HOMEOPATHY
Learning More

Although there are several thousand substances in use as homeopathic remedies, only a proportion of these have received a proper ‘proving’. Our knowledge of the others arises in a number of ways, the most common being clinical experience.

A ‘proving’ is an experiment carried out on healthy volunteers under careful conditions to discover what happens to the health of each participant after taking the substance being ‘proved’. Only when proved on a sufficiently large number of people can one say with fair certainty that a remedy is known sufficiently well to be useful.

Once proved, we know what conditions that remedy can cure. So new provings are an important activity for homeopaths. But they take time and considerable care and patience. Provings are carried out by keen volunteers from time to time. It is not the proving itself that inhibits quick access to this new knowledge, but the care needed to carry it out and the time taken to assemble and organise, then understand, and finally tabulate in an easily understandable and useful form, the results of the proving.

Here is Uzma Ali’s contribution to the understanding of a recent proving. In due course we hope to add to this on a periodic basis.

Before you read it, you might like to reflect that the remedy is being looked at from a homeopathic point of view, and as you read through it, some of the homeopathic attitudes, ideas and ‘slang’ begin to appear in the text. To someone without a background in homeopathy, some of this will be hard to accept, because the author is assuming that the reader has a working knowledge of the subject.

NEW, SMALL AND PECULIAR REMEDIES IN HOMEOPATHY an essay by Uzma Ali [click to view]