This is often misinterpreted to mean everything about the person including ‘Personality’ type, aversions and cravings, weather, time, modalities of the ‘person’ even when well.

What we are really looking for are the deviations of these, the striking opposite or the exacerbation of these sub-symptoms when sick.

Statements like “Homeopathy treats the person not the disease” can be very unclear and misunderstood. What Hahnemann states is that we don’t treat the ‘name’ of the disease, but the unique and characteristic symptoms that individualise and represent the precise disease suffered by a patient, which has its closest match and thus most efficient curative response from a particular substance known to cause such similar deviation of symptoms in healthy humans.

Thus Homeopathy treats the whole of the diseased person.

Also according to Hahnemann, this often means the totality of the ‘principal’, predominant and most disturbing disease.

An Example in practise: If a patient in their ‘diseased state’ develops an aversion to bananas, that when in healthy state they desire, then aversion to bananas is used to individualise the persons susceptibility to disease.

However, if that same patient in their sickness had an increased desire for bananas on top of the usual level of desire, then this would be repertorised as a characteristic key to the remedy and may suggest that this sub-symptom is representative of a general state of chronic disease as well as the acute flare ups. The same medicine may be needed but in different potencies with varied repetition to manage the acute and chronic phases.

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