Materia medica validation: health technology assessment

Objective

To enhance accuracy and precision in homoeopathic diagnosis by critically assessing the classification system used in clinical practice.

Materials and methods

The homoeopathic classification system is composed of ‘remedy pictures’, which originate from many patients in experiments and clinical cases. Within the remedy pictures, the original intersubject and interpatient variation is not recognisable anymore as all individuals’ symptoms have been grouped in an anatomical scheme, per organ. However, as diagnosis by the similia rule compares a single patient’s pattern with the pattern of the remedy picture, inaccuracies in this remedy pattern will diminish the quality of diagnosis. This study performed quantitative and qualitative analysis on all individual symptoms from the ‘provings’ or experiments documented in one of the standard works in homoeopathy (Allen’s Encyclopedia) on which much of the current materia medica is based.

Results

Three analyses have been made in this ongoing project:

1. retrieval of symptom patterns from 230 patients who used small doses of phosphorus to elicit symptoms in experiments
2. quantitative and qualitative analysis of the best documented cases:

• organ distribution of symptoms in each patient
• meaning of similar symptoms of different patients

1. by factor analysis, distinguish subgroups of patients within one remedy group with more homogeneous patterns of symptom distribution over organs.

Conclusion

The next step will be to perform the same analysis with clinical data of successfully cured cases to assess subgroups and compare them with the experimental ones. This is the first of a large series of experiments with the most widely used ‘polycrests’, the remedies affecting different organs. The results are promising: assessment within remedy pictures of rather homogeneous subgroups facilitates differential diagnosis (= between-remedy distinction) in patients with overlapping symptom pictures and thus contributes to higher effectiveness, both in practice and in clinical trials.