history - long distance casetaking
Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 8:37 am
To respond to Dr. Rozencwajg's well-phrased and interesting question about how people conduct long-distance homeopathic treatment:
I've found that phone conversations and e-mail augment each other very well, and also often fill in gaps between personal visits. I've asked for candid photos of an individual I haven't previously seen but started treating at a distance, and the photos in this case (along with detailed e-mails and thorough phone interviews) actually provided big clues to the constitutional remedy that worked beautifully, Mercurius. I have had people make long trips of several hours by car or even plane for a first interview, then followed up quite successfully by phone or e-mail. A video of the person narrating would be excellent, of course, if they have the facility to produce one.
For me a key component is the person's energy, which is best perceived in person. The absence of opportunities somehow to perceive this renders the case more difficult than it needs to be -- although not impossible as long as there remain a combination of other modes of contact and perception. Sometimes handwriting has also provided useful cues to the person's underly ing energy as well as to their evolving progress with a remedy -- whatever is available, and the more modalities the better.
In general, I find that what doesn't work at all -- other than in cases of epidemics -- is if no contact is possible with the patient himself or herself. . One situation that turned out to be impossible actually involved multiple in-person visits of a recently immigrated patient who was seriously mentally ill and part of whose presentation involved a total lack of connection with others. I had no idea when I agreed to the initial appointment what the circumstances would be.
It turned out that I had not been the first health practitioner who had found the situation impossible: the medical doctors who had treated him had not been able to make a valid diagnosis, and were giving him medications for schizophrenia, although the picture we pieced together with great difficulty from combined family members' accounts of events 15 to 20 years previous pointed more toward epilepsy with severe depression. So there wasn't even good medical information to serve as a basis for proceeding.
The patient came each time accompanied by a half dozen to a dozen members of his extremely voluble family, only one member of which spoke English. This one English speaker did not live in the same location as the patient and so was not available to observe directly any of the patient's responses to remedies. When they came for a consultation, the various family members, talking all together, and arguing among themselves, gave their observations (while chasing two or three errant toddlers they'd also brought along), while the patient wandered about the room and the garden scowling and muttering and touching everything, and the English speaker tried to interpret.
In addition, the patient was heavily drugged by a large number of very potent psychotropic medications, so it turned out that the behaviors we could observe were artifacts of the medications, not symptoms of his natural disease. Finally, at one visit, the chaos was so great, the patient wandered away unnoticed and disappeared (within 3 or 4 minutes -- he must have hopped aboard a bus), the consultation ended with a generalized search through the whole neighborhood, and the local police finally found him several hours later in a different area entirely.
At that point, it had become clear we could not succeed. The accumulation of distancing factors made it impossible to get a case or figure out what the responses were to remedies, and we could make no progress. We could not persuade the family to stay home and let the patient come with only one or two people -- it just was contrary to their cultural and familial mores. It was a very distressing experience, because the patient was obviously very sick both naturally and from the (probably wrong) medications, his whole family was frantically distressed about him, and no one in any health care modality was able to help because of the impossibility of communicating through all these obstacles.
So I'd say that communication is the key, and there are not hard and fast rules how it should happen -- it's just essential that it does happen. Rosemary
I've found that phone conversations and e-mail augment each other very well, and also often fill in gaps between personal visits. I've asked for candid photos of an individual I haven't previously seen but started treating at a distance, and the photos in this case (along with detailed e-mails and thorough phone interviews) actually provided big clues to the constitutional remedy that worked beautifully, Mercurius. I have had people make long trips of several hours by car or even plane for a first interview, then followed up quite successfully by phone or e-mail. A video of the person narrating would be excellent, of course, if they have the facility to produce one.
For me a key component is the person's energy, which is best perceived in person. The absence of opportunities somehow to perceive this renders the case more difficult than it needs to be -- although not impossible as long as there remain a combination of other modes of contact and perception. Sometimes handwriting has also provided useful cues to the person's underly ing energy as well as to their evolving progress with a remedy -- whatever is available, and the more modalities the better.
In general, I find that what doesn't work at all -- other than in cases of epidemics -- is if no contact is possible with the patient himself or herself. . One situation that turned out to be impossible actually involved multiple in-person visits of a recently immigrated patient who was seriously mentally ill and part of whose presentation involved a total lack of connection with others. I had no idea when I agreed to the initial appointment what the circumstances would be.
It turned out that I had not been the first health practitioner who had found the situation impossible: the medical doctors who had treated him had not been able to make a valid diagnosis, and were giving him medications for schizophrenia, although the picture we pieced together with great difficulty from combined family members' accounts of events 15 to 20 years previous pointed more toward epilepsy with severe depression. So there wasn't even good medical information to serve as a basis for proceeding.
The patient came each time accompanied by a half dozen to a dozen members of his extremely voluble family, only one member of which spoke English. This one English speaker did not live in the same location as the patient and so was not available to observe directly any of the patient's responses to remedies. When they came for a consultation, the various family members, talking all together, and arguing among themselves, gave their observations (while chasing two or three errant toddlers they'd also brought along), while the patient wandered about the room and the garden scowling and muttering and touching everything, and the English speaker tried to interpret.
In addition, the patient was heavily drugged by a large number of very potent psychotropic medications, so it turned out that the behaviors we could observe were artifacts of the medications, not symptoms of his natural disease. Finally, at one visit, the chaos was so great, the patient wandered away unnoticed and disappeared (within 3 or 4 minutes -- he must have hopped aboard a bus), the consultation ended with a generalized search through the whole neighborhood, and the local police finally found him several hours later in a different area entirely.
At that point, it had become clear we could not succeed. The accumulation of distancing factors made it impossible to get a case or figure out what the responses were to remedies, and we could make no progress. We could not persuade the family to stay home and let the patient come with only one or two people -- it just was contrary to their cultural and familial mores. It was a very distressing experience, because the patient was obviously very sick both naturally and from the (probably wrong) medications, his whole family was frantically distressed about him, and no one in any health care modality was able to help because of the impossibility of communicating through all these obstacles.
So I'd say that communication is the key, and there are not hard and fast rules how it should happen -- it's just essential that it does happen. Rosemary