Minutus

Oboy, a test!
Assuming there is no severity or urgency:

Begin with a test dose (maybe an LM, maybe a c), wait three days to gauge response.
- If there is clear and continuing improvement, wait and see how long it continues.
- If there is improvement that fades away but seems appropriate insofar as it went (please don't ask me to write a dissertation on that--I'm confident in my understanding, and it's not a simple answer, and is part of what we all went to school for), then time repetition for just before that would occur.
- If no discernible or certain response, can have them do a dose-a-day for a few days, then stop again and see whether improvement sets is and/or is maintained.

I've been told that if there is no discernible response after a max of 7 days' repetition, you can assume the remedy is wrong. All of my folks are quick responders, so if no response I think I would give up sooner than that!

Monitoring would depend on circumstances, but I'd ask them to let me know daily what has happened, until we've established a good procedure (whether schedule or otherwise). In practice I'm more casual about it than that--they can call me if they need to, and I'll ask when I'm talking to them anyway. With my one "difficult case", when we were actively treating with LMs through a difficult patch, I just called her every day, because she could not be counted on to call me. One has both challenges and luxuries when one treats only friends and family...

Potency and dose I have found I have a *lot* of leeway with, with most of my folks; most are fine with big doses or small, and high potencies or low--not the *same* response, but we can get started in any of a variety of ways, depending on circumstances and preference. (I decline to elaborate at the moment.) With low c in water, I advise one pellet into a jar (size of jar I have not found especially important, but aim for medium-sized, roughly a liter), dissolve, whack a few times (usually 3-10, depending), take a tsp or a sip for a dose. If the rx is right, there *will* be a response in the first day, and we take it from there. (There may be circumstances where this isn't the case.)

High c in water seems to act pretty much the same as high c dry, except gentler at the start. This is based on particularly limited "sample size", and I'm still vague about when and why to repeat that, except during time of particular stress or illness, at which point whack and re-sip as needed. Generally, tho, if I'm using a high potency it's because I *want* to be able to just "let it run"; that's one thing I really like about high potencies. For some people the day-to-day "messing with it" of LMs and low Cs (dry or water) just is not a plus!

I do understand that repeating high C in water more frequently is said to speed the "cure", and perhaps when I've done it more often with more people under more circumstances, I will have more appreciation of that aspect.

Alright then, have at it, carry on with the red pencil.

Shannon

Sorry, I don't know why it went out unfinished. I'll try to finish it at the end.
Some replies:
Okay, that's useful. Actually, I *have* been getting good response, and have usually wound up with jar more toward 8 oz (tho had no problem when it was smaller), and have a bunch of sensitive (tho not mostly over-sensitive) responders. But that might account for a couple of surprises I had with myself... But as I said, except for one person, I have not found size-of-dose and size-of-bottle critical--within this sensitive-but-not-oversensitive group. (With one person it is.)
The first time I did this (1M, one pellet dissolved in a glass of water, stir, one sip for a dose) was about 15 years ago, on myself, before I had learned or done *anything* else about dosing in water. I did it because I had been told (by classmates, I think) that dosing in water was *both* more effective *and* more gentle. I was taking a remedy I was nervous about aggravating on, and very anxious not to, as I was already enough of a mess. So that was my compromise--go ahead with the 1M (I needed it to be deep), but do it in water (I needed it to be gentle). At the time I didn't know beans about LMs, and neither did my prescriber, who wasn't available to me at the time anyway. So call it placebo, but it worked *exactly* that way: my horrible, intense, won't-go-away headache vanished pretty much the instant the liquid touched my tongue, and everything shifted quickly and smoothly to normal over the next day or so, and it did just a beautiful job of unwinding the "layer" I'd been stuck in. That one dose ran for... well, I forget how long, but it shifted the entire very entrenched layer. So I can't agree with you that water doses of high potency are in any way bad... I've done it several times since, some with myself and a couple with others, and have found it gentle and reliable. (More so than single pellet dry dose? That I don't know, as I haven't really seen problems with that either, with a few minor exceptions.)

So, I don't know who originated the advice that high potency in water is good, but it is not recent. What leads you to say it is too strong? I know about the advice that diluting in water makes it stronger because of contacting more nerve endings, but presumably (at least I assumed) this compares taking the *total* dose (pill) in e.g. a tsp versus a quarter cup, and drinking it all. Because as you noted yourself, diluting a pill in a liter and taking one tsp is not more apt to agg versus diluting the pill in a smaller amount, and taking 1 tsp. So why should diluting a pill in a glass of water and taking 1 tsp be a problem? Anyway, I haven't seen it to be--can you explain?
I know you think that, and you know that I disagree.
Yes, it's 4th ed. method.
Yes, you need to modify that for some circumstances, and if anything untoward comes up.
"Let it run" works great for some of cases--e.g. uncommunicative spouses and over-busy children, for instance.

In treating some of my animals, LMs would have made the task needlessly more difficult--esp. since I *know* how high / single doses work, why would I want to substitute multiple doses, requiring monitoring I'm not able to do, for a single dose that, if correctly chosen, will work for months or more? Why would I want to add that layer of difficulty? And frankly, my son and husband are not all that much easier to monitor day-to-day than the cows are... Sometimes I've done that with them, and usually I don't.

"... especially in water"? As I said, when I do water doses high, I have not tended to repeat, mostly because I haven't seen a reason *why*, or understood *when* to repeat. So far as I've seen in my handful of experiments with it, they act largely the same as high potency dry doses (except for a gentler beginning), and don't *need* repeating for quite a long time. (months or longer)

I think the end that got cut off was to the effect that I understand there's supposed to be advantage to repeating the water doses to speed the cure, but from your reaction I gather that is not generally applied to high potencies--good, that answers a question I had wondered about! So I don't need to figure out anything different about repeating them, which is good, because I couldn't see why or how...
If the cure is moving properly but dragging, I've simply gone to a higher potency.

