J Altern Complement Med. 2003 Feb; 9(1): 39-50.

Homeopathic practitioner views of changes in patients undergoing constitutional treatment for chronic disease.

Bell IR, Koithan M, Gorman MM, Baldwin CM.

Program in Integrative Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85724-5153, USA. ibell@u.arizona.edu

OBJECTIVES: To identify areas that classical homeopathic practitioners would want to see evaluated in a patient self-report questionnaire sensitive to change during constitutional treatment. DESIGN: Open-ended, written practitioner questionnaire, analyzed using inductive content analysis. SETTINGS/LOCATION: Two classical homeopathic meetings held in the western United States. SUBJECTS: Homeopathic practitioners attending the above professional meetings and volunteering to complete the questionnaire in response to announcements prior to sessions. DATA COLLECTION METHODS: Practitioners completed a demographic questionnaire and answered an open-ended question inquiring for changes about which to ask people undergoing classical homeopathic constitutional treatment. RESULTS: The categories that the 38 homeopaths identified included changes in: (1) emotions; (2) mentation; (3) specific physical functioning; (4) general physical changes; (5) perception of self; (6) relationships; (7) spirituality; (8) lifestyle; (9) energy; (10) dream content and tone; (11) well-being; (12) perceptions by others; (13) life relationships; (14) a sense of freedom or feeling less "stuck"; (15) sleep; (16) coping; (17) ability to adapt; (18) creativity; and (19) recall of past experiences. Sixteen percent (16%) of participants added more in-depth description of the nature of changes across categories (i.e., a rhythmical process of innovation and flux). CONCLUSIONS: The findings are consistent with the systemic orientation of classical homeopathic philosophy to evaluate and treat the patient as a whole. Taken together, the results support the need for development of new, multidimensional outcome measures for clinical research in homeopathy beyond the disease-specific and health-related quality-of-life scales available from conventional medical research.