Tracing the idea of a single, unchanging remedy: Hahnemann, Kent and the Organon
You go to a homeopath. The remedies you are given make you feel good; there is a sense of wellbeing that comes from having shared with your homeopath — but your main complaint is no better. You still have pain; life is still hard. But you love your homeopath. One day they will find that right remedy, and all the problems will be solved. Meanwhile you go through some healing crises. "Normal," says your homeopath, and you wait for it to pass. Or, as the homeopath, you cannot understand why the patient's main complaint still hasn't gone away.
There is a solution to these problems, and its answers are in Hahnemann's Organon. Giving rarely used, newly proven remedies, saying "the patient doesn't want to get better" and changing the potency mostly do not solve these problems. Just as Hahnemann warned us in Aphorisms 6 & 7, you cannot solve these cases by making speculative interpretations about disease. Go straight to the source — the answers are all there.
The structural remedy myth is built on the illusion that we have a soulmate remedy — one that helps every complaint and never changes throughout life. It is the notion that if we find this magical remedy, give a single dose and wait for months, that miraculous healing will eventually take place.
The reason for this misunderstanding lies in the misreading of the Organon, and in the fact that the homeopath Dr. Kent's approach is currently used around the world as mainstream homeopathy. Most homeopaths confuse the Kent school with the Organon. And they are left alone with cases where the healing crisis is severe, where some mental-emotional improvements are seen but the main physical complaints do not resolve — cases, in other words, that have not been helped — and they feel helpless.
In the Organon, Hahnemann used the word Constitution (Leibesbeschaffenheit), which we might translate as "structural." But what he meant was not — as it is understood today — an "unchanging personality structure," or that magical remedy that would first heal our soul. For Hahnemann, the concept of constitution was a term describing entirely the biological and physical ground.
Instead of a constitutional remedy, Hahnemann tells us to find and give the simillimum and to start the process with it. This too is a "similar" remedy — one containing all the complaints of the moment and all the signs the patient's vital force brings out. But this remedy changes as the patient's vital force changes and the symptom picture shifts and emerges layer by layer. In the end, we must give the remedy that fits whatever we see in front of us.
To understand this, let us look again at the observation of "one-sided diseases" in the Organon. In these patients — whom Hahnemann called difficult cases — you can find no sign of their chronic disease beyond just 1–2 prominent symptoms. In this situation, making interpretations about the mental-emotional picture is also absurd, because there is nothing observable beyond the 1–2 signs the vital force puts forward.
In this case, Hahnemann tells us: "give a simillimum based solely on these observable signs." That remedy will bring out those "suppressed" signs anyway. After this remedy, a set of signs begins to emerge. Where before the remedy the patient said "I just have a severe headache; its side, its sensation are unclear, and I have no other problems at all," after the remedy they say "my feet are very hot, and my pain always starts above my right eye; also, every morning and evening I crave spicy food." Now we have a totality of symptoms and signs with which to give a simillimum. Bit by bit, the case shows itself to us. And we adapt to it and change the remedy.
In my practice, a group of clients not exceeding 10–15 per cent truly stays in the constitution they were born with throughout their lives. Their head still sweats in sleep as it did in childhood; they move slowly; they take great satisfaction in living in this safe place without ever leaving the city they were born in (Calc-carb). These people do have a single simillimum remedy, and they benefit from that remedy all their lives. But in this age, finding such a high level of health has become a rare natural phenomenon. What we mostly see now are one-sided diseases that give few signs. Which means we have to move forward by changing remedies.
The idea of the "single, constitutional remedy" emerged not with Hahnemann but in late-19th-century America, with Dr. James Tyler Kent.
Kent was a devout aristocrat attached to the Swedenborg church, and he interpreted disease as the result of "spiritual disturbance." He described remedies as "character portraits" that would help these. Saying "our soul is ill; the cause of diseases lies in the soul," he was of course received with great interest in this aristocratic and Christian community. He said he gave his cases a single remedy, and that because their spiritual disturbances healed, their physical problems healed too. But in the books containing his clinical notes, we see today that Kent also gave more than one remedy. In other words, what he said and what he did did not match. Because his first aim was to popularise homeopathy and to ensure it was accepted in his community without drawing its reaction on such a controversial subject.
This approach made homeopathy easy to learn, but it led to major clinical shortcomings. And seeking the origin of disease only in the soul trivialised the very valuable clinical observation of Hahnemann and the homeopaths who came after him. Because we do not say "disease is in the soul." If we must put forward a cause for disease, we say it is the disease information inherited from ancestors, knocked off balance by combining with triggering factors.
The claims that "our soul is ill; there is a single remedy that will heal our ill soul" also, of course, added considerable prestige to Dr. Kent in a short time.
Then this understanding spread from America to the whole world. Most homeopaths in fact practised Kentian homeopathy while calling themselves "Classical Homeopaths." A brand-new confusion of concepts was created right there.
We all have a base remedy underneath. A remedy picture that holds the characteristics of the constitution we were born with. As a child I would never eat; I was very frail, yet I always walked around with a bloated belly. I was introverted; I would hide when guests came to the house. I was terrified of needles; I would always fall ill before exams. Yes, this person was born with a Silica constitution. But did she remain Silica? She could not — because her tonsils were removed, and instead of sore throats she began having lung infections. Her parents fought a lot; she clung to her mother so they wouldn't leave her. Just as this constitution mostly changes, this layer is also mostly the layer that causes no problems and requires no treatment. It can only be a support remedy given at the end of treatment to secure the healing. But stubbornly giving this base-layer remedy at the very bottom — without seeing that remedy's symptom picture — just because it sits there, both fails to work and sometimes causes severe healing crises. (see Is a Healing Crisis Necessary?)
In other words, he says: leave aside theories about the hidden, inner causes of disease; take into account what you actually observe.
These remedies given one after another are mostly "complementary remedies" that follow each other well. That is another marvellous topic — I explained it in this article: (see Remedy Maps)
I don't think Hahnemann ever told a patient in his clinic whose pain appeared or increased after a remedy, "look, you say you're sleeping better — your remedy is working, bear it a little." I imagine he looked at the picture again with this increased pain, asked whether there was a new sign and "could this patient need another remedy?" — and gave the remedy that would help the pain.
You do not have to tell a client going through a healing crisis to "endure it" — nor do you have to struggle alongside them through the process. The only thing you need to do is look at the Organon. Sometimes the hardest place is the one where the mind is least involved — this is like that.
“I'm here to listen
to your story.”