Question on Homotoxicology

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Shannon Nelson
Posts: 8848
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2002 10:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Shannon Nelson »

Ach, I love these new words. Julian, I *like* your un-edited one-fingered
approach!!! Where else would we get wonderful words like "yypist"? Wow, I
relate to that word... Yipping, yapping and typing. Sounds like me on a
day when I'd Rather be Hiking! :-)))
on 3/5/04 3:37 PM, Chua Ching Yee at chingy@homoeopathyheals.com wrote:


Julian Winston
Posts: 622
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Julian Winston »

At 6:55 PM +0000 3/5/04, Anna de Burgo wrote:

First: in an historical context, Hahnemann had a very limited number
of remedies to work with. He often had to "zig-zag" to a cure using a
number of remedies, each given as a new picture emerges.

Second: The IDEAL is the single simillimum. In practice, this is not
as easy as it sounds. Often the remedy that appears to be "most
similar" is only partially curative, and a second or third remedy is
needed (based upon the presenting symptoms) to carry the case to cure.

The ability to differentiate between "the most similar" and the
"simillimum" is a skill that comes only through experience.

I will maintain that in many cases, there is only ONE simillimum,
while there might be a few "similars." It was in THAT context that I
spoke of not having more than one similar.

As an example, I am thinking of a number of cases I have read about
where Sepia was given, and had SOME effect, but the cure was
completed by Murex. In SOME of those cases, a differential brought
out both Sepia and Murex, and Murex was curative in the first
instance and not as a second remedy.

As Joe pointed out, the ideal is to find the exact similitude. The
ability to do so is often attributable to the skill of the
prescriber, and THAT is gained through experience.

I trust this answers the query.

JW


Anna de Burgo
Posts: 63
Joined: Sat Feb 21, 2004 11:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Anna de Burgo »

Dear Mr Winston,
Thus, there often is no real simillimum, because the case is more complex
than that? I can understand perfectly well that in some cases one remedy may
well be enough to cure. No disputing that. Although, I would imagine (and
Hahnemann says this too) that these would be relatively simple,
straightforward cases where the disease has not moved through too many
stages. In the more complex cases, as Hahnemann noticed, one "simillimum" is
in fact often only able to knock down part of the imbalance. He talked about
different parts of the disease; and that one remedy should be applied to
each individual disease within the patient. Thus, the question is: what is
the remedy supposed to be similar *to*? How realistic is it to expect one
waveform to cancel out the entire complex of imbalances that have evolved
throughout the organism over time - and through generations - to become a
chronic disease? Is it not naive to expect this to happen? I return again to
Hahnemann, who tells us very clearly in The Chronic Diseases that you may
have to fire hit after hit to knock down the whole pathology, because it is
made up of different sides and parts. I notice for instance that in the
severe cancer cases one will never find Dr Ramakrishnan using one single
remedy, although he professes to adhere to classical principles.

(I hope it is noticed that the narrow-minded allopathic quackbusting troll
is sticking close to Hahnemann's words and just trying to understand how
they fit with the given doctrine.)
Perhaps especially in very acute cases, where, say, Belladonna or Aconite
will work all on their own. But what about the fact that in many other cases
the apparent simillimum is only partially curative? You will admit, it
seems, that there are also cases that require a more complex approach.
But Dr Rozencwajg also pointed out that where the single remedy approach
does not give him what he wants, he may then opt for a complex remedy. So it
seems, if it is possible to cut through the veil of semantics, that there is
a way to incorporate these different approaches, all under the heading of
homeopathy. So where is the problem, and why the dogma and the antagonism?
If the single remedy fails in the first instance, and then you try another
and that only helps partially, why not just bring in a product that works on
the same principles, will not suppress or harm, and has been used 1000s of
times successfully on similar pathologies?

Warmly,
Anna

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Dr. Joe Rozencwajg, NMD
Posts: 2279
Joined: Wed Jul 31, 2002 10:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Dr. Joe Rozencwajg, NMD »

Every time I see a patient I start with a blank mind (some would say it is my permanent state......).
After the full history and physical and all other things that should be done, I ask myself:

- what does the patient want and need? an acute pain needs immediate attention without dabbling in chronic situations, a 20 years eczema is something else

- what is the best way to give that in the fast, least complicated and cheapest way? clearly, to me, most of the time homeopathy is the answer with the search for a simillimum, unless I am dealing with acute pain conditions, in which cases I have more succes with acupuncture, bringing down the acuteness, then back to homeopathy.

