Dear Friends,
I have shared my personal journey as a homeopath with you before in our July 2007 and August 2007 editorials. Today, I would like to share another aspect of my evolution as a homeopath.
When I was a young student, it was common for us to hear statements from our teachers like ‘homeopathy cures, allopathy suppresses’, homeopathy can cure many incurable cases’, ‘homeopathy cures the person and not just treats the disease’. On hearing these statements we used to nod in agreement. Our teachers made us feel that homeopathy can literally cure anything and everything. The limitations of the system were taught but the sense of euphoria over having found the ‘real medicine’ drowned the realization about the limits.
On and off, we used to come across extraordinary cures from our teachers and met with our own small successes while treating our family and friends. We felt like we were sitting on the edge of a medical revolution. I used to look with scornful eyes at anyone who said that xyz disease is incurable! After all, we were taught that the name of the disease does not matter for a homeopath. Life and homeopathy both looked very promising. Curing a case seemed easy – take the case well, repertorize, differentiate remedies and you are ready to rock!
But life ain’t so easy …and neither is homeopathy! When I started practicing independently the results were there but not as frequent as I had hoped for and miracles were few and far between. Even after going through all the basic steps, often at the end of taking a case, I had no clue what to prescribe. Time and again I met situations where cases of arthritis, leucoderma, psoriasis, hypertension, thyroid disorders, chronic IBS, asthma etc. stood in front of me, looking for an elixir. Time and again I faced failures and realized that the euphoria of the student days was misleading.
What followed was more hard work, going back to Organon again, learning about all non-classical and new-classical schools of thoughts and above all, learning from failures. With time the results have improved a lot. Be it leucoderma, psoriasis, myasthenia or cancer or thyroid disorders – I have seen people improving with homeopathy. Sometimes the journey ends with a cure and sometimes relief is all that comes. But cures are now not infrequent and the faith in homeopathy continues to grow.
Measuring the Success
So after having seen success with homeopathy, the next step was to find out to what extent can we be successful in curing our patients? I understand that there are too many variables in defining a cure and it is not even possible to measure the success rate with absolute certainty. It can vary from acute to chronic, from early to advanced pathology and even with how you define ‘success’ or ‘cure’. But still, we can have a fair idea about our individual success rate.
Over the past few years I have discussed this with many homeopaths and have got a variety of different answers. Some, who believe in single remedy cures, say that the cure rate can be as low as 2% (for cases treated with just 1 medicine throughout the course of treatment). There have been others who believe that even master classical homeopaths have a success rate of 10 to 15%. There are others (a larger percentage), who claim curative results in around 40-50% cases. On the other end of the spectrum, there are homeopaths that claim 90% success rates.
The truth is that the cure rate varies from individual to individual and that the average rate lies somewhere between those two extremes of 2% and 90%. Have you ever thought about your average success rate for all cases for a given year? Would you like to share your success rate and your ideas about the measure of the success with others in the community? If yes, write to me about your success rate as a clinician. Use your own guidelines for what constitutes success for you. Let us do this as a random sampling and see what the global results and variables look like. Tell us about your success rate, how you measure your success and also what leads to failure.
Write to me at mail@hpathy.com
Yours in Homeopathy,
— Chief Editor —
Homeopathy for Everyone
