Simple Ideas in Homoeopathy

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - Leonardo da Vinci

It is my belief that there is enormous scope for new ideas - simple, but effective - in the world of homoeopathy.

Over the past few years, we have put up several small programs on this website - PhaseRep, Distinctions, Quiz etc. We have also made an App called HQR, available on the Google Play Store. Our latest offering is Beagle, which is a tree-form materia medica.

All these are very diverse, yet simple, ideas. None of them is perfect, but we hope they are thought-provoking - and above all, useful in practice. Nothing in these programs is weird or bizarre - indeed, they are all common-sense ideas. What could be simpler than a program like Distinctions, which gives you opposite symptoms of two drugs to be compared - Calc is (usually) chilly, Sulph is (usually) hot. To my knowledge, such a program showing opposite rubrics was not available a few years back, when we created it and put it up on this website.

These ideas are simply using today's technology to present well-substantiated data more effectively.

There is tremendous scope for improving each of these programs. For example:

1. In the program "Distinctions", many more comparisons could be added. A lot of repetition is present, and this needs to be cleaned up.
2. In Drug Relationships, we need to add grouping of elements from the periodic table to show their relations - for example, of mercury to platinum etc.
3. In the new program Beagle, I could make a subclass "Modalities" - maybe that's a good idea. Or "Regions" as in Boger's Synoptic Key. Many symptoms need to be removed, and some others added.

I have a big list of improvements to be made to each of these programs - they are on a to-do list. Knowing this, why am I presenting these programs? Because I feel this is the way to go forward.

Without knowing even a few keynotes of drugs like oleander, squilla, taraxacum or guaiacum - all drugs proved by Hahnemann, and presented in the Materia Medica Pura - there is a much greater interest in newly proved substances, even unusual ones like dog-shit, menstrual blood, vacuum etc. If there is a choice between novelty versus reliability, surely the latter should win? Especially when it comes to treating patients!

I believe that if you can prescribe drugs like Nat-m, Bell, Nux-v and Sulph successfully every time, you would be doing a very good job indeed. Very often, a homoeopath who would have otherwise correctly prescribed sulphur in a case, ends up prescribing something totally unrelated (dissimilar) to the case, because of some theory, or a wish to prescribe a newly proved, exciting drug.

What is needed in homoeopathy is more simple ideas, more work on existing solid information - presenting it in new ways, enabling us to study or grasp a drug picture clearly. For example, I found there was no quiz program available for homoeopaths to study and revise. E.B.Nash had made a book "Regional Leaders", meant to be used as a self-quiz. With today's technology, nothing is easier than to create a computer-based quiz. Yet, with so many expensive commercial homoeopathic software programs, a simple quiz to study keynotes was not available. In the meantime, we run after "new" theories and "new" provings.

I hope these programs work as a balancing force. They help us use our most reliable repertories and materia medicas simply and effectively. These programs are presented only as ideas - new ways to think and present data - not as perfect products. We hope others with more resources available to them can improve on these ideas - to create a better Quiz, or a better Distinctions program etc., for the cause of homoeopathy or commercially.