Homeopathic Repertorisation Methods

As a medical professional, you want to analyze a patient's symptoms and find a proper remedy as swiftly as possible. The colossal materia medica, which requires reading and comparing infinite lists of symptoms, does not allow for quick and easy reference. However, you can complement medica usage with homeopathic repertories, which offer an index to disease' symptoms and their remedies, from which you select ones that fit a case.

Old and New Methods

• If you interpret symptoms into headings (also known as rubrics) accurately, you will find the remedies that have close similarity to your case and, to help ascertain your final selection, study and compare the remedies to those in the materia medica. After significant experience with repertories, you may be able to use repertorisation alone by carefully selecting headings and narrowing your choice to one remedy.

  The old repertorisation method involves using a plain paper sheet. You would write down medicines with their grades, and compare them against symptoms. Upon conclusion, you discover common medicines that cover all the headings, and you can differentiate further by referencing materia medica.

  When you're trying to work out a case, this method takes more time, but you will learn to use repertory in a better way, and you will improve your acquaintance with the repertory and your knowledge of materia medica.

  The modern repertorisation method involves using a repertorial sheet, which contains a list of alphabetically arranged medicines as well as a number of horizontal and vertical columns, so you can compare the marks to headings.

Elimination Process

• Regardless of whether you use the old or new method, you follow two logical processes when systematically working out a case: elimination and total addition (totality).

  With elimination repertorisation, you select a key symptom from your case and infer that the remedy your patient needs must be in the corresponding heading. After placing the key symptom on top, with the remaining symptoms descending in hierarchical order, you take the primary heading as a starting point, and only analyze further the listed remedies.

  The elimination process works best when there is a clear-cut cause of the condition; if a single symptom exists in the case, in any category (emotional, mental, physical; general or particular), given it has an unusual intensity, peculiarity or uniqueness in the type of case you're treating; or when a clearly defined pathological process exists, with no other existing case feature to interfere.

Totality Process

• Totality repertorisation is the most cumbersome of techniques, though you have less chance of omissions. If you do not use a computer, you should use it in cases where you cannot use another technique or you have enough time to do it.

  Here, all important symptoms are in the repertory, with you noting every complete heading in full. You then analyze the whole group of headings to see which remedies feature in most or all, scoring each remedy by adding together all of the grades of type in which the remedy appears. Under the remedies you are considering, you can get an idea of each symptom's relative intensity.

  For example, if you have five headings and use Kent's or Murphy's Repertory, you score 3 points to remedies appearing in bold, 2 points for those in italics and 1 point for those in ordinary type. You end up with a small group of remedies, with each carrying two numbers. If sulphur scored 5/14, that means that it appeared in every heading and scored a 14.