Dear Julian
Thanks for your comments. I agree with you whole heartedly when you
said- throw all this garbage about animal, plant and mineral
classifications.
Over all I see that there is too much classifying and too much
theorizing in current homeopathy. When gurus and guides abound they
look for some marketable specialty - some way of standing out from
others so that their seminars would attract people. Thus they bring
out their own unique approach and call it homeopathy. There is also a
lot of discussion of themes and this is what is giving rise to so
much non-sense. Themes may be used for confirming a selection but not
for primary selection. When one thinks in terms of themes one needs
to generalize.
And there is so much absurdity due to this.
Let me demonstrate.
Divya Chhabra's interview about Lac Felinum ( by Neil Tessler) is a
case in point. She decided that the central theme of the milk
is "prostitute" and goes on to say how the cat is the only animal
that domesticated itself and this is like prostituting oneself and so
it has an inner conflict. Is this what homeopathy has become? Does
this mean that instead of Lac Felinum - the milk - if we potentize
the muscle or blood or hair or grind up a whole cat and get a drug
out of it we will still get the central theme of "Prostitute"?
Obviously we should - right? But that never is the case. We all know
that even in plants the roots may have different actions than the
stems etc. There is so much evidence that different parts of the same
thing can have different effects that such cat prostitution claims
are laughable to say the least.
Rajan Sankaran in his "Substance of Homeopathy" talks about Thallium.
Since there are no clear cut mental symptoms for Thallium, he takes
the neuralgic pains of Thallium and because these are violent goes on
explaining the coped up and decompensated sides from the sense of
being attacked and attacking in return and so is like a general
leading a war effort...etc. Come on - give me a break. I feel ashamed
that stuff like this gets called as Classical Homeopathy. His
writings on Naja provings in the same book show the kind of reasoning
that goes totally against what I have understood as Homeopathy. To
quote-
"The specific quality of each species of snake seems to come in part
from the country it is indigenous to e.g.Lach which comes from South
America where people are extroverted, expressive, communicative and
have a strong ego- Lach has these qualities, whereas Naja comes from
India where people are subdued, suppressed and wronged and yet are
known to be spiritual, responsible and duty conscious." He not only
generalizes (racial profiling?) cultures and "humanizes" snakes but
uses that to justify his explanations of Snake venoms. Where is the
end?
Provings are not one-sided- Provings are a product of the substance
that is proved AND the prover. It is a record of an interaction.
Whereas here he discusses as if Lachesis or Naja have these
characteristics by themselves. What about prover characteristics?
Moreover what happens if a subdued Indian makes a Lachesis proving
and an extrovert South American takes Naja? What kind of provings
would we get?
Regarding Ellen's question about Medorrhinum - I am not against
remembering and using some one else's experience to prescribe. May be
at times we need to generalize- just a little bit but with a clear
understanding of what we are doing. This is like driving 10 miles
above the speed limits. We must be aware of what we are doing;
Boenninghausen completed his symptoms by analogy. But there is
certainly a limit to this as Hering felt. You cannot say having an
extra head is similar to having an extra finger even though both are
extra growths. Analogy must be used with limited acceptance and with
a touch of caution. Adding more symptoms from clinical observation is
needed; but the best way to do that is - give the remedy based on
known symptoms and then look for symptoms that disappeared even
though they are not part of the drug's known symptomatology. If a
remedy removes a higher level(mental, general etc) symptom than what
it was prescribed on - the better it is. Now we can grow our Materia
Medica without so much guess work.
Instead of running after each new remedy that comes in the horizon
esp. from the Guess-work masters we would be better off sticking to a
few hundred well known medicines - which were proved by the real
masters with real patients with real problems. There is so much gold
in those old hills- the old writings and journals.
--- In
minutus@yahoogroups.com, Julian Winston wrote:
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