Building Bridges

Afterthoughts of the NASH conference in New York (2003)

 At the conference in New York there were several voices that emphasized the urgency of organizing our profession. More and more of us realize that instead of being the followers of several leaders in separate groups we should find our core values and establish our standards together. Sticking to these standards we will not be lost in the maze of recent passionate upheaval of homeopathy but rather we will be able to create a community where we can rely on each other’s ideas and results.

We have been discussing this issue recently quite  a lot in the NASH News and at other homeopathy forums.

Miranda Castro in her conference opening speech mentioned that one of the tasks of NASH is to build bridges between homeopaths from North America and from other countries.

I liked this picture: building bridges means that we connect, we find the already existing islands and make the connections between them. We are a community, because we see the advantage in being connected rather than isolated.

The question is lurking all around us: How can we become  a community unified by shared values rather than separated by different leaders?

Paul Herscu in his conference closing speech suggested that we should establish standards for our profession. He suggested that we at least do the following:

That is right - and not only we need a standard definition on what cure is but we should establish our standards in many different areas of homeopathy. We have the Organon, which founded our basic laws. 200 years have passed and though we still build our profession on the same solid ground, we have had many great homeopathic thinkers since then. The new ideas have to be organized or at least evaluated as being appropriate to homeopathy or not. How do we decide about new ideas whether or not they should be a part of our standards?

I think that currently one of the main obstacles to agreement on anything in our profession is that the leading teachers present their systems using different basic concepts. This misleads many of their followers to believe that systems of other prominent teachers of homeopathy are essentially different and therefore inferior or even wrong.

I had the privilege to study with three exceptional teachers of homeopathy: Paul Herscu, Misha Norland and Rajan Sankaran. Looking back I realize that although there are differences in their systems they share some essential elements. Could those essential elements be the foundations of our standards – the islands that we can connect with bridges? 

Let me illustrate this with two examples. First an example that compares situational materia medica of Rajan Sankaran and Cycles and segments of Paul Herscu.

Rajan tells us about situational materia medica, where he views the pathology and the remedy picture as if it happened in a situation. The person behaves in a certain way, one theme of the pathology following the other and unfold itself in a logical order, caused by that particular situation. To quote Rajan from his book, The System of Homeopathy: “ As I was studying the Materia Medica I came to understand remedies as characteristic combination of components. .. I postulated that the various components were connected, and the connection was that all of them were needed in one particular situation.”

Paul Herscu teaches the homeopathic material in Cycles, built from segments (which are the themes of the remedy).

A Cycle is a pattern of change from segment to segment.  Each segment represents a state of the patient from which the natural tendency leads to the next segment in the cycle. “ The fluid action of chronic disease is like that. It first establishes a certain pattern and then renew itself by falling back to the same groove over and over again.” (quote from Paul Herscu’s Stramonium book)

Although these descriptions may appear different they have a  shared underlying structure – dynamics, causality, development, sequencing of symptoms.

I studied in depth the Cycles and segments model and I see it as a well grounded and comprehensive system. I know other authors have ideas which resemble this sequencing - Rajan Sankaran, Jeremy Sherr, etc. As I read articles written in different publications of homeopathy I see struggle: great ideas, good homeopaths, logical thinking but there are no bridges between them. It would be great to see a forum (part of the process of establishing standards!) where these ideas could be viewed keeping in mind: How can we relate them to each other? What can we learn from the other one? How can we build  system  guide-lines that all of us could agree upon? Guidelines that would be based on the core ideas that we all share.

Without connection, without bridges between these systems the struggle will continue.

Let me give a different  example:

I quote from an interview with Jeremy Sherr from The Homœopath, telling about his work for his book , the temporarily nicknamed The Joys of Syphilis:

“I'm taking ten remedies that are characteristically syphilitic and not much else, and studying them in depth to look at the simple, common denominator running through them all, in order to try and understand the miasm.”

This statement reminds me very much the way Rajan Sankaran works on his ideas: “One approach I took to unearthing the themes of the plant families begins with studying a primary remedy in the group, with an eye toward finding an underlying theme…. When a theme is found in many of the remedies, it becomes a theme of the family.” (quote from The System of Homeopathy)

These are not ground breaking ideas but show clearly that these two homeopaths start their research in a very similar way. 

Reading through our literature I see never-ending similarities between approaches, ideas and key concepts.

This is an important task for our community to identify the common core that is present in the prominent contemporary systems. It is the commonality in these teachings that we can safely rely on and use as the foundation for our science - standards, that all those who have the different names for their ideas today, could agree upon.