Re: [H] Combos vs. Singles

Thanks, Catherine; you put it better than I could have. Translating it
into homoeopathic terms lets a subset of a medicine's symptoms be "similar"
to an illness, which is essentially what is required, without necessitating
that the illness be equally "similar" to the entire pathogenesis of the
medicine. (That's why, for instance, *Sulphur*, with its several quite
different pictures, may still cure an individual with just one of those
pictures.)

Shannon's confusion, though, arose, as far as I can see, from not quite
getting what Irene intended in saying "Law of Similars says the symptoms of
the PATIENT must be similar to the symptoms of the remedy". I think that
Shannon understood Irene to be, in that sentence, distinguishing the
similarity of the patient to the medicine from the similarity of the
medicine to the patient. As I understood it, Irene was in fact
distinguishing similarity of the patient to the medicine from similarity of
a *single symptom* to the medicine.

Shannon, this matter of what is being distinguished is something that Susan
raised in her last message, but adding a new twist: a mixture in which each
medicine targets a different symptom. And she asks you -- not
rhetorically, I trust -- why prescription of such a mixture on the basis
she gives (each similar to a different hypothetical symptom of a patient's
cold) should not be considered to be homoeopathy. I'd be fascinated if you
could answer that question as any homoeopath could. To do so, you'd have
to abandon the entire basis of your apology for polypathy: the hypothesis
of self-selecting medicines. But that hypothesis enjoys little to no
support in evidence to date and faces a lot of apparently contradicting
observation of cases spoiled by the confusion that polypharmacy invariably
and inherently introduces.

The question of how much risk there is of grafting a medicinal illness onto
the patient using a medicine selected, or mixture of medicines each
selected, for *extremely partial* similarity to the patient -- similarity
to perhaps a single symptom, which is no similarity at all -- is just
another rabbit warren, largely irrelevant to what any homoeopath would do,
and obviously dependent to some extent on repetition (particularly in
unchanged potency) as well as upon prescription complexity. It's useful to
keep that in mind in reading Irene's winkle on Rosemary's point -- the
winkle being "If you have an illness and you take a mismatched remedy --
you run the risk of adding grafted symptoms that make it a more complex disease
and MUCH harder to cure! All the more reason NOT to use combos".

Cheers --

John

On 21 December 2011 09:12, Catherine Creel <catherine.creel@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Shannon Nelson <shannonnelson@tds.net
> >wrote:
>
> <<But, um, how can A be similar to B, but B not be similar to A? >>
> >
>
> Hi Shannon,
>
> Your statement is too generic to stand up to logic. Think about this for a
> minute. The term "similar to" is too vague to be useful. For instance, if
> A = humans and B = mammals, then your statement would read:
>
> All humans (A) are similar to mammals (B); all mammals (B) are similar to
> humans.
>
> So, let's test it.
>
> An armadillo is a mammal. Is an armadillo similar to a human? It can be
> because the term "similar" allows me to broaden my search and identify
> anything that creates a similarity (they both breathe, both have legs, both
> give live births, etc.).
>
> But how truly similar is an armadillo to a human? If the human is one
> homeopathic remedy and the armadillo another, are they similar enough to
> each other to be interchangeable?
>
> The problem is I can find "similarities" between almost any any two
> things, so when the word "similarities: is used, it doesn't hold up as an
> example of logical proof.
>
> Regards,
> Catherine
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--

"And if care became the ethical basis of citizenship? Our parliaments,
guided by such ideas, would be very different places."

—Paul Ginsborg, *Democracy: Crisis and Renewal*, London: Profile, 2008.
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