I do see many very difficult situations where everything has been modified, suppressed, hidden by years of other treatments, so I often have to get rid of that burden before even being able to address the core of the problem; I cannot remember last time I had a straight forward case...........in the meantime I have to provide some relief.
It is in those circumstances that I would use nutrition, herbalism, homeobotanicals, homotoxicology, acupuncture, Reiki and yes even complexes that I create myself (not the OTC) in low potency.
Once the situation is cleared and the real symptoms appear, then I am able to practice what you call "Classical Homeopathy".

I wish to repeat this once again: my duty is to the patient, not to any medical theory. And if , as Julian wrote, to do that I have to become a "criminal", so be it.
Dr. J. Rozencwajg, MD, PhD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"


Julian Winston
Posts: 622
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Julian Winston »

At 1:06 PM +1300 3/6/04, Dr.J Rozencwajg wrote:

Gee Joe! Having met you I KNOW it is your permanent state!

[snip a wonderful exposition of inter-relating various modalities]
And, as Jeremy Sherr said, it is your duty to treat the largest
totality that you can perceive in the best way possible.
A skin doc who uses corticosteroids, can only see the skin as the
totality. If he saw a larger totality, and STILL used steroids, that
would be "criminal."
Yet (oh my! here we are in the grey zone) the judgement is always the
call of the practitioner. Many years ago I developed an incredible
itching. It was so bad I was losing sleep, weight, friends, and was
close to suicidal. I had one of the best classical homeopaths I know
working on my case. He tried four different remedies that he
perceived to be the simillimum. None helped. I was getting worse by
the day. He then prescribed prednisone. I objected. He said, "When
the house is on fire you don't worry about saving the piano." I took
one dose (allopathic). The itching abated. I got some sleep. The next
day he spent SIX hours with me working on the case. And he found a
single remedy. And it worked-- for a short time. Then we upped the
potency. Over a period of three weeks we went from a 30C to a 50M.
There is no doubt in my mind that he hit the remedy I needed. It took
a lot of work on his part.
He was not apologetic about using an allopathic intervention.
As Jeremy Sherr says, allopathy buys you time. And that is what
happened with me.

As for Dr. Joe Rozencwajg, it would only be criminal to not treat in
the best interest of the patient.
The giving of multiple remedies without thought or without the
knowledge of what their action is (using them as homeopathy and NOT
as homotoxicology, as Joe pointed out) is to be avoided at all costs.
Joe is very specific about understanding the modes of action of each
modality he chooses to use. No problem there.

JW


Dr. Joe Rozencwajg, NMD
Posts: 2279
Joined: Wed Jul 31, 2002 10:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Dr. Joe Rozencwajg, NMD »

Thank you.

Dr. J. Rozencwajg, MD, PhD.
"The greatest enemy of any science is a closed mind"


Julian Winston
Posts: 622
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Julian Winston »

At 12:00 AM +0000 3/6/04, Anna de Burgo wrote:

