What if?a patient gets mentally and emotionally totally better but physical symptoms persist?

-  Anne Vervarcke, 'Homeopathy Strange Rare and Peculiar,' 
http://www.thewhiteroom.be/Books.html
 www.thewhiteroom.be
(AV= Anne Vervarcke   AvdM= An van de Moortel)

AvdM: What if a patient gets mentally and emotionally totally better but physical symptoms persist?

AV: That’s a good question. We expect all signs and symptoms to disappear with the right remedy. Now I often come to a situation where I know the remedy is right but still the patient keeps having for example his joint pains or some headaches or poor sleep. Since we tend to consider the disappearance of physical symptoms as an objective sign that the remedy was right and thus give more importance to them; we feel the physical symptoms should go away.

AvdM: But don’t you agree? Isn’t it obvious that if the symptoms don’t disappear the remedy wasn’t a similimum?
AV: If they do disappear it can either be suppressive or curative. So, in general I would say that this ‘objective’ sign of the suitability of a similimum is in fact less reliable than the mental/emotional state of the patient. A lot of remedies can make physical symptoms disappear, for a period of time or even forever. But that is by no means a proof the patient is cured.

AvdM: I do remember your statement; “the symptom is treated, but not the patient”.

AV: Indeed. The difficulty is that even when a patient is cured from an eternal depression or suffering as long as he can remember, it is all ‘subjective’ and hard to measure. On top of that, homeopathy works so gently and so gradually that the patient himself often doesn’t even realize it. But your question was, I believe, somewhat different. You meant to ask what happens if the remedy is clearly a similimum and the mental and emotional levels are perfectly sorted out but some physical complaint persists? I often use the 12C potency to deal with this situation and with good results. And if not… my conclusion for the time being is that when a vital remedy doesn’t take away a symptom, it could mean that the symptom isn’t an expression of the Vital Disturbance.

AvdM: But what else can it be since we defined disease as…

AV: … a disturbance of the vital level, I know, but maybe not everything is vital. We have already discussed the devastating effects of our pollution, drugs and lifestyle on our

Surprise: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”energy body. Hahnemann already made a distinction between natural diseases and artificial diseases36 and maybe a lot of what is presented to us homeopaths are artificial diseases.

AvdM: And how do we have to treat artificial diseases?

AV: There are several possibilities as we discussed before. But we will most likely treat the first and second level in a more clinical way and with the use of nosodes, of course.

AvdM: What if the remedy is close but not close enough?

AV: Our remedies can’t be anything else but ‘close’ and honestly we have no idea how close is close enough to cause resonance. We can only tell by the result if there is resonance that brings about a curative action/healing response or not. It is fun to speculate and to have discussions in the bar after the seminars but so far we have no clue.

AvdM: It comes down to the same conclusion: we don’t know what we are doing but it works!