Practical Application

Any therapeutic method must master the technical aspects of the materials being used if there is ever to be any hope for achieving reproducible results. Standards of materials and meth- ods must be carefully established and strictly followed. This is as true in homeopathy as it is in all other sciences.

Mostly, the burden of technical standardization has fallen on the shoulders of homeopathic pharmacists. Considering the smallness of the dose being administered to each patient, it is easy to imagine the problems facing these pharmacists in properly making a profit. Despite their difficulties, they have thus far done an admirable job in provdiing homeopaths the world over with excellent medicines of reliable standard. However, if these stan- dards are to be maintained, every practitioner must take steps to support the pharmacists preparing and dispensing our precious remedies. It is not enough to simply gather remedies into our offices and blindly take for granted that the supply will always be there. On the contrary, we must make arrangements whereby the pharmacists are benefited by our prescriptions just as we and our patients are. If this is not done, the reliability, and eventually the availability, or remedies will disappear altogether; this can as teg about the death of homeopathy as can the opposition rnments of orthodox medical societies. nsidering technical standards for the actual production of opathic medicines, we must first put attention on the initial





preparation of the plant, mineral, or nosode into a form amenable to potentization. Then, the specific standards for potentiation I must be considered. Finally, to be presented in Chapter 19, the storage, handling, and administration of remedies must be under• stood and followed.

Initial Preparation of Crude Substances

Materials of medicinal value occur in Nature in a variety of forms, some of which are chemically easily available for poten- tization and some of which require initial preparation.

A wide variety of plant species are used in homeopathy. Ob- viously, the first step involves selecting the correct species, grown under optimal conditions and collected at the optimal time. This requires the skills of a person highly knowledgeable in botany. Once a particular plant species has been used in a proving, all conditions of collection and preparation of the original plant must be duplicated in every detail in all later medical preparations.