Deutsche Version (German version)

Choice Of Remedies

Gudrun Brune Text by Gudrun Brune Gudrun Brune

Two people with the same health problem might need different remedies. I give you an example:

Patient 1 consults me because of a persisting stomach-ache. He tells me that he feels always hungry at about 11o'clock in the morning. He has to eat something then, otherwise he feels weak or gets headaches. He feels hot in general, especially on hands and feet when laying in bed: he has a desire for sweets, feels better when laying on his right side. From his behaviour in the clinic I get the impression that he likes to theorize, that he also likes to hear himself speaking; I'm not really sure if he is exaggerating or not. This would be typical symptoms for a condition which asks for the homoeopathic preparation of SULFUR.

Patient 2 suffers from stomach-ache as well, but his emotional and psychological state is very different from those of the first patient. This time the patient is a woman, who is crying easily; she has all sorts of fears, is melancholic, a bit childish sometimes, very emotional, her mood changes all the time. She has a need for fresh air, an aversion against fat food, also her symptoms change all the time. This condition may ask for PULSATILLA, which is often used for women with a special complexion and has prooved to be very successfull in the treatment of PMT (pre-menstrual-tension).

Most of the cases which a homoeopath takes are not so easy to solve as those two which I described here, because they show very typical symptoms for those two remedies. But there are about 1500 different homoeopathic remedies, and most patients don't give a clear picture about their symptoms. So the homoeopath has to read a lot between the lines of that what the patient is telling him, to get through to really typical symptoms which lead to a certain remedy.

All possible symptoms of illness plus the information from clinical experience for over 200 years are recorded precisely in two types of homoeopathic reference books: The „Materia Medica“ and the „Repertory“ as well as on computer.

In the „Materia Medica“ mostly all remedy-pictures are described.

In the „Repertory“ all possible symptoms of illness are listed up - and the remedies which heal them.

I give you another example: If a patient has the symptom 'dry cough' and I look this symptom up in the Repertory, I will find about 250 different remedies which can cause a dry cough (and which can heal it, after the principle that „like cures like)“. So which one is the right remedy for my patient? When questioning him he points out that he feels remarkably better when driving in a car. When I look up in the Repertory 'better when driving in a car' I find only 5 remedies which have this characteristic. If this symptom is so remarkable I can almost be sure that the right remedy for this patient has to be amongst these five. Now I look up which of these remedies appear also under the symptom 'dry cough'. And then I compare them with the history of the patient, with his character, his appearance and of course with his other physical symptoms. I prescribe that remedy, who's drug-picture is most similiar to the picture I got from the patient.

This reminds a bit if detective-work. The skill of the homoeopath is to be able to find out the relevant symptoms of all those the patient tells him during the consultation to get through to the essence of the case.

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