A good question. Have you done any chronic case-taking? The remedy is
most similar to that which is perceived to be the top layer in the
patient. Often, it may come down to a choice between two remedies--
especially in a single sided case.
You give ONE (the most similar in your judgement) and see what is
left at the follow-up.
The problem with giving TWO is that you then don't know which acted,
and therefore, more muddled at the follow up.
Ah. Waveform. That is a construct that YOU (and others) have to be
able to make all this understandable to you. I can't answer that, and
neither can my wife (a practicing homeopath for 17 years) because
neither of us see the imbalance as waveforms.
You may. Again, we have more remedies now than Hahnemann had, so we
*might* have the ability to bring it to completion sooner.
But Ramikrishnan never does two at once. His method involves
alternation, and it is something he developed over years of practice.
You take one remedy daily for a week, then alternate with another.
He is also often dealing with severe pathology, where repetition is
often needed.
Furthermore, his approach sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
Indeed. Nice troll
More complex in understanding the sequence of treatment, but not
complex in the sense of using more than one remedy at the same time.
That is Dr Rozencwajg's way of working. It is not for all.
Again, it all comes down to the science of the method. You want to
change one variable at a time and note the changes, so you can move
in a way where you can learn something. If you use more than one
remedy at a time, the ability to track this way is lost, and there is
no learning, only reaction.
Since within the definition of homeopathy (as seen in the word, and
outlined in the Organon), precludes the use of more than one remedy
at a time, such practice cannot be called homeopathy-- even though
potentized medicines are being used.
I would extend that (and have done so in print over the last few
years) to the use of remedies not based on provings. If you use an
un-proven remedy based on some kind of group-analysis, you are NOT
doing homeopathy-- even though the shingle on the door says
"homeopath."
And there is no fault in that-- many grand old "homeopaths" did the
same over the years. But there must be integrity in the practice to
say to yourself, and your colleagues (and patient) that you are in
experimental territory.
Perhaps the clinical experience will feed back more info that can be
learned from.
But this can happen ONLY with single remedies. You can learn anything
from combinations, other than *in this person, for this disease name,
this combo worked.* There is no way to abstract that information to a
general level without thinking allopathically about drugs and disease.
Who say it doesn't suppress or harm? When discussing combinations
with classical single-remedy prescribers, they all have seen cases
that need unravelling after long term combination treatment. A
combination does NOT work on the same principles. If it did, it
wouldn't be a combination.
If you use a remedy that produces a partial result, then the next
step is to re-take the case and look for the revealed next layer--
not throw a combination at it based on pathology.
Can you give an example of this thing you are talking about. It
becomes easier to discuss when using a concrete example.

JW


Anna de Burgo
Posts: 63
Joined: Sat Feb 21, 2004 11:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Anna de Burgo »

Dear Mr Winston,

Thank you for this detailed analysis. Hopefully this is a sign that we can
return to some kind of rational discussion! :-)
So it is not a question of the "totality of symptoms", then. This is also
what Dr Reckeweg says.
Yes, I understand that in theory. But it would still be homeopathy. Might be
less precise homeopathy (from a classical point of view), but still
homeopathy because the one of the two remedies that "did the job" is working
exactly as it would on its own. The "wrong" remedy simply becomes
superfluous. This is analogous to Bach rescue remedy, as someone has pointed
out to me privately. When the combination is administered, maybe only 3 of
the 5 components will have "work" to do, and the rest fall by the wayside.
In effect it is just as though only 3 had been given, but the use of the
combination increases the probability of hitting the right note. Logically,
I see the same analogy working for 5 or 10 remedies, which could have been
selected based on the fact that they were typically used for a given problem
or range of symptoms and their causes.
I did not say the imbalance was a waveform, although I am cognisant of the
physics of molecular resonance. I applied this term to the remedy itself.
That is a moot point! He will often squeeze an acute intercurrent remedy so
tightly between regular "plussed" doses of another remedy that they are
basically being given at the same time, within hours of each other.
Yes, but that has more to do with the fact that he is working at the extreme
fringe of disease. He knows what types of cancer will respond better or less
well. He has a structure, and interestingly tends to use the same remedies
for the same problems, more or less. Which is rather akin to homotoxicology,
which groups the typical remedies indicated for a given pathology and then
designs the combo so that non-indicated components simply fail to act.
One tries...
But does it work? :-)
But when you reach a point where 3,500 people in one study group, all with
the same "disease name" (which, let's face it, is only a description of
their symptoms, and given the fact that we are all made of the same stuff
there are bound to be strong similarities in the underlying reasons why they
developed them) you are learning much more than "this combination happens to
help sometimes, by chance". In no way does the Dr Reckeweg system approach
disease allopathically. In fact it is less allopathic than much of the
symptom-based approach in classical homeopathy. See below..
(I rolled your two questions into one for ease of answering) Say a person
has a skin problem. The classical homeopath may apply Sulphur only, just
looking at the outward symptom. But the appropriate homotoxicology combo
will bring into use not only the symptom-orientated remedy but will also
look at the biological processes that gave rise to the symptom. It will
consider the symptom as a manifestation of a phase in the table of
homotoxicosis, e.g. deposition / reaction phases. The remedies will attempt
to address underlying liver damage, iatrogenic toxicity, miasmatic
predisposition as well as the symptom itself. So if the symptom is the
body's way of eliminating the toxins and re-establishing homeostasis, the
Reckeweg approach may actually be seen to be working more in harmony with
the body's processes and assisting a retrogression of the events that led to
the formation of the symptom. This is negative vicariation, helping the body
regain equilibrium, which Hahnemann says "thus cures disease". So I
personally can see ways that the classical approach could be more
suppressive.
What if only one remedy out of the combination were actually having an
effect, and the others were designed (by the use of low potencies and
potency chords) so as not to cause any kind of proving if given
superfluously? The one effective remedy (or potency chord of one remedy)
within the complex would then surely be working homeopathically. I think the
mistake is to regard the combination as a new entity, more than the sum of
its parts. Each part within it is available to be used or not, as the case
may be. So each one is potentially homeopathic, as an individual, to the
case. Its individuality is not lost within the combination.

