Teaching homeopathy – practice more than theory

Samuel Hahnemann expected homeopathy to be considered as a medical practice. In his first public article the “New Principle”, he fundaments the need to test substances on healthy people. The word “principle” means therefore more a method choice than a theory. In the Organon he demands the physician to “stick” to his patient. The only scope of the physician is to cure the patient and not to build up theories on the origin of diseases. Hahnemann wanted to remain intently empiric, a genuine experimentalist in his approach to the affected person. He wanted the physician to control every phase of the treatment: he combined a unique professional example, namely: the producer, the prover and the clinician. The only person able to understand the quality and power of remedies is the physician himself.

Currently it is very difficult to maintain all these roles in one profession. However, to learn preparation methods and to test the remedies before administering them is a feasible approach. Coherently, LUIMO since 1971 has developed a teaching method, that brings the physician face to face with all these different aspects of homeopathy: remedy preparation, provings and clinical practice. At the same time, chemists, pharmacists, biologists and nurses are all implicated at different levels during patient treatment and there is a need for organic training. We suggest – to preserve the homogeneity of homeopathy – that it be taught in unique interdisciplinary organizations, rather than in separate, varying university disciplines (medicine, pharmacy, biology, etc). The risk, otherwise, is to lose internal coherence as it presently occurs. This claim will be extensively illustrated.