Favorite Medicines

It is easy to become complacent and prescribe favorite medicines when being a homeopath. If we are lulled into a stupor seeing many cases they may all seem to have similar themes and therefore similar remedies. Be very careful when prescribing to treat the person and not the disease. As well we should be very careful in selecting remedies that fit the case rather than remedies for similar cases we have seen before.

In Aphorism 257 of the Organon Hahnemann made it clear we should take great care not to develop favorite medicines; " The true physician will take care to avoid making favorite remedies of medicines, the employment of which he has, by chance, perhaps found often useful, and which he has had opportunities of using with good effect. If he do so, some remedies of rarer use, which would have been more suitable, consequently more serviceable, will often be neglected."

We must select very good rubrics for the case and understand what is really asking to be healed. In addition to this we must do precise research and investigate all of the remedies that may be applicable to the case. If we settle for any remedy based on a previous experience we will no doubt miss other opportunities, for often there is a much more suitable remedy for the case.

Read about every remedy and learn about it's natural history and what the substance is about. Study the mind section. Study its most common indications. Study it's modalities. It will help you find the simillimum remedy when our prejudice about remedies do not exist. We need to be free to consider any remedy, not just those remedies that we are familiar with.

The same is true for forming prejudice about remedies that we have used in the past with less than desirable results. Hahnemann continued in Aphorism 258; "The true practitioner, moreover, will not in his practice with mistrustful weakness neglect the employment of those remedies that he may now and then have employed with bad effects, owing to an erroneous selection (from his own fault, therefore), or avoid them for other (false) reasons, as that they were unhomeopathic for the case of disease before him; he must bear in mind the truth, that of medicinal agents, that one alone invariably deserves the preference in every case of disease which corresponds most accurately by similarity to the totality of the characteristics symptoms, and that no paltry prejudices should interfere with this serious choice."

Notice how Hahnemann was very careful to warn us of having prejudices. There are no such things a better or worse remedies. It is only what we may project onto them that makes them so. If our research and understanding of the case and the remedies most suitable for it is thorough,  it will be easier to have good judgment. We should have no fixed ideas about the case or the remedy. From our unprejudiced place we can correctly see and apply the best suited remedy. No two cases are the same. Because one remedy may have worked for one case and not another, it should have no bearing on the case before you. Select the remedy as if there were never a case even similar to it. Select the remedy from understanding the essence of the case and if the remedy is truly homeopathic it will fit in it's totality.

I recently had a case of Sarcoidosis and Kidney stone as the main ailments. Selecting rubrics was easy but the case analysis did not hold up so well to many rubrics. Only the polycrests were present. I was searching for a remedy much more specific to the case. By changing the repertization to a word search for Sarcoidosis in ReferenceWorks and using the results as a rubric and combining it with Bladder; calculi, the results were impressive. Three remedies came up. It would have been easy to make a case for Lycopodium or Pulsatilla if I wanted to. But I would have severely prejudiced the case this way. The other remedy was Beryllium Metallicum, a remedy that I had never prescribed before. When I read it it fit like a hand in a glove.

If I had prejudices about favorite remedies I may have missed this remedy by trusting my first repertization whose results included many of the polycrest remedies. But by being free to analyze the case in a different manner it actually became very easy. We must be willing to let go in each and every case. Let go of the favorite or the ones you want to avoid and simply see the case and do good investigations of the materia medica. It actually makes our jobs much easier and more successful prescriptions can be given.

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