Successful homeopathic prescriptions depend on accurate individualisation of each
patient; however, this remains a highly subjective and controversial aspect of practice.
Traditionally, individualisation was mainly based on the subjective symptoms of patients
naturally collected through speech. For the past 30 years, several researchers have
paid particular attention to objective, mental, and physical signs in patients and
correlated sets of them with definite homeopathic medicines. This approach allegedly
allows for more accurate and faster decision-making on individualised homeopathic
treatment; however, there are still no quantitative measures of its accuracy.
In parallel, Rutten prospectively subjected symptoms to likelihood ratio calculation,
comparing their prevalence in good responders to different homeopathic medicines to
their prevalence in the remainder of patients. Interestingly, one retrospective assessment
of the likelihood ratio of a set of Lycopodium symptoms in patients responding well to this medicine, compared with the rest of
the population, pointed to what might be seen as a Lycopodium pattern.
We believe that both objective signs of patients and this Bayesian approach are relevant
for real-life therapeutic decision-making in homeopathy. Especially frequentist approaches,
as in randomised control trials, have little to say to homeopaths for daily practice.
Therefore, we shall start an international multi-centre study to investigate the prevalence
in the overall population of a set of physical signs considered characteristic of
muriatic homeopathic medicines. This is the first indispensable step for later estimation
of their likelihood ratio in prospective studies to assess their prognostic value.
In this presentation, we will briefly introduce the concept of individualising configurations
of physical signs of homeopathic medicines. Next, we will discuss a protocol for multi-centre
estimation of the overall prevalence of a set of objective mental and physical signs
of muriatic homeopathic medicines. Thus, we expect to contribute to greater accuracy
in individualised homeopathic therapeutic decision making.
Keywords: Homeopathic individualisation, objective signs, configurations, prognostic value,
Bayesian analysis
