Introduction: Different popular methodological approaches arrive at different remedies as the most
appropriate for a given patient. What does that mean with respect to reproducibility
of clinical outcomes? The aim was to identify prescribing methods that would more
consistently arrive at long-lasting, sustained healing in chronic disease.
Method: We compared long-term outcomes of patients in our practice treated with different
homoeopathic approaches. We tracked individual patient outcomes over extended periods
between 1 and 21 years and correlated them with the different methodologies we had
used to determine the remedies.
Results: Long-term outcomes—Certain methodologies were correlated with outcome rates comparable
to placebo (Plant-sensation-method), whereas other methodologies scored consistently
better (Periodic table). Perfect Match—The most reliable and predictive indicator
of sustained long-term improvement with a single remedy was a perfect match between
patients’ symptoms and remedy proving. A perfect simillimum match was only possible
if in-depth and thorough provings were available. Such a perfect match is very rare
and is clearly linked to the quality of the proving. A surprising and unexpected observation
emerged in patients for whom such a perfect matching simillimum was determined. On
re-taking the case of these patients, who did not know their remedy, they could almost
always name the source of their remedy using interviewing techniques adapted from
psychoanalytical methods.
Conclusion: This led to the discovery—like with Hahnemann's patient, Klockenbrinck—that the knowledge
about the source of the simillimum may lie within each patient. It can be brought
to light using adapted interviewing techniques, which we have increasingly refined
over the years. A source-based remedy prescription—once unambiguously identified—leads
to reliable long-term outcomes only comparable to perfect matches based on highly
thorough provings.
Keywords: Homoeopathic methods, long-term outcomes, chronic disease, perfect match, simillimum,
source-based prescription
