Case Taking

Case Taking:  The general concept in Homeopathy towards treatment of the sick is “Treat the patient not the disease”.

Symptoms are the language of the disease. These are the body’s attempt to warn about the internal derangement of the person. Without symptoms, a person could not have illness. The symptom may be trivial or significant. This may be at the physical, mental or spiritual level. An experienced physician will be able to identify the internal derangement through the signs and symptoms, even if it is trivial or insignificant to the patient.

In homeopathy, medicine is prescribed after a detailed case taking, giving importance both to mental and physical attributes as well as any particular symptoms. Both subjective and objective symptoms have their importance. The symptoms that represent the patient as a whole are of more value, especially such as expressed in the patient's own words.

The core concept of Homeopathy is the principle of Similia Similibus Curantur, which demonstrates that a remedy selected for the treatment of a natural disease shall be the one that is capable of producing a range of similar symptoms in a healthy person. Therefore, the precondition to call a substance a homeopathic remedy is its ability to produce set symptoms on healthy human volunteers during the course of its clinical trial or proving. This principle demonstrates that disease can be cured by a medicinal substance that is tested on the principles of Homeopathic pharmacodynamics.

The word symptom connotes any change that the patient experiences during the illness, including changes in emotional patterns, sleep, eating habits, temperature variations and so on. According to the importance for selecting a similimum, symptoms are evaluated for their value.

The following are the different approaches of evaluation of symptoms:

Peculiar symptoms: These are symptoms unique to the individual that do not occur in most persons with the same disease. Homeopaths make note of peculiar symptoms because they often help to determine the remedy.

Mental and emotional symptoms: These are important general symptoms that inform about the patient's total experience of the disorder.

Other general symptoms: These are physical symptoms felt throughout the patient's body such as tiredness, changes in appetite, or restlessness.

Particular symptoms: Particular symptoms are localized in the body; they include such symptoms as nausea, skin rashes, headache, etc

During homeopathic case-taking, the practitioner will evaluate the intensity of the patient's symptoms, assess their depth, duration, note any peculiar symptoms, evaluate the modalities of each symptom and make a list of key symptoms to guide the selection of the proper medicine.

The choice of a specific remedy is guided by the patient's total symptom profile rather than by the illness. Homeopathic remedies are prescribed according to the law of similars. There are several types of prescriptions according to the different types of clinical presentation of the case.