Phenomenological Approach to Homeopathic Case-Taking

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Phenomenology, epistemology and psychology have immensely evolved during last century and can give great support to homeopathy as we try to gain a deeper understanding of how diseases express themselves through physical and mental and emotional symptoms, linguistic patterns that describe our experience and perceptual world. Modern approaches in homeopathy stress the importance of studying the experience of the patient as well as collecting the totality of symptoms and finding characteristic symptoms to prescribe medicine successfully. The way we understand other person’s experience is through the language. Our language expresses who we are and allows listeners to see in our perceptual world. Our perceptual world is highly dependent upon the senses that a particular organism possesses, although it is also affected by the internal working of a human’s organism at any given time. Adapting tools offered by psychology, phenomenology and epistemology into homeopathic case-taking helps to capture the totality of human experience to avoid limitations of mechanical collection of symptoms. Broadening our tools will allow to record precise language patterns corresponding to individual remedies and enrich our homeopathic Materia Medica, and will lead to more successful prescribing.

Exploring the experience of participants is known as a phenomenological approach. Understanding the exact experience of the patient leads to narrowing down the number of remedies to prescribe and better results of the treatment.Phenomenological approach shows its effectiveness during acute prescribing as well as for chronic pathology, especially when symptoms are general and it is hard to find characteristic symptoms using general homeopathic protocols.