If you are dealing with an emergency or very acute case, simply click on the condition under the Ailments and Diseases bottle and choose the remedy that seems to fit the symptoms best. See also the Introduction to First Aid in the First Aid section under the Ailments and Diseases bottle.
In all other cases, it pays to take the time to follow the steps below:
- Jot down the most noticeable symptoms; these can be physical (swelling, redness, pain) mental (anxiety, irritability, grief), food-related (a dislike of milk, a craving for fatty foods) or environment-related (sensitivity to noise, symptoms which come on after getting wet) but they must be symptoms which are unusual for you or for the person you want to treat.
- Click on the Ailments and Diseases bottle and see if the physical or mental symptoms have an entry, for example general symptoms such as ‘sore throat’ or ‘fever’. If you have a particular diagnