Using the ‘Qualities’

The idea was to create rubrics representing major mental themes, large rubrics which have a very high (95% and up) chance of having the right remedy in them.  This is based on the Boenninghausen concept of generalization, and also on the concept of affinities.

For instance, a case has definite issues of being a ‘victim’. The patient might have delusion of being persecuted, have suppressed anger and feeling always taken advantage of.  If the same patient deals with this by always wanting to be at home: Fear out of the house and homesickness, then I will also use the rubric ‘home’. Now let’s say the main physical affinity is bones.   I now use these three rubrics in my repertorisation.

Victim (331 remedies)

Home (251 remedies)

Generalities, Bones (232 remedies)

The result: 68 remedies. This is an easy number of remedies to go through and choose the most appropriate one. Many remedies that would have vanished in normal repertorisation, such as Vipera or Lac-delphinum, will come through.

There is a very high probability that the right remedy would be in the end result. This system is much simpler to use, as we do not have to choose a precise small rubric, which may look good in theory, but still be inappropriate, if only because the remedy is not in it.

I started by creating a list of Mental Qualities that came up frequently in my day-to-day practice. As well as the themes of caring, money, self-esteem, victim, obsessive-compulsive and snakes, I chose qualities such as perfectionist, control, divided, guilt, clairvoyance, failure, embarrassment, opinion of others, knives and points, home, water, music etc.

Primary rubrics

I am also a fan of the Phatak Repertory, which is based on Boger’s Repertory. In these repertories only the remedies that have the rubric’s theme as an essential part of their makeup are included. So for instance, in Phatak’s Repertory the rubric ‘white discharges‘ contains only 20 remedies, far fewer then in Kent or Synthesis, but you can be sure that the remedies included have white discharges as a major theme, such as Kali-muriaticum. This is true even if the remedy is small.

Therefore I decided to create a ‘Primary rubric’ alongside each ‘Main rubric’. This represents remedies that have the theme as a major issue, even if they are minor remedies. We should use these ‘Primary rubrics’ only in cases where the issue is very intense or pronounced, or is an essential feature of our understanding of the case.

By including the opposite approach of Boenninghausen, which contains all possible remedies in the generalized rubrics, side by side with the Boger-Phatak approach of rubrics with only the most prominent remedies, I have attempted to create a repertory that will span both trends and create more possibilities.

Accuracy

When creating a repertory of Qualities and concepts one must be very careful not to use automatic combining of rubrics or importing materia medica, without critically checking each remedy. For instance, if we search for the word ‘fall’ to represent the quality of ‘High and Low’, we may get the rubric “Coma with falling of eyelids”, which is not appropriate.

Furthermore, a materia medica search in Encyclopedia Homeopathica or ReferenceWorks using the search word ‘embarrassment’ will yield remedies mentioned as “NOT being embarrassed” or remedies listed under “Unlike Bar-c, embarrassment is not an issue in this remedy ….”  In a similar way, searches for the theme of ‘dark’ will bring up remedies with ‘dark thoughts’ or ‘dark urine’. While a search for ‘perfectionist’ might bring up many remedies from cases, many times this symptom was not cured, and therefore is not valid. If using materia medica searches to repertorise was a valid method, we could stop using our repertories. But for the above reasons it does not work well.

Other inaccuracies came from some clinical materia medicas, which tend to be relaxed about adding remedies under collective themes. For instance, Cuprum-metallicum may have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but while this may be true for some Cuprum salts, it is not necessarily true for all Cuprum salts.

For this reason I made sure to check each remedy individually from the source.

The xx family groups

Another innovation I incorporated in this repertory is the use of families, which I call the

The -xx remedies (e.g. Carbon-xx or Gems-xx or Noble-xx). These represent families that are prominently related to a particular Quality. Rather than including all the remedies in a family, which may not be accurate for each individual remedy, I allow the user to decide. The fact that Kali-c is included in OCD does not necessarily mean that all Kali-salts have this Quality – that is a dangerous assumption. By creating the -xx remedies I allow for the possibility of a Kali salt having the symptom, until this is confirmed or denied by clinical experience.

I have made no assumptions about families. If Arsenicum and Iodatum are present to a high degree in a Quality, it does not necessarily mean that Arsenicum-iodatum is, unless there are other factors to support its inclusion. However if the Quality seemed to be present in a few of the Iodatum salts, I have added Iodatum-xx experimentally.  This gives the user an opportunity to check all the salts and to confirm or deny their clinical usefulness.

For example, if you combine the Qualities ‘Money’ ‘Light’ and Home’, the ‘family remedy’ Radioactive-xx will come through. You can now search the radioactives to see if any particular remedy is appropriate, for instance Neptunium or Californium. In this way you will again come up with remedies you may not have thought of.

I now use the Repertory of Mental Qualities in almost every case. I have no doubt that this repertory will increase the quality of your practice. It has done that for me and for all the homoeopaths who use it.

I wish to thank Rafi Neu and the Dynamis -Minnesota team for their help with this repertory.

For a detailed explanation of how I constructed the rubrics see:

http://www.wholehealthnow.com/homeopathy_software/sherr-rmq.pdf

Once again, you can watch the demo on the following link

http://www.wholehealthnow.com/homeopathy_software/sherr-repertory.html

What experienced homoeopaths and old masters have to say about the art of repertorisation

Boger made a serious attempt … to unite analysis and synthesis in one rubric…And it is, in my opinion, the safest, in that it is more likely than any other to include the desired remedy in the final group.

Analysis…is a resolution of the data into the simple elements of the individual complex.

Royal Elmore Swift Hayes, M.D

I think before we condemn any repertory we ought to know how it is constructed and the background back of it.

… unless you know how to follow it after the Hahnemannian manner of taking general groups of symptoms first and then going to particular groups, you can very easily get into a maze.

The best prescribers prescribe on the high-grade symptoms, the mental and moral states, the reaction of the patient to environment, heat and cold, etc., aversions and desires.

Take those groups, and you don’t have to use so many of them. Three or four general symptoms will frequently lead you to the three or four remedies you want to study more carefully in the materia medica.

Dr. Grimmer

We have in Boger’s repertory a compilation of remedies of highest rank from Kent’s, from Boenninghausen’s, and from some of the other repertories, taking about twelve of the most important remedies in each of those, those that have shown the largest relative values. That is all right so far as you are going, but they omit those remedies of lesser value in that rubric. The most absolutely sure repertory in this world is Boenninghausen’s. As has been said, it is nearly fool proof. You get symptomatic and numerical totality.

Dr. Roberts

If the symptoms of the case are sufficiently characteristic, I usually use Kent because I can repertorize my case more quickly… When the symptoms are more or less common I turn to Boger or Boenninghausen.

Moreover, most of them (the repertorisers-JS) were provers themselves. They had felt the action of the remedy in their very tissues, and they understood remedies a great deal better than we do.

Dr. Farrington