Sheri, I've never been inclined to argue with the information you've offered on water dosing. As I've said, I've found it very helpful! But I am very inclined to argue with your contention that it's the *only* appropriate way to practice. That is just not my experience *at all.* And IMO it is *always* better to have more options, rather than fewer!

I'm going to send a separate post with a few more examples of a couple of things--this one is already too long!

Thanks for the feedback,
Shannon

Okay, here are some of my examples. I want to say I am not doing this in an effort to be argumentative, but rather because *to me* certain treatment situations would be very much more difficult without the options of high potency in water, and dry dosing. To me it is part of the wonder and beauty of this system, that in most situations we do have such a great deal of flexibility, and ability to work with what we have, in order to get to where we want to be.

Okay, some examples of using high potency in water, and the wide range of dosage size that's OK:

1) When my first child was little, we were under the care of a very good 4th ed prescriber, so all of our remedies were between 30c and 10M, with most being 200c. Initially I used (as directed) dry doses, under the theory (which I have since abandoned) that "size of dose doesn't matter". Usually I gave her 10-15 little pellets (as directed). The only two aggravations happened after I let her convince me to give her the entire little "single dose vial", containing... who knows, maybe 100 pellets? That did give her a doozy of an aggravation, and at that point I decided to "agree to disagree" with our homeopath, and stick to smaller doses. I was also at that time beginning to hear about water dosing, but without any detail except what I have said, that they can act both more deeply and more gently.

I then switched to giving her each (infrequent--these were single doses) dose in a bottle, one pallet to the bottle, dissolve, shake a bit, and let her take however much or little she wanted--it always worked great, never had any further aggravations. I used the same method years later when my son was an infant. (Same reason, to circumvent the "More! More!" wars.
2) When my PTSD cat (a tom who'd been apparently "born crazy"--the poor sweet guy lived in an emotional battlefield) disappeared, I was afraid he'd been killed in a fight (didn't know enough in those days to get him neutered, and don't know how I'd have managed if I had known!). Short version--days later he turned up, skeletal, mangled, with huge abscesses, and now terrified even of *me*. I left out a dish of water, out of the sun, with a single dissolved pellet of Stramonium 1M. A day or two later he turned up in his usual place, waiting for me, and already healing. A few days later he started hanging out on the porch with the other cats--which he had *never* done in his three-year-old life. He was a different and *much* happier cat after that! (He needed only that one dose, at least up until he *did* get himself killed a year or two later.)
3) When I've needed to dose one of the cows, I've done it by dissolving a pellet--actually I think I used a few, but maybe not necessary--in a half-cup of water, sprinkle on some grain or hay. In one cases the cow didn't even *eat* the hay, just sniffed it--and it worked wonderfully, with effect lasting for many months.
So--I see no reason not to give high potencies in water, tho I have also seen no reason to repeat the doses any more frequently than i would have with dry doses; I'm keeping an open mind on that.
Dry doses:
Sheilagh Creasy in a seminar was asked whether there's any problem switching between high potency and LMs. She said no, and talked about a case that had done very well on LMs, but felt it would be too difficult to continue while on a trip she was about to take. So Sheilagh sent her off with a single high-potency dose so she wouldn't need to worry about it. (And I've certainly gone the other way, picked up with LMs when a high potency dose had worn off.)
Sheri wrote that she has never had anyone not able to follow the instructions for LMs, but I have! My multiply brain damaged buddy, who is also my one hypersensitive "patient," literally cried when I was trying to explain it to her, so I had her go ahead with dry doses of 6c. (I still had to check in daily, because at that time she could not *remember* from one day to the next whether she was improving! She did improve and that's currently not an issue.
A final example, my son went through a period where, due to... what, well, changes in his activity, his sleep, and who knows what, his mood could be so variable from day-to-day that it just was too difficult trying to keep track of progress on LMs (which I've used with him off-and-on), so i went back to single / high doses, and that's actually been much easier to deal with, except that when the issue has been *sleep*, I switched back to 6c (either water or dry) so that if it didn't work in a few days, I could change remedies--that is the only disadvantage I see to high potencies, that you really do have to give it at least 4 weeks to either work or not-work, and sometimes I do like the "tighter turning radius" of either LMs or 6c. (I would experiment more with LMs, but expense is an issue, as is storage space. Two more factors that are not an issue for someone *in practice*, who simply has the patient buy and store the remedy, but are definite issues for me! I have hundreds of remedies, with each bottle holding many doses, stored in a relatively tidy space, which would not be possible with LMs.)
So Sheri, you talk about my "latching onto this and that" (or to that effect) and for that I make no apology at all. It's true that my situation is quite different from yours in a number of ways: I'm treating people who would otherwise not be in treatment at all (my husband, and my brain-injured friend), and some of my "patients" aren't even human and don't live in cages. Also no one is *paying* me to do this, I have to slip it in around the edges of my available time (don't ask why I'm here so much ) I'm working on that...) and theirs. So, it's "horses for courses," different tools for different jobs. Why should we ever want to know *less*, or to have fewer choices???????

And, I still would rather be treated by a *good* prescriber of *any* methodology (high/low, wet/dry), who knows the Organon, knows how to interpret changes in the context of increasing health, and knows the remedies--rather than anyone of lesser skills using the "more favored method" of LMs. It's a *tool*, that can be used with greater or lesser skill.

Okay, more than enough from me...

Cheers,
Shannon