Principles and Practice of Homeopathy: The Therapeutic and Healing Process

This is a new and comprehensive textbook of homoeopathic practice, written by a leading teacher and practitioner of homoeopathy. The forewords praise the book as a landmark textbook, and they are right. The book attempts to synthesise different levels of homoeopathic therapeutic approaches to treatment and theoretical insights into the disease process. It actually achieves this miracle by using a synthesising metaphor: that of a spiral. So the reader can see that what has been, say, an organic approach at a lower level of the spiral, is not wrong but can be integrated at a higher level into, say, an approach using the essence of the remedy, or the miasmatic understanding of the disease. So what have often been seen as diverging, contrasting or even contradictory views of homoeopathic practice make sense all of a sudden. What I admire most about the book is its undogmatic stance. Far from being the disciple of one great master — Vithoulkas, Sankaran, or whoever may be the favourite — David Owen combines the insights of seemingly different teachers and practitioners and helps the reader understand how they address different ways of using homoeopathy, what their strengths and weaknesses are and to finally choose the right practice for oneself, depending on the presenting disease or even the way the patient presents.

This is truly a masterpiece, written by a master of the practice himself. The author has a longestablished track record as a teacher of courses, a supervisor and a practitioner of homoeopathy. So it is a book written by a teacher and practitioner for students and other practitioners.

Chapters that are outside the author’s particular expertise are written by others, including an extremely well written and referenced chapter on research, by Iris Bell; a chapter on homoeopathic provings, by Jeremy Sherr; and chapters by other authors on pharmacy, computer programs, miasms, second prescription, the view of remedies as related by chemistry or signatures, etc. This makes the book a particularly rich resource, without tedious redundancies.

The book contains chapters on homoeopathic philosophy, materia medica, case taking, analysis and management, indicated by symbols such that a reader interested only in one aspect can easily find their way through.

The book does not contain any basic information about homoeopathic materia medica, but directs readers to appropriate resources. It progresses through six sections: Foundation, Causation and Presenting Symptoms, Totality and Constitution, Broadening our Understanding, Deepening our Approach, and Confused and Hidden Cases. It illustrates its points with small, or sometimes longer, case vignettes that help readers to clarify and memorise points. Here is the only suggestion for improvement I could possibly make: fewer cases, analysed repetitively on ever deeper levels, with the respective results, might have done a better job at illustrating. But that might be asking for a miracle squared.