Читать книгу Polarity Analysis in Homeopathy: - Heiner Frei - Страница 13

The quality of symptoms plays a decisive role in the reliability with which the remedy is chosen. Due to our prior experience gained in the treatment of ADHD, an investigation was conducted during the preparation of the Swiss double-blind study into ADHD with the aim of identifying unreliable symptoms. This involved analyzing the choice of symptoms from the cases in which initially an ineffective remedy was chosen, followed later by the correct remedy. In this way it was possible to identify the symptoms that often led to incorrect prescriptions. The evaluation of 100 cases produced 77 unreliable symptoms, including 44 mind symptoms, 9 weather modalities and 6 food symptoms (desire / dislike / aggravation). These symptoms were subsequently excluded from the repertorisation.

Due to the frequency of these excluded symptoms, many cases were now characterized by a lack of symptoms, which therefore impeded the process of choosing the remedy. A possible substitute for the unreliable symptoms was the modalities of the disturbances in perception found in ADHD patients. These had not been used so far because — as pathognomonic symptoms — the consensus within homeopathy was that they should not be included in the repertorisation. Yet the use of this type of symptom immediately led to a marked improvement in the results.

NOTE

PATHOGNOMONIC SYMPTOMS CAN BELONG TO THE SET OF CHARACTERISTIC SYMPTOMS. IF SO, THEY MUST NOT BE EXCLUDED FROM THE REPERTORISATION.

The term pathognomonic was first introduced to homeopathy by G.H.G. Jahr. Later C. Dunham explained in his work the importance assigned to these symptoms by homeopathic physicians of the nineteenth century: pathognomonic at that time meant irreversible changes in organs (for example, liver cirrhosis or a scar), which should therefore be excluded from the repertorisation because they usually cannot be healed.^11,12,13 But the current understanding of pathognomonic is different: it now refers to those “hallmark” symptoms used to establish a conventional medical diagnosis. For example, the pathognomonic symptoms of acute lymphoblastic leukemia are: pallor, petechiae, fatigue, bone pain, enlarged liver and spleen, and so on. Such symptoms belong to the set of characteristic symptoms, so that it is a misapplication of the law of similars to exclude them from the repertorisation. The false interpretation of the ambiguous term “pathognomonic symptom” has therefore had disastrous effects on the precision of homeopathic prescribing.

NOTE

WHEN CHOOSING A REMEDY, IT IS BEST TO INCLUDE MIND SYMPTOMS ONLY DURING THE MATERIA MEDICA COMPARISON.

Yet why can mental symptoms be so misleading? “Mind” is the smallest chapter in the PB. Boenninghausen justified this by saying that mind symptoms are often consequences and therefore do not constitute reliable symptoms, and he pointed out that mental symptoms are often overlooked or incorrectly ascertained. He therefore recommended looking up the state of mind, with all its subtlety, in the original sources, and restricted himself in the area of mind to the essentials. Boenninghausen placed great emphasis on including the state of mind only when making the final choice from the list of likely remedies – at the stage of differentiating the remedies, and he explicitly restricted himself to the CHANGE in the state of mind during an illness (see § 210 ff, especially the footnote to § 210). “One often finds that people who were patient in healthy times become, in disease: stubborn, violent, hasty, and even insufferable, self-willed and in due succession, impatient and despairing. Those who were formerly chaste and modest often become lascivious and shameless.”

In contrast to the mind symptoms, modalities are generally unambiguous. Regardless of individual, cultural, or linguistic background, the sense of warmth or cold (for example) is everywhere perceived the same. Other polar symptoms such as thirst and thirstlessness also permit little scope for misinterpretation. Based on the ADHD study, it has been possible to draw up a hierarchy of the reliability of symptoms (table 2, symptom reliability, decreasing from top to bottom).

Table 2: Hierarchy of Symptom Reliability