The Challenge of Doing Provings

By: Peter Fraser

The way that we have historically come to an understanding of a remedy’s picture is not as well-known as it should be. It is important to appreciate how remedy pictures are arrived at since the ways that have been used in the past are the same ways that are available to us now. We need to know the process, not only so that we can follow it in working with remedies that have not yet been assimilated into the secondary materia medicas, but also so that we can understand the limits of our knowledge about all remedies, new and old.

It is often thought that the information we find in the materia medicas has come only from detailed and well conducted Hahnemannian provings of potentized remedies, but this is not so. Only a small proportion of information comes this way. Many of the provings were either toxicological reports of the crude substance or were conducted by an individual or a very small group, often over a very short time. A homoeopath with no plans for the weekend might just take a remedy from his cabinet and record what happened over the next couple of days. Much of the information comes not even from provings at all but from traditional or experimental usage and all of it is tempered greatly by clinical experience.

Knowledge is only truly useful when we also know its extent, its accuracy and the limitations and uncertainties of the information. This is always true, but particularly so when the knowledge is being used in an exclusionary way. Thus, if we have a female endocrine symptom that is not in a remedy like Sepia or Lachesis, then the likelihood that the patient needs that remedy is quite low because we know that these remedies were extensively proved and the clinical experience of them is substantial and well reported. On the other hand the absence of the symptom in the remedy Dioscorea would have much less meaning because we know that the remedy was not extensively proved; all provers were male and there is little clinical information in spite of the fact that Dioscorea is known to contain the precursors of female hormones and so likely to be linked to them.

I would like therefore to outline some of the ways that we do get information about a remedy picture and to examine the strengths and limitations of them. The ideal and most important source of information about a remedy is a well conducted Hahnemannian proving of a potentized remedy. The symptoms that come out of this process are both the most reliable and the most detailed. The main disadvantage is that the remedy can only bring out symptoms to which the provers have some degree of susceptibility. The proving will not bring out symptoms to which none of the provers are susceptible. In a small proving or one undertaken by a very homogenous group of people there will always be symptoms that do not arise. The obvious example today is male sexual symptoms which are very scarce in modern provings, not because men don’t get ill but because provings are usually undertaken by groups of students most of whom, and sometimes all of whom, are female.

Although only the symptoms of a remedy will be brought out in a proving; the provers’ susceptibilities can emphasize a small and relatively unimportant part of the picture and so give a distorted overall impression of the remedy. For some provers the proving is an important event that starts a process of significant change and development in their life. It is often very difficult to see where the proving ends and where the provers ongoing and personal life story continues. This is particularly noticeable in dreams where a prover will be powerfully affected but their dreams will reflect where this affect takes them rather than being simply induced by the proving.

Proving coordinators also come to a substance with at least some idea of what they expect to see in it and they naturally tend to emphasize the aspects of the proving that reflect their personal interest in the remedy. Another danger in modern provings is that some of them are undertaken by large groups over several months and so produce and extraordinary amount of material that is difficult to process, analyze and interpret. Few homeopaths have the expertise or the time to use them properly.

There are many other types of proving all of which have considerable limitations. The type of individual or very small group proving mentioned above is unusual today, or at least is very rarely reported and is regarded as unreliable. This is a pity since in spite of its limitations it does produce valuable information and many useful remedies came to us through such a process.

There are toxicological provings of crude substances which are often really reports of poisonings. These tend to show the most severe or end stage pathologies without the characteristic subtleties that are most helpful in using a remedy. They do, however, provide solid and useful information. One area where they are particularly helpful is with substances that are used as recreational drugs, whose users often observe and report their effects in a way that brings out their finer details.

There have been a number of seminar provings in which participants at a seminar take a remedy and report the effects. These can be effective provings and some very good ones have been published. However, they tend to be very short in duration and so can be superficial. Groups that are brought together in a common purpose can act in concert, particularly in provings and in situations like seminars it can be the group rather than the individual that proves the remedy and this often gives a powerful exposition of the remedy.

Some seminar provings take the form of a dream proving in which the provers take or sleep with the remedy and report the dreams that they have. Dream provings often provide many of the essential characteristics of the remedy. They are difficult to interpret because they do not provide many physical symptoms and it is the physical symptoms that are our strongest defense against getting carried away with speculation and our own prejudiced ideas about a remedy. It is also difficult, as it is in all prov- ings, to separate the aspects of a dream that are derived from the proving and those that are the personal direction that the prover takes when the psyche is stimulated. Some provings which are designed as straight forward provings turn out to be effectively dream provings in which only dream and emotional symptoms are manifested.

Provings that are undertaken of gem or flower essences rather than of the substance prepared in a conventional way seem to be very similar to dream provings. They provide good information about the essence of the remedy but do not give the physical information that is really needed to build stable foundations for an interpretation. Perhaps the most controversial type of proving is the meditative proving. There is no reason why they should be less respectable than a dream proving when they are conducted by dedicated groups well practiced in the art of meditation. There are a substantial number of remedies which have had both conventional and meditative provings, and it is clear from these that the meditative provings have uncovered the same essential nature of the remedy. The problem with meditative provings is that they often take the form of an interrogation of the remedy, and as always, the quality of the answers given is greatly dependent on the quality of the questions. In a conventional proving there is only one question to the remedy: “Show us what you do!” In a meditative proving there is always a strong temptation to take short cuts and to ask more specific and direct questions such as: “What can you be used for?”,“Who needs you?” or “What do you cure?” Unfortunately the answers to these questions are general and common and it is always the specific and characteristic features of a remedy that the homoeopath prescribes on. The prejudices and assumptions of the meditative provers are all too easily bound up in the questions that they ask of the remedy and so must be found in the answers that they are given. We can and should take with some confidence whatever information is specific and characteristic from a meditative proving; unfortunately this often forms a very small part of what these provings produce.

The second main source of information about a remedy is found in traditional uses of the substance: in folklore in traditional medicine and even in conventional medicine. These are all pragmatic and observational systems. They use something because it works, and if it works well, holistically over a long period of time, it is likely to have worked homoeopathically. Many remedies, including some of our most important first aid remedies, moved directly from traditional usage into the homoeopathic materia medica. Many of them have never been properly proved because we already know when we use them. The danger of this lies in not knowing whether the usage is homoeopathic or allopathic. A remedy can have gained a reputation in traditional usage because it is effective allopathically, and suppresses the disease in which case we would use it in the opposite way; or it can be effective homoeopathically and cure the disease. Sometimes a proving is the only way to know which of these is true.

The other source of information lies in the doctrine of signatures and the correspondence of the substance to other things, particularly myths and legends. Again this information is useful but it is often difficult to know which is central to the remedy and which is peripheral. There are often many different myths and connections associated with a substance and provings tend to show that some are very important in the remedy and others have very little impact. After a proving it is almost always apparent why something should be an issue in the remedy but quite often it is not the thing that you might have expected. There is always a danger in assuming that a particular feature of the substance will be important in the remedy picture.

The thing which allows us to consolidate the remedy picture from all this information is clinical experience. The aspects of the picture that are most important are the ones that we see time and again in the patients that benefit from the remedy; while other aspects that may have been important in the proving, or in the background of the substance, might not come up so often in cases and so their importance will fade. It is therefore extremely important that cases are made available to the whole community so we can better understand the remedies. It is not just the dramatic cases that seem to sum up the whole essence of the remedy that are important. There are many cases that have a small feature that is cured within the wider case and these small features can add considerable depth to the remedy picture. The technology is readily available to make many more cases available with little cost or effort and we need to find ways of encouraging all homoeopaths to share their experience.