My Desktop Resources
I recently rearranged my office, and replaced a tall overflowing bookcase with a much shorter, waist-high bookcase which only contains the books that I use on a daily basis as resources with patients. The overflow of books has been relocated to the home library, where I’m more prone to dig into larger-scale research projects.
Of my clinical resource books, the one that spends as much time on my desk as on the bookshelf is Dr. Roger Morrison’s Desktop Guide : To Keynotes and Confirmatory Symptoms. It has succeeded in its design and purpose to be a quick reference to the most characteristic and common symptoms of some of the most used remedies within homeopathic practice.
Not only do I reach for this book many times a day myself, but I even hand it over to the patient on a regular basis, in order for them to understand for themselves the image and character of the remedy which will be used to address one or more of their chief complaints. This is much more my usual mode of working with a patient, as opposed to the withholding of even the name of the remedy to be given as I described recently in Delivering the Remedy by Stealth.
In a certain way, this initial introduction the patient has with this description of this remedy will sometimes even act as their first dose received of the remedy. Likewise, even talking about the characteristics of a remedy with certain patients will initiate their response to it, as if they’ve already ingested it. This is not so much a matter of the “placebo effect”, or strong suggestion, but a true mechanism for delivery of a remedy through the living imagination of the patient, which may be one of their more receptive organs of ingestion.
This stands to reason, as the origin of certain types of diseases may also have begun in this same way through the organs of imagination – certain diseases of the emotional body, or of the mind can be brought to pass through means of a morbid imagination of a negative outcome. Think, for example, of the old superstitious modes of humanity which enabled cultures of hexes or curses to be placed. This isn’t much different from the modern diagnosis delivered by a doctor in a white lab coat, which essentially creates a death sentence in the mind and body of the recipient (ie “You have 6 months to live”).
The delivery of the image of the homeopathic remedy, as I mentioned by example through Dr. Morrison’s Desktop Guide, can also flesh out important parts of the patient’s history which hadn’t yet come up in their case-taking yet. Sometimes, some of the symptoms of the remedy will be identified as belonging to someone else in the family, thus confirming a genetic basis for the given disease picture in the patient.
More than anything, this first encounter the patient has with the description of the remedy to be given to them will have the effect of calming their mind, as they realize that there is a concrete existence of a medicine which matches what they need in order to make a real change to their health. Before then, they will often feel lost within their own symptoms, which don’t seem to fit on the map of modern medicine. Being able to reassure the patient that they do fit onto a well defined map of treatment is one of the best moments inside the consult room.