This podcast is an excerpt from Dr. Robin Murphy, ND's "Children's Health Care" Lecture CD Set. Dr. Murphy briefly speaks about different schools of Homeopathy (Hahnemannian, Kentian, etc.) and prescribing myths.

Children's Health Care
Children's Health Care overs problems at birth, conditions of infancy, childhood diseases, sore throats, ear infections, respiratory problems, bedwetting, worms, abused children, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, autism, the vaccination issue, case taking and general children's remedies.

Dr. Murphy's full Children's Health Care lecture is available for streaming access.

Transcript:

Dr. Murphy: So quickly, just some things about how I see homeopathy. There are a lot of different schools and stuff. I have studied with Vithoulkas, did Vithoulkian homeopathy for 5 years, I’ve been studying with Eizayaga. I’ll study with anybody here, if they’ll take me. Because we all have to learn, but the primary thing is that a person’s clinical experience cannot be denied. That’s the bottom line. Their dogma, their philosophy and all this might sound great and it will win you over and you will get caught up in a religious fervor for homeopathy, but when someone is sick, how well does it translate into action?  That’s the big question.

So basically, there’s, this will take five minutes. There are two schools, the Kentian school and the Hahnemannian school, that are pretty dominant today. You know Kentian prescribers because they give one dose of a high potency and wait a long period of time. Hahnemannian prescribers give multiple doses of low potencies and they tend to prescribe more frequently. Vithoulkas represents this (Kentian) school and Eizayaga this (Hahnemannian). There are other schools. Ortegas has a school and Dhawale has a school. There are many ways of prescribing. One time I gave a lecture in New York and listed all the ways of prescribing, and came up with 16 different ways of prescribing in classical homeopathy. That’s first aid, acute, constitutional, miasmatic, fundamental, lesional, synthetic prescribing, isopathic prescribing, intercurrent prescribing and you go on and on and on. But usually people grab one or two and adhere to it almost religiously.

There are a lot of myths in homeopathy, that the remedy can’t touch the person’s hand. Why? (student) “To cancel it out? For canceling out the remedy?” Right, but it’s their hand. I mean, I’ve been putting the remedy in people’s hands for 12 years, literally, and it has to go under the tongue. Have you ever looked under someone’s tongue? Is there a secret door under the tongue that lets the remedy in? You can literally inhale the remedy. Hahnemann used to rub it in the skin. You can give it as an enema, any way. All it has to do it touch a mucous membrane, period. But we have these little things, many, many little things. Then the people, they get their one remedy and they go through life afraid of being antidoted. They come back in, “Oh no, I had mint toothpaste.” Or “I went into a room, and a women had perfume on. Am I antidoted?” You see, all that stuff, you can just throw it all out. Then there’s a lot of stuff in the books you read, like in Boericke’s, you read the duration of a remedy or remedies that follow well, or remedies that are inimical, or all that, just throw it out, literally. Because their experiences are with certain patients. Aconite, duration of action, 48 hours, and I’ve seen aconite work for months. Or treat a problem, aconite after the first day, it’s to late for aconite. I’ve given aconite for a personal who’s never been well from a problem 10 years ago. They’ve had a fright, it’s been 10 years. That’s a little to late according to the books.

Another big myth in homeopathy is the potency selection. Don’t use this potency or don’t use that potency. Whenever you read those things, you just filter it out. All you want to see is their clinical experience, because that’s all that’s valid. The rest is just opinions on top. “Never give lycopodium 200.” Why? Because somebody gave lycopodium 200 to somebody and they had a bad reaction. Why? Because it was the wrong remedy. So then Margaret Tyler puts it in her book and it then it becomes a myth in homeopathy, full of myths. No one questions these things, why this or why that. Pierre Schmidt used to say, “Never start a case with a vegetable remedy.” I mean, come on. Or “Never use the 200s at all.” He outlawed the 200s. If you go into a homeopath’s office and there are no 200s, he’s read Pierre Schmidt, but all the potencies are valid, these type of things.

Another big myth is that aggravations are necessary and that aggravations are a good sign. A big myth in homeopathy. First sentence in Hahnemann’s Organon: “Physicians highest and only mission is to cure rapidly, gently and permanently.” There’s no word of aggravations. It’s a big thing, that you need to suffer to get well. If you give a remedy and they get a severe aggravation and the person gets well, it means one thing, that the potency was too high. You over-stimulated the person. If you gave a lower potency and they had a milder aggravation, at even lover potency they had just amelioration. But the high potency people, you get a sense of power with homeopathy, it’s invasive. You give natrum mur 10M, a woman has migraines, she gets severe migraines, she gets depressed, hysterical, she cries and then one day, 3-4 days later, it all disappears. That gives people a sense of power. But no one ever asks, “Is it necessary?” for that person to suffer that way. I’ve done many experiments. Someone will come in and he’ll give them natrum mur 1M, they get aggravation for four days, depression and all this old stuff, and then they feel great. In a month or two, they come back, they’ve relapsed. I gave them nat-mur 6C, 3 times a day, just steady clear improvement with no aggravation. Just a matter of potency. We’ll talk about some of those things.

So, both of these are valid systems, it’s just a matter of knowing when. A general rule is that if person has functional problems, symptoms like fears, or hypoglycemia, or low energy, you can most likely give a higher potency and get aggravation, amelioration and it will work. But if it’s necessary, is still a question. If you have a disease, the Hahnemannian system works better. But the thing with the Hahnemannian system, which we’ll talk about a little, orient towards children, is that you can also do the high potency functional things, too. The Hahnemannian system is complete. The Kentian system is geared for functional problems and psychological problems, it’s very effective with all these purgings. These purgings are real popular today. Everyone wants to get purged of something. You feel it has to come out or dump something, but you see these people that chronically are chronically working on themselves and chronically dumping out their emotions, are always, every time they have a crisis in their life, they have to run to someone when there’s a crisis in their life and dump their emotions. That is not natural.

So there is a lot of information in homeopathy. I would say too much. There’s not too much, but there are over 5,000 books written. I studied homeopathy in Michigan. University of Michigan has all of the old homeopathic books and all the hospital records, they’re all up in the North Campus Library. I used go there and pull out these long drawers. I would come out solid brown with dust, the drawers hadn’t been opened for 30 years, literally. All these old books on everything. There are books on headaches with charts, we found some of these, I have some of the charts, with little arrows with all the remedies that show all the pains, like sanginaria comes here, and goes over here, or lac caninum here, with an arrow. There is a lot of lost knowledge in homeopathy. But this information is also a detriment because we go in at random and study it at random. We get filled with conflicting views about everything. Everything in homeopathy has its opposite. Why? Because the individual patient that you see, you may give a one dose of 200 and see a remarkable cure with someone that has migraine headaches. The next time you see a migraine headache, you give the one dose of 200 and you see a remarkable aggravation. There is nothing consistent. The reason is that human nature is not consistent. Once you get that into your mind, you will be a much more flexible and open in homeopathy and then you’ll find the ultimate teacher in homeopathy, which is who? Who is the ultimate teacher in homeopathy? The patient. The patient can even contradict your experience.