For me one of the most important aspects of any therapeutic plan is the assessment of the response the patient has to therapy.  This assessment is the equalizer among the various forms of therapy, the common yard stick with which to measure the results regardless of the therapeutic choices.

This assessment is made on the observation that the response to any therapeutic intervention comes in three forms (actually four forms if you include those rare occasions when absolutely nothing happens).

One response of the body to therapy is suppression.  In suppression we see one or two targeted symptoms of the diagnosis suddenly and permanently disappear in response to the therapy.  Suppression is not accompanied by an improvement in the patient’s overall health (other than the relief felt by not having to endure the suppressed symptom) and is in fact the precursor to a deterioration in health.  This deterioration is due to the Vital Force no longer being able to express the disease state on the chosen level and having to move to deeper levels on which to express the body’s imbalances.

Suppression can actually be favored in conventional medicine and the deterioration of health goes unnoticed since the charge of the doctor is to remove the symptoms of today’s diagnosis, leaving the next specialist to deal with tomorrow’s symptoms.

A second response is palliation.  With palliation we see one or a few targeted symptoms of the diagnosis suddenly disappear under the influence of the therapy and remain gone only as long as the patient is under the influence of the therapy.  Once the therapeutic influence ceases, those symptoms come back unchanged.  Over a period of time, the therapy must be administered more frequently, in greater quantity, or at a higher strength in order to maintain the patient under the palliative influence.

As the patient is palliated, chronic disease continues to mature and develop since nothing has been done to remove the disease or to improve the patient’s overall level of health.

We see palliation on many levels from the allergy patients on cortisone to the food sensitive patients confined to a certain restrictive diet to patients on antibiotics.  As soon as these supports are gone, the patient collapses back into the old tendencies and symptom patterns.

Both suppression and palliation take place rapidly because they are the results of the immediate anti-symptom primary influence of the medicine and are not dependent on the counter-response of the body.

Finally, there is cure – a rarely seen phenomenon, especially in allopathic medicine.  With cure, we see a period of latency as the body processes the influence of the therapy and triages its response.  This period of latency is necessary for the curative homeopathic remedy to displace the natural disease, for the medicine to run its course, and for the body to mount a secondary or counter- response before the curative results are seen.

Once the response to the therapy begins, a natural progression of improvement is seen.  This progression is best described in Hering’s Law of Cure.

According to Hering (Constatine Hering, MD, the Father of Homeopathy in the USA), cure takes place from the inside to the outside, from the core to the periphery, from top to bottom, from last to first, and from most life sustaining to least life sustaining (remember that chronic disease is a continuum, not an isolated event).

If you see the symptoms of the patient passing off from the interior of the body to the exterior, from the life sustaining organs to the more superficial/less important areas, with the most recent symptoms disappearing before the original symptoms, you can be assured that the patient will enjoy a sustained improvement in their overall health.  This patient will be left more resistant, less susceptible, more resilient and healthier on all levels than prior to therapy.

Cure involves the totality of the patient, not the selected symptoms of the diagnosis, and provides for improved health in the life of the patient today and into the future.

In my experience, no other form of therapy produces a curative response as consistently and as coherently as does Homeopathy.