The Complete Homeopathic Resource for Common Illnesses

Dennis Chernin
North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, California, USA, 2006
Price: $29.95, ISBN:1-55643-608-4

This is a four hundred plus page book clearly directed at a general readership. So, my first response is “oh no, not another general guide to the treatment of common conditions! Aren’t there enough already?” Actually, most books directed at the general readership suffer from two failings. If they are written by people who have no medical training the general advice is often dubious and in some cases downright dangerous. This book, written by a medical doctor, absolutely does NOT suffer from this criticism. You can trust the advice in this book. The second common failing is that such books take a kind of recipe book approach to homeopathic treatment, laid out by clinical condition with a few keynotes of common remedies for each condition. The problem with this is that it is a very limited and sometimes misleading approach to our rich materia medica and fails to sufficiently individualise. This is probably inevitable with a “these remedies for these diseases” approach.

The first section of Dennis Chernin's book is a good, clear introduction to the basics of the homeopathic method. Very clear. This is a good starting point for anyone who wants to learn what homeopathy is. The second section is the traditional homeopathic recipe book approach with the conditions listed alphabetically. There are just under a hundred separate conditions listed. This section is good enough but really contains nothing new to set it above any other similar book. I’ll come back to Section 3 in a moment, but Section 4 is unusual. It is unusual because it is a balanced, broad, though not intensive summary of the evidence base for homeopathy along with other resource information. This kind of information is usually incomplete and quickly goes out of date but the idea is a good one.

Let me return to Section 3 because this is where this book turns from a “me too” into something highly original, interesting and much better than probably any other similar book on the market. Section 3 is entitled “Using the Complete Homeopathic Resource CD”. The book has a CD in a plastic envelope inside the back cover. This transforms this book. The CD is superb! Firstly, it contains a working version of an abbreviated Kent's Repertory (only rubrics relevant to the clinical conditions mentioned in this book, and only those 105 remedies covered by this book, with mental symptoms “that are applicable to home use or basic clinical use”) This amounts to 9000 of Kent's 65,000 rubrics. It is a working repertory and really easy to use. Secondly, it contains an excellent primer of materia medica accessible either through a clinical conditions module or a materia medica module. Any health care professional preparing for the Faculty's Primary Health Care Examination would find this extremely useful. Thirdly, it contains an introductory section about homeopathy.

For $29.95 this is nothing short of remarkable. I could easily recommend this book as either a family guide type book or as one (you’ll need other books too!) of the books which a student of homeopathy should buy.

I have two suggestions for improvements. Firstly, it would be great if the CD ran on Macs and/or Unix! It's a shame it is Windows only. Secondly, research and resource information is date-sensitive and this part of the book/CD would be enhanced with web links to resources such as The Faculty of Homeopathy's site-which doesn’t even get a mention in this very US-oriented book.