By the words “mental symptoms” many readers wrongly consider that they must probe deeply into the mental faculty of the patient by putting symptom-eliciting questions.
No. Not at all.
We would even go to the extent of saying that if you have already learnt anything about psychology it is a disqualification.
You have to simply listen to the patient. He has to tell his remedy and not you.
While ‘key-notes’ ‘characteristics’ or ‘rare, strange and peculiars’ are also ways to find the remedy, there is another but easy, quick and surest way to arrive at the similimum, and it is to work out the case on mind symptoms.
S.210 of the Organon reads:
“…in all the so-called corporeal diseases the condition of the disposition and mind is always altered; and in all cases of diseases we are called on to cure, the state of the patient’s disposition is to be particularly noted, along with the totality of the symptoms, if we would trace an accurate picture of the disease, in order to be able therefrom to treat it homoeopathically with success.”
Again, in S. 211 Hahnemann adds:
“…. the state of the disposition of the patient often chiefly determines the selection of the homoeopathic remedy, as being a decidedly characteristic symptom which can least of all remain concealed from the accurately observing physician.”
Hahnemann continues to say in S. 212:
“The Creator of therapeutic agents has also had particular regard to this main feature of all diseases, the altered state of the disposition and mind, for there is no powerful medicinal substance in the world which does not very notably alter the state of the disposition and mind… and every medicine does so in a different manner.”
In the succeeding Section it is further emphasized that mental symptom is a must:
“We shall, therefore, never be able to cure conformably to nature (that is to say, homoeopathically) if we do not, in every case of disease, even in such as are acute, observe, along with the other symptoms, those relating to the changes in the state of the mind and disposition, and if we do not select, from among the medicines a disease force which, in addition to the similarity of its other symptoms to those of the disease, is also capable of producing a similar state of the disposition and mind.”