Another issue is the duration of the action of a remedy. I have heard
homeopaths saying that they regard the remedy almost like a "microchip" that
works away in the body and does not dissipate quickly. I have also heard the
opposite, that the remedy's direct effect is extremely short-lived and the
effects seen in terms of symptom change are an indirect result. If the
former theory is right, it would suggest that alternating remedies, which
seem to be accepted in classical homeopathy, would in effect be the same as
giving them together. As mentioned above, in the Ramakrishnan example.
But what about the fact that a given pathology will tend, based on proving
symptoms, to respond to a relatively narrow band of remedies? Applying a
cluster of remedies, based on careful clinical observations, is not very
different from applying one remedy.

I can understand that many practitioners may choose the single remedy
approach as their personal preference, but I still don't see why the
assertion "it's not homeopathy". Why not just accept that it is a different
branch of homeopathy?

Further to this, I have been looking through my papers and found other
references suggesting, and sometimes stating, that Hahnemann did use
multiple remedies. I don't suppose it is worth typing them up, though.

Say Henry Ford, father of the modern motor car, had written a strict
definition of a car that stated it had four wheels. Most do, certainly, and
this is our common view of what a car is. But a friend of my father's
(trolls do have fathers), years ago, had a six-wheeled car, a Panther. It
was a different kind of car, but nobody could say "it's not a car". Maybe in
some ways, homotoxicology is just a six-wheeled car. It is in a class of its
own, but still belongs to the same basic category of design. There are also
parallels in architecture, where people in the past have strongly opposed
new design concepts. One fantastic design in the US, which really worked and
was an organic part of its environment, was labelled "anti the american way
of life" because it was minimalistic. One thing architects don't do, though,
is call one another "trolls". :-)

Warmly,
Anna

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Shannon Nelson
Posts: 8848
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2002 10:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Shannon Nelson »

A nice post, Julian! And a very worthwhile exchange, IMO (thanks, Anna, JW
and Dr. R! :-) ).

I love Julian's story about "the house burning down" (like that anlogy,
too).
on 3/5/04 10:55 PM, Dr.J Rozencwajg at jroz@ihug.co.nz wrote:


Joy Lucas
Posts: 3350
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:00 pm

Re: Question on Homotoxicology

Post by Joy Lucas »

I am not wanting to pre-empt Julian's or Dr R's response to this but the
'totality of the symptoms' is applicable to the top layer in as much as one
can only 'see' a top layer. You cannot include potential symptoms that lie
beneath if you cannot see them - so it most definitely is 'totality of
symptoms' in each and every case, whether it be acute, chronic, layered, one
sided etc.

Same applies to Dr Ramakrishnan's approach, he might move through a number
of remedies but it is one at a time, what is needed at the time. This also
often occurs during acutes, you might need to prescribe a different remedy
every few hours but it is still one at a time.

If you actually practised instead of just theorising you would know this. I
have said this before - put theory into practice not practice into theory.

The 'single remedy' is our uppermost responsibility to classical homeopathy.

Joy

www.homeopathicmateriamedica.com
on 6/3/04 4:42 PM, Anna de Burgo at annadeburgo@hotmail.com wrote:

Dear Mr Winston,

edited

So it is not a question of the "totality of symptoms", then. This is also
what Dr Reckeweg says.
That is a moot point! He will often squeeze an acute intercurrent remedy so
tightly between regular "plussed" doses of another remedy that they are
basically being given at the same time, within hours of each other.

A de B
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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