Homeopathy : the journal of the Faculty of Homeopathy
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Historical Article
The concept of miasm--evolution and present day perspective.
This paper reviews the circumstances in which the concept of miasm evolved and how subsequent developments in medicine have improved our understanding of the cause of diseases. It concludes with an emphasis on the need to further refine the homeopathic concept of disease.
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We report findings from a pilot data collection study within a programme of quality assurance, improvement and development across all five homeopathic hospitals in the UK National Health Service (NHS). ⋯ We have successfully piloted a process of national clinical data collection using patient-reported outcome in homeopathic hospital outpatients, identifying a wide range and complexity of medical complaints treated in that setting. After a series of homeopathy appointments, a high proportion of patients, often representing "effectiveness gaps" for conventional medical treatment, reported improvement in health affecting their daily living. These pilot findings are informing our developing programme of standard setting for homeopathic care in the hospital outpatient context.
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Biography Historical Article
Believing in order to understand: Hahnemann's hierarchisation of values.
During the last 200 years, the social, scientific, and religious framework in which homeopathy is taught and practiced has changed tremendously. Various different forms of homeopathy have been advocated. ⋯ Hahnemann's hierarchisation of values appears to consist primarily in striving for a world view in which he could conceive of himself as a spiritual and moral being, secondly in a yearning for scientific advancement, and thirdly in his need to earn a living. Homeopaths are challenged to match this hierarchisation and be aware that homeopathy comprises dimensions other than just science and economics.
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Biography Historical Article
Hahnemann's experiments with 50 millesimal potencies: a further review of his casebooks.
A review of Hahnemann's clinical records at the Institute for History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart shows that until the end of his life, Hahnemann continued to refine his clinical method, based on clinical cases. His "most perfected method" motivated him to write the sixth edition of the The Organon of the Healing Art, proposing solutions controlling the side effects he observed with repeated doses of homeopathic medicines. Unfortunately, this was published many years posthumously. The sixth edition of The Organon introduced the fifty-millesimal scale. ⋯ Hahnemann probably decided to write the sixth edition, in 1840, to incorporate his latest experience with the repetition of potentized doses and periodically modified potencies. He must have revised it after February 1842 to include his latest findings with fifty-millesimal potencies in ascending degrees. Hahnemann's conception about the superiority of the fifty-millesimal in comparison with the centesimal dynamization was based on a significant number of experiments with the two scales.