The hallmark of case taking in homeopathy is the ‘understanding the core of the individual’, his mental status, psychological and behavioural aspects. Even more so important than the emotions are the feelings, reactions and sensations of these emotions. Many great homeopaths consider the sensations of the patients as the utmost priority and prescribe according to them with tremendous success.
One such remarkable homeopath was Dr. Herbert Roberts who has greatly emphasized on the ‘patient’s own expressions’ as an important aspect of case taking and solving. Based on three major works Hering’s Guiding Symptoms, Clarke’s Dictionary of Symptoms & Allen’s Handbook of Symptoms, Dr. Roberts created a repertory of “Sensations as if” which consists of 25 chapters arranged in an anatomical order. The salient feature is that this is the only repertory which covers subjective symptoms and these are very important for individualizing the patient and the remedy.
For example, a patient may feel that she is lonely, and then we tend to take rubric such as ‘forsaken feeling’ or ‘friendless feeling’. Let us assume the conversation as follows:
“Patient: There is no one in my life, I feel lonely
Doctor: Exactly how do you feel?
Patient: As if I am totally alone in this world and no one else existed”
Now, this is exactly what you mean by sensation and in Robert’s repertory you will find the following rubric:
Only one remedy and that is Nux Mosc. Prescribing on the basis of sensations greatly helps in narrowing down the remedy.
A sensation in homoeopathy is an internal feeling. It can be as simple as describing a pain or as subtle as describing the feeling of being lonely. It is not an emotion such as sadness or anger, but rather how one would experience such sadness or anger. Sensations have always been very important in finding the correct homoeopathic remedies, because they express more directly the particular nature of an individual’s vital force.
Apart from sensations pertaining to emotions, there are also physical sensations felt by a patient. For example, many a times patient experiences a feeling of ants crawling on the extremities which we generalize and take it as tingling or numbness which can go wrong. Here is a specific rubric for such sensation:
Sensations can be on an emotional plane or on a particular part or felt as general sensations all over the body. Robert’s repertory has all the chapters designed systematically to search rubrics from mental, particulars and general aspects. For example, general sensations like tremors that are felt all over the body, is found in the chapter generals as follows
All the chapters have various sensations listed as rubrics and all are helpful tools for repertorization. Care should be taken to back up your choice of remedy by checking the remedy picture in the materia medica.
Robert’s repertory is a handy reference when you are looking out for that unique symptom. One of the crowning achievements in homeopathy is using the patient’s own expression for selection of accurate Similimum and Robert’s repertory just solves the purpose.
This repertory is available in Hompath-world’s most trusted and complete homeopathic software.