The mood was very sentimental on the last day of our college when we were to part ways with our friends. After all of them left, I looked bemusingly at the sprawling, lush green campus, standing all alone. I had to meet one important person–my professor
He was as usual in the library. Seeing me he exclaimed–‘What are your future plans? Where are you going to set up your clinic?’ I was short of words but full of parting tears in the eyes. He consoled me–‘Parting is a way of life but do not ever depart from the true spirit of Homeopathy’ He said
‘Let us come to reality’…he continued.. ‘In Homeopathy, cure is not cure if there is a transient palliation only to be quickly followed by a whirlpool of catastrophe. Remember that individualization is the strictest criteria that cannot be foregone even for a million dollars. A patient might utter a hundred times that he has blood pressure but it is of little use to you. But if he utters just once that he is better by lying down on left side, it is an important highlighter.
Read the right Materia Medica, The right repertory. Read them between the lines. Understand your patient and his feelings properly. Every second patient will seem to ask for Nux vom and Sulphur while it is actually not so. Nux vom appears to suit everyone going by the repertory while really it is not so. (He was repeating this aspect often in the classroom too)
Do not prescribe without the patient in front of you. Examine the pulse, his appearance, the color of the tongue –this will tell you 50% of his story.
In Homeopathy, disappearance of symptoms should be followed with increase in strength and feeling of buoyancy. Or else it is not cure but palliation. A patient who tells you he is well, and that he also feels well within one month of treatment is unreliable but one who tells so after one year of treatment is rightly believable
I was little hesitant when I asked him one last question ……’Sir what about potency?
He said ‘ For potency factor, look at the life of Dr JT Kent. Having enriched himself with buffer knowledge and buffer experience, having completed his Materia Medica, Repertory, the lesser writings and his interpretation of Organon, towards the end of his life in one of his concluding lectures, he stated that anything beyond the dose laid by Hahnemann is a fatal error. It was at this stage that he was a crestfallen man because few of his contemporaries started falling apart from him’
He showed me his briefcase full of mother tinctures, biochemic tablets low strengths…’ With this briefcase, I can treat the whole world of sick–the whole world of the imbecile…the whole world of psychics.. the whole world of terminally ill’
Ultimately he said…’There is no separate Classical and Non-classical Homeopathy. There is only one Homeopathy.
And he handed over the briefcase as my parting gift which I use till date.