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by Paul Herscu ND, MPH, DHANP
Every classical homeopath must use a repertory. The remedies that comprise our materia medica contain so many symptoms that it is not possible to remember all the symptoms of all the remedies. In fact, one of the many signs that homeopathy is flourishing once more is by noting how many new remedies are being proven every year.
While this is potentially very useful for us, as we expand our materia medica from 100 to 1,000 to eventually 10,000 remedies, it does strain a difficulty that already exists in the repertory. As we know, some remedies have only 40 symptoms listed in the repertory, while others have 15,000 symptoms. As such there is a mathematical bias built into the repertory that the “larger” remedies are listed more times than the “smaller” remedies. This means that statistically you are more likely to end up with the “more listed” remedies, and less likely to end up with the “less listed” remedies.
This, in fact, is a major contributor to a vicious cycle that exists in our practice, where the “more used” remedy gets to be written about ever more and therefore grows in number of rubrics, and the “less used” remedy seems to lag further and further behind. Somehow, this statistical bias has to be acknowledged and dealt with efficiently for repertorization to be all that it could be. Is there a way that we can use the repertory that makes the “small remedies” and “large remedies” more fairly represented in the repertorization?
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