Clinical courses in Homoeopathy have been offered since the early days of prescribing in a variety of locations by a wealth of talented educators around the globe. Students and practitioners often travel vast distances at a great personal expense in order to understand better the tools of their science and to perfect their art in prescribing. An opportunity to widen one¹s view of the Materia Medica, to experience first-hand different methods of prescribing and to see a variety of live cases not only helps one grow as a prescriber but as a person as well.
One opportunity to achieve this scope of understanding awaits students and practitioners in a small clinic in a northern suburb of Mumbai on the west coast of India. Dr. Rajesh Shah and his wife Dr. Rupal Shah, both classical Homeopaths and educators, team-teach a three-week intensive course every February for foreign practitioners to further the understanding of Homoeopathic prescribing. This past February¹s class which I personally attended consisted of eight practitioners representing five countries. The course itself provided a once in a lifetime experience, India as the back-drop provided the adventure.
The main requirement for participants of the course was to come with an open mind for learning. This requirement was a pre-requisite for anyone staying for even a short period of time in the liveliest, most densely populated suburb in Mumbai. What the clinical experience impressed on the intellect, the journey to and from the clinic impressed on the emotions tenfold. One simply could not walk a block without experiencing at least 10-20 rubrics of the Mind section simultaneously. India is a place where the senses will never atrophy from a lack of stimulation.
The daily schedule easily satisfied the hunger to learn to start with Materia Medica lectures which were taught in the mornings by Dr. Rupal Shah. For three hours each day participants were graphically taken on a journey through all aspects of a remedy straight from her vault of knowledge and personal clinical experience. Her depth of understanding, as well as the passion she held for the peculiarities of the materia medica, infected the atmosphere to the point that if you didn¹t end up proving the remedy by the end of the lecture, you simply were not paying attention.
The evening sessions at the clinic were conducted by Dr. Rajesh Shah who taught an organized and well-paced approach to case taking, analysis and evaluation, prescribing, and long term case management. Each lecture followed a progressive flow of strategies involved in building the totality of a case. When sufficient ground was covered in theory, the real case-taking started when the patients were called in for their consultations. This was where the gap between theory and practice was bridged; where the charismatic teaching of a practitioner was put to the test by a mob of suffering patients in a packed waiting room. This is what we all came to see. As the procession of beautiful sari¹s filed in, one after another, there was a realization that the cultural differences being observed would shed new light on previously stereotyped remedy pictures.
Most patients were accompanied by relatives, all telling in competing levels of excitement how the medicine had taken away their suffering. After the first five hours of follow-ups, it occurred to most participants that there seemed to be only two kinds of patients coming to see Dr. Shah: patients rapidly moving toward the direction of cure, or cure patients. The consistency of the cure was impressive.
Consultations in Hindi were translated by Dr. Shah and the participants were invited to examine and question the patients at any time. At the close of the first evening, the general consensus of the participants was that there simply were not enough good out-of-work actors from The ³Bollywood Actor Factory² to cover the volume of patients filing in. These were people who had truly benefited from Homeopathy and that message could be read on their faces. What was witnessed that evening was encouraging. For myself, two realizations were driven home: 1) Homoeopathy works and 2) Any practitioner can achieve this level of success if they apply themselves. Although unquestionably brilliant, dynamic and driven, Dr. Shah was not a magician. He was a person fulfilling the goals of an achievable endeavor: practicing the science and the art of Homeopathy and doing well.
Throughout the entire course, individual case strategies were discussed in-depth. Often patients had to sit through the banter of the peanut gallery while their symptoms were evaluated from conflicting points of view in four different languages. The collective knowledge of the participants could be likened to an orchestra tuning up before a performance. Dr. Shah as maestro guided the thoughts both receiving as well as giving key points which led the group to create perfectly tuned case totalities. Each case was as dynamic as the analyzing process which eventually led to the prescription.
Dr. Shah¹s clinical tips were spontaneous, and though the objectives of the course were structured, learning had no boundaries. One of the main objectives of the course was to teach a strategy by where all the participants could collectively arrive at a similar understanding of a case. Only through this method would our individual practices be successful. If fixed philosophies or rigid dogma prevented us as practitioners from operating in a practical manner, we would not get the results we wanted from Homeopathic prescribing and our patients would not benefit. This as the most important objective reinforced the knowledge we all had of the principles of classical Homeopathic prescribing. Dr. Shah¹s therapeutic lectures provided the insight into what is common in disease allowing us to recognize what is uncommon in the patient and what is uncommon in a common symptom. The variety of patients seen during the course finely-tuned the powers of observation both for the experienced practitioners attending and the practitioners starting out.
Practical skills were also taught pertaining to all aspects of running a practice from simply writing out an organized case to administrative issues and this proved key to some of the participants previously working in a method of organized chaos. Dr. Shah¹s strength as a practitioner matched his talent as a teacher as humor, compassion and strength of character were the icings on the cake.
This intensive clinical course holds for participants an opportunity to experience the best of what Homoeopathy can offer. I highly recommend it to those in search of a highly seasoned and enlightening journey down the path of understanding the tools of our trade.
by Laura Fenton, Japan