is often thought that the information we find in the materia medicas has come only from  detailed and well conducted Hahnemannian provings of potentized remedies,  but this is not so. Only a small proportion of information comes this way. Many of  the provings were either toxicological reports of the crude substance or were  conducted by an individual or a very small group, often over a very short time. A  homoeopath with no plans for the weekend might just take a remedy from his cabinet  and record what happened over the next couple of days. Much of the information  comes not even from provings at all but from traditional or experimental usage and all  of it is tempered greatly by clinical experience.   

Knowledge is only truly useful when we also know its extent, its accuracy and the  limitations and uncertainties of the information. This is always true but particularly  so when the knowledge is being used in an exclusionary way. Thus if we have a female  endocrine symptom that is not in a remedy like Sepia or Lachesis then the likelihood  that the patient needs that remedy is quite low because we know that these remedies  were extensively proved and the clinical experience of them is substantial and well  reported. On the other hand the absence of the symptom in the remedy Dioscorea  would have much less meaning because we know that the remedy was not extensively  proved, all provers were male and there is little clinical information in spite of the fact  that Dioscorea is known to contain the precursors of female hormones and so likely to  be linked to them   

I would like therefore to outline some of the ways that we do get information about a  remedy picture and to examine the strengths and limitations of them.  The ideal and most  important source of information about a remedy is a well conducted Hahnemannian proving  of a potentized remedy. The symptoms that come out of this process are both the most  reliable and the most detailed. The main disadvantage is that the remedy can only bring  out symptoms to which the provers have some degree of susceptibility. The proving will not  bring out symptoms to which none of the provers are susceptible. In a small proving or one undertaken by a very homogenous group of people there will always be symptoms that  do not arise. The obvious example today is male sexual symptoms which are very scarce in  modern provings, not because men don’t get ill but because provings are usually undertaken  by groups of students most of whom, and sometimes all of whom, are female.  

By Peter Fraser

Peter Fraser practices homeopathy in Bristol and London, England.  He is the author of many provings, working with the The School of Homeopathy, Devon and author of a number of books, including The AIDS Miasm, books on Snakes, Spiders and Insects and the series of Using Maps and Systems in Homœopathy, which includes: Miasms, Realms, Mappa Mundi and Philosophy. He is currently working on a Supplement to Clarke’s Dictionary of Materia Medica that extends it to cover many new homeopathic remedies. He is especially interested in the diseases of our times: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Allergic Reactions, Hyperactivity and Concentration Disorders, Auto-Immune Disease and HIV. Visit his website at http://www.homoeopathist.info/.