One of the advanced practices in homeopathic software repertorization process involves the use of remedy families. By family I mean any group of homeopathic remedies sharing certain common characteristics. Examples of families would be a family of all flowering plants (named Magnoliophyta in scientific classification), family involving all mammals, or a family that consists of all alkaline metals. The basis of the common trait of the family can be diverse. For instance, you could design a family that involves all purple flowers.
In standard repertorization evaluation, homeopathic software displays the ordered list of remedies sorted by score based on remedy grades, rubric weights and other possible criteria. The evaluation by families would list various families sorted by the score achieved by its members (remedies). The exact formula how to achieve such list would be outside of scope of this article, so let me just say it is possible to design a suitable formula which a homeopathic software can use to rank the families with regards to the remedies used in the standard evaluation.
Some experienced homeopaths may be able to „see“ some of the families in the evaluation, Solanaceae family would be a classic example, as it contains some well-known remedies such as Belladonna, Hyoscyamus and Stramonium. However, considering the fact there can be hundreds and thousands of useful families, this is clearly a task for homeopathic software, not a human being.
Let's consider a patient with the symptoms matching the following rubrics (from Complete Repertory 2008):
Generalities, morning, five am., nine am., agg. (816 remedies)
Chest, inflammation, bronchial tubes, bronchitis (319 remedies)
Respiration, impeded, obstructed, oppression, from, chest, in (80 remedies)
Vertigo, rising, on, sitting, from (85 remedies)
Standard homeopathic software evaluation lists the following remedies (only first ten listed): Ferr., Puls., Rhus-t., Apoc., Acon., Lyc., Nux-v., Phos., Sang., Kalm.
The main problem is that the rubrics are quite large and all first ten remedies listed are present in all the rubrics, though in different grades. It would be useful to have some other criteria that shed some light on this case and allow further differentiation. By using Mercurius homeopathic software, the top-ranking evaluation of families looks like this:
Gentianales (Apoc., Nux-v., Spig.)
Ranunculaceae (Puls., Acon., Hell.)
The homeopathic software identified the valid families for us, thus providing us the next criterion to consider in choosing the best possible remedy. In Gentianales, there is Spigelia which does not list in top ten using standard homeopathic software evaluation, in Ranunculaceae there is Helleborus Niger. Instead of comparing remedy to remedy, we can now compare the characteristics of the whole families (as identified by the homeopathic software) and perhaps select the best matching remedy which otherwise would not list even in the top 30 remedies.
Such a prescription can be reasonably justified by matching one or two peculiar symptoms of the selected remedy and the general characteristics of the matching family.
We can conclude, that this is the way how a well-designed homeopathic software can help us with particularly difficult cases.
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