How our practice can empower us! Don’t get bogged down in methods and techniques that don’t produce results. Here are some of the hard lessons learnt from 25 years in practice:
1. Polycrests. These remedies with their long paper trail are well represented in our Materia Medicas and Repertories and have solved at least 80% of all my cured cases. To neglect them is a disservice to the profession. For example how many cases involving skin, digestion, sleep and thermo regulation (in menopause) respond well to Sulphur? How many laudable practices where built on polychrests? André Saine, Farokh Master, Vithoulkas to name a few. Another example is Cuba, where until recently (10 years ago), Cuban homeopaths worked effectively with only some 200 remedies at their disposal.
To this day I spend time practicing my scales (studying the keynotes of key remedies).
2. Nosodes. I confess that it has taken me some 18 years to use nosodes well; the increase of pediatric cases in the last 8 years helped to tip the scales. As an inveterate unicist prescriber, nosodes did not come up often enough in my repertorisations. And yet if I looked across the channel, at my colleagues practicing French style homeopathy, these nosodes occupied center stage in. The use of miasmatic remedies such as Medorrhinum, Tuberculinum, Carcinosinum in tandem with constitutional or acute remedies can put turbo jets on our therapeutic engine. Even the Banerjis have observed the miracle of Medorrhinum for urinary infections!
3. Stacking of Remedies. Surely it was not for nothing that P Sankaran (Rajan Sankaran’s father) offered such categories as “Complements” in addition to “Remedies that follow well” in his well-used pamphlet The Clinical Relationship of Homoeopathic Remedies. Yes I wish I were a sharp shooter, resolving the case with the single remedy or a string of single remedies, but my practice has informed me otherwise. The first ten years I was a devotee of classical prescribing which finally served to humble me, given the distressing load of failed cases. It was only when I traded in ideology for practicality that the tide turned in my favor. Why not prescribe Rhus Tox on a daily basis alongside Sulphur while including the occasional dose of Graphite or Natrum Sulph, and the whole topped up with Staph for a quick and painless resolution of a case of depression, eruptive inflammation and stiffness of the joints?
4. Be grateful for the complexes and the tried and true protocols. How many times have I relied on protocols and complexes, to keep a case afloat while I got my act together? Hahnemann himself proposed Belladonna for scarlet fever almost as a specific and quinine for malaria, which remedies could also be used prophylactically. Why not empower your clients (many parents) with easy to use complexes? In my practice, I favor the HTSF First Responders Kit. I find that I am best to enable all willing parties to handle the acutes, freeing me up to concentrate on the chronic. The kit with its user guide also helps solve the ongoing problem of accessibility to remedies. You save time and effort (minimal after hour calls and emails), get better results and watch your practice grow (mothers are the very best source of referrals).
5. Expanding your view. In the last 20 years we have modulated and refined our view of our remedies while including new remedies, thanks to the work of the Bombay school, Scholten, Vithoulkas, Loutan to name a few. It would be foolish for us not to bring this knowledge to bear in our prescribing. For example, the protocol proposed by Marine Jourde for Ebola includes Lac Caninum out of a consideration for the state and sensation of the victims of this epidemic in West Africa, along with such blood toxins as Bothrops, Baptisia and Carbo veg….but one must be mindful that prescribing from sensation-soul-essence is more experimental and so perhaps less reliable given the scarcity of drug provings, rubrics and materia medica.
On Sunday November 30th, I will show you how to hold your practice center stage. After all we come from an empirical tradition where the practice serves to informs us. Above all we must be able to interpret our results and adhere to what works. So if prescribing these two remedies simultaneously moves the case forward that is what we do. If repeated daily dosing of a 200C is what works that’s what we do. All of the examples that I use in the workshop serve to illustrate this. Also any method and technique which promotes our practice must be implemented, for practice enables mastery. We will delve into the nitty gritty of some of my strategic cases such as examples of tandem prescribing in pediatric cases (important cases to resolve given the many referrals they represent) , miasmatic prescribing (with some understanding of constitutions), the stacking of remedies all of this without losing control of a case.
In the wake of the regulation of homeopaths in Ontario it behooves us to move our practices forward. May I share with you my 25 years of experience and welcome you to learn from my mistakes. They say that the best coach is not necessarily he that makes the most impressive presentation but rather he who can improve the game. Allow me to be that coach for a day. I promise you will not be disappointed.
Merci,
Ingrid Bekhor
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