July 7, 2009

The Advantages of Using Homeopathic Software in Homeopathic Practice – Part III

Now let’s talk about the type of books you want and don’t want to have in a homeopathic software. In homeopathy, we have three main categories of books – repertories, materia medicae and books on homeopathic philosophy. Which ones do you need to have in your homeopathic software?

The answer depends on how you plan to use the homeopathic software. While it is clearly advantageous to include repertories in a homeopathic software (as presented in Part I), the situation is less obvious in case of materia medicae and books on homeopathic philosophy. Let’s take it step by step.

Typical materia medica includes some kind of foreword, followed by chapters describing the homeopathic picture of selected homeopathic remedy. For example, you have a chapter on Aconitum Napellus, followed by a chapter on Agaricus Muscarius etc. This typical structuring can be utilized by a homeopathic software and allow linking the chapters to specific remedy and provide a smooth interaction with the repertories.

This, however, assumes a common table of remedy names, on the side of homeopathic software, to which all repertories and materia medicae are linked. While this may come as natural, it is in fact very rarely the case. There are great discrepancies in remedy naming throughout the homeopathic literature and it takes a great deal of work to resolve all the naming problems, sometimes it’s even impossible. For example, some authors describe the remedy “Agaricus” and they mean “Agaricus Muscarius”, although the name “Agaricus” only denotes a genus involving many other mushrooms.

Only by comparing the symptoms can we know with confidence that the author means Agaricus Muscarius.

In case of other remedies, the situation is even more complicated. For example, for most older authors, Ferrum Metallicum contains information belonging to Ferrum Aceticum, Ferrum Carbonicum and Ferrum Metallicum. The homeopathic software has to deal with all these intricacies and you should specifically ask about this point when deciding what homeopathic software to choose.

When all this is resolved in a satisfactory manner, the homeopathic software should then allow you to define search commands that will browse through the text of materia medicae and present the parts that match your search query. It is important to make sure the homeopathic software of your choice provides effective searching mechanisms for materia medica. For difficult cases, the required information is often found in some forgotten materia medica, rather than in a repertory. It’s essential to keep in mind that even the modern repertories do not incorporate information from all the materia medica, not even all of the very old ones. Effective work with materia medica is therefore one of the essential functions of the homeopathic software.

The third category of books includes books on homeopathic philosophy. Since the study takes time and most people don’t like reading the text from the computer monitor, it is better to have these in physical format. By including such books, the homeopathic software vendor can claim a higher number of titles, but these do not necessarily mean a higher value in the actual process of remedy prescription.

In the next part, we shall talk more about the way materia medicae are included in homeopathic softwares.