How to take a case. General overview. part 2.

So, if you read part 1, the analysis continues. Specifically, the question arises pertaining to the known diagnosis of a named disease, and what place it holds in homoeopathic treatment.

We need to make a mental adjustment when thinking of disease. A ‘disease’ is not a unique entity. It does not exist outside of a living organism. It is a condition, a deviation from a healthy state. Once we comprehend that fact, it allows us to proceed with interpretation and assessment of the individual a lot more comprehensively.

As Stated previously elsewhere, there are known states of disorder which have been classified by symptom exhibition and pathological progression in a known order. These states have occurred, be it a contagion or epidemic, in individuals, albeit from a infecting agent which cause the progression of disorder in the known manner. The organism will exhibit the fundamental reality of altered response and functional changes which can be observed.

In homoeopathic diagnosis, this functional change, according to know pathological progression, according to location and altered responses, is ONE of the diagnosis tools used. Knowledge of progression of a type of disorder is useful to evaluate treatment and give a prognosis of the efficacy of the medicines prescribed. A physician utilising the true Hahnemannian application of therapeutics, will match the individual expression of disease, with an individually required medicine for individual curative purpose. Orthodox medicine will contain its treatment within the parameters of causation and location, ie treat the causative infection and the locale that is affected only. Given that the homoeopathic physician is looking to treat the person suffering under a disease state, it makes it totally imperative that he or she does not get trapped into the nosological form of diagnosis, to the detriment of treating the patient by individualising exhibited symptoms. If we keep the nosological diagnosis firmly in view, but attach a far WIDER significance to it, we can proceed cautiously further in our search for a curative medicine.

Diagnostic issues that face the homoeopath today, are far more complex than naming diseases, and knowledge of the anatomical areas of concern. A homoeopath will have to weigh up carefully and determine what value to place on aetiology and intervening events in the progression of the disorder that has the patient before them today. The physician will have to look past the causation and see what is to be treated RIGHT NOW Regardless of the causation if necessary. The homoeopath will have to take into consideration the reactions to all external stimuli IF there has been changes in reaction since an altered state of health ensued. This is a much widened viewpoint of disease acknowledgement that current medicine allows for.

We cannot ignore pathology. Pathology is a symptom and an observable symptom of part of the disease state. Hence;

• Pathology indicates what is common to a known disease state.
• Hence Pathology allows us to see the Patients individual or peculiar symptoms.
• Pathology allows us to see new symptoms as a curative progression or a known progression of a disease state.
• Pathology can determine what is treatable and what is not.