The Triad Method: Treating Complex Cases from Grassroots to Clinic

The Homeopathic Compendium

This book is three-in-one: it tells the story of the Maun Project (Botswana), it details the ideas behind the Triad Method (‘a homeopathic prescribing strategy for people living with complex disease’) and it is a summary of an independent evaluation of the Maun Homeopathy Project clinics performed by Lancaster University (2013).

Part 1 is the (hi-)story of the Maun Project—starting from ‘meeting the elephant’ and ending with a transformed community. It is a summary of Hilary's involvement with the Maun Project and sounds like a farewell story too.

This part is enlivened by little personal anecdotes and encounters. It is a book about homeopathy, but I would have loved to have more of the story of Botswana, Batswana (the people of Botswana) and the merging of traditional African healing and worldview with homeopathy.

The Triad Method seems to almost just happen out of Hilary's approach to being confronted by multifaceted, serious disease. A visiting volunteer spotted that she was using a ‘method’ and from that moment the method became ‘conscious’.

The Triad Method has been the unifying and continuous factor in the work performed by over 40 volunteers providing homeopathic care to the patients of the Maun Project since 2002, treating mostly HIV and AIDS sufferers.

Part 2 describes the principles underlying the Triad Method, a multi-remedy prescription, aimed at treating the acute/lesional, the fundamental (constitutional?) and the miasmatic layers (dormant or exposed) perceived in the case. A remedy is prescribed for each of these layers (in different potencies), to be repeated weekly on different days of the week. As Hilary says: ‘In the Triad Method there is no one simillimum and no hierarchy in the three prescriptions’.

Obviously, each case requires an individualised prescription. However, Part 2 would have benefited from clearer explanations as to the basis on which each remedy was chosen. The remedies are usually mentioned in the endnotes, and footnotes would have been a huge improvement to readability.

The university study summarised in Part 3 undoubtedly provides well-deserved acknowledgement of the Maun Project and Hilary Fairclough. However, it is a rather laborious and repetitive read, whose highlights are quoted in the first two parts already.

Did I enjoy the book? Yes! I liked the ‘story’ and Hilary's understanding of homeopathic philosophy. She provides good explanations of basic principles of health and disease, enabling good understanding of what ‘healing’ or ‘cure’ may mean in a case. The descriptions of the different miasms are enlightening and would make a good source for any student of homeopathy.

Would I use the Triad Method in my practice? Maybe, sometimes, very much depending on the individual case. As any method (for me personally), it is just one tool that needs to be used depending on the job in hand, not something to be followed religiously.