Homeopathy 2018; 107(S 01): 55-78
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1633306
Oral Abstracts
The Faculty of Homeopathy

Does Methodology Matter? A Long-Term Comparative Analysis of Current Homeopathic Methodologies

Irene Dorothee Schlingensiepen
1   Institut fuer wissenschaftlich orientierte Homoeopathie, Germany
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Publikationsdatum:
05. Februar 2018 (online)

 

Introduction: Different popular methodological approaches arrive at different remedies as the most appropriate for a given patient. What does that mean with respect to reproducibility of clinical outcomes? The aim was to identify prescribing methods that would more consistently arrive at long-lasting, sustained healing in chronic disease.

Method: We compared long-term outcomes of patients in our practice treated with different homoeopathic approaches. We tracked individual patient outcomes over extended periods between 1 and 21 years and correlated them with the different methodologies we had used to determine the remedies.

Results: Long-term outcomes—Certain methodologies were correlated with outcome rates comparable to placebo (Plant-sensation-method), whereas other methodologies scored consistently better (Periodic table). Perfect Match—The most reliable and predictive indicator of sustained long-term improvement with a single remedy was a perfect match between patients’ symptoms and remedy proving. A perfect simillimum match was only possible if in-depth and thorough provings were available. Such a perfect match is very rare and is clearly linked to the quality of the proving. A surprising and unexpected observation emerged in patients for whom such a perfect matching simillimum was determined. On re-taking the case of these patients, who did not know their remedy, they could almost always name the source of their remedy using interviewing techniques adapted from psychoanalytical methods.

Conclusion: This led to the discovery—like with Hahnemann's patient, Klockenbrinck—that the knowledge about the source of the simillimum may lie within each patient. It can be brought to light using adapted interviewing techniques, which we have increasingly refined over the years. A source-based remedy prescription—once unambiguously identified—leads to reliable long-term outcomes only comparable to perfect matches based on highly thorough provings.

Keywords: Homoeopathic methods, long-term outcomes, chronic disease, perfect match, simillimum, source-based prescription