important!! ?period of time for remedy?

Good questions.

If you mean by 'done its work' that the disease is cured - that is not something that can be predicted. A disease might cure in a week, or it might cure in a year. Some patients might have such complicated health problems that several years would pass before cure could be pronounced.

This is of course in chronic disease. For acute diseases which are naturally self limiting, the effect of homoepathic medicines is very quick, and you would expect the natural span of the disease to be cut down to 1/3 of normal or even less.

The noticing of benefit(not full cure) however is a different matter altogther. For chronic problems, you should be seeing improvement (if the remedy and the potency is correct) within 2 weeks. Improvement usually won't start until the aggravation finishes, although sometimes you will see improvements start right away in areas of higher importance (eg. mental level) while lower levels worsen (discharge from the nose or eruptions on the skin). Again this time frame can be somewhat individual - it might happen within a few hours, or take a month in rare cases.

The aggravation, which is usually the first sign a remedy has done anything at all, should start within the first 3-5 days typically. For most of my patients I can notice improvement starting around 5-7 days. How long an aggravation lasts depends on how many doses you took, how large the dose was, how much suppression has taken place in your case (by medical drugs for instance) and how sensitive you are to homoeopathic medicines.

The aggravation is quite controllable, and proper dosing by someone who knows what they are doing, can usually keep suffering to a minimum. First dose can be difficult though, as the practitioner may have no idea how the patient will react.

Direction of Cure is the principle that guides us in understanding what the patient's reaction means. It is hard to give general rules, as the individual reaction, where the reaction is happening, and understanding the history of the patient, all goes to help us determine if the patient is moving in the right direction.

Direction of Cure tells us that symptoms should move from more important organs to less important ones, from inside to outside, from mind to body, from top to bottom.

So if your obssessive behaviour vanishes and your constipation gets worse, this is the right direction. If on the other hand your eczema clears up but you start having terrible nightmares, this is the wrong direction (and must be reversed asap to avoid real trouble).

That was probably all a bit long-winded - did I answer all your questions.

David Kempson
Professional Homoeopath

If a patient feels good mentally on the first day, my assumption would be that is just placebo. Most patients with confidence in their homoeopath or faith generally in homoeopathy will experience that. It usually wears off after about 3 days or so. It doesn't mean anything. I am more interested if they feel worse mentally than better in those first few days.

However if the patient feels better mentally and their physical symptoms worsen, that *might* be the right direction, assuming that the mental state stays better. The physical symptoms should also let up after a period of time.

A remedy that is too strong will make you feel much worse (aggravation) not better. If it is the correct remedy, once the aggravation is over you should feel better.

It would be difficult to see mental improvement as the wrong direction since the mentals are very high up in the hierarchy of symptoms, but it can just be palliation (temporary improvement) from the remedy being partially correct rather than exact, or from the placebo effect.

A remedy is a 'Partial similar' when it is not prescribed on the whole case, but just part of it. You might give Lycopodium to a person that is bloated and gassy and gets full from eating very little, but this remedy does not suit the symptoms the person has in their lungs or in their sleep. So it is only partially similar, and will likely only improve the gut symptoms if it does anything at all. In doing so, it usually just palliates them, and the Lycopodium must be followed up with a new remedy to deal with the unaffected symptoms.

Temporary improvement (palliation) occurs when the cause of the disease is not cured. The cause of all disease is the derangement of the Vital Force, which manifests as symptoms in various parts of the person's body/health. Palliation can occur when the symptoms used to prescribe are common for the condition, or when the symptoms from one location only are used. This means that the Vital Force is being left in its disordered state, and it will either recreate the symptoms or it will create new symptoms in new locations (often worse than the previous ones).

A true simillimum covers all the important features of the person's disease, including peculiar and invidual symptoms. It will go directly to the life energy and put things right, which then results in a 'flow on' effect to the rest of the body. When this is done, you don't need to be constantly represcribing new remedies - the one remedy will solve most of the problems, and will create health right at the centre of the person.

A partial similar, while it may help one set of symptoms, will not create this same overall improvement. In fact the person may still feel anxious, angry, restless, unhappy and so on, despite some of their symptoms being improved. It is my observation that a person who only gets a partial similar will start asking very quickly for new remedies to deal with other things that are bothering them. On the Simillimum, they hardly complain at all, and are happy to wait while the remedy works since they often feel so much better in themselves.

Yes I don't see emotional complaints as being particularly stubborn on the correct medicine.

Some mental habits can take awhile to break, especially if the person's life is set up to enable that behaviour (abused person remains living with the abuser for example).

It is tissue change in the body that seems to create the longer delay in achieving full health.

Not at all. Acute complaints always heal faster than chronics - much faster. With homoeopathy acute complaints should be resolved in a few days (depending on how seriously ill the person was with the acute).

There is no way to say for sure - you would have to define 'done it's work'. What measurement are you using for that? What result would you consider as a remedy being done?

One dose can cure everything. Sometimes a patient needs a hundred doses.

Aggravation will usually happen within 3 days of starting the remedy, and may last anywhere from several days to several weeks depending on the factors I mentioned earlier. I usually expect to see improvement start about a week after the remedy is taken or the aggravation starts.

If you are asking about a specific situation or patient, it would be better to talk about that. It is hard to apply general rules to everyone, there are so many factors that can influence how people react to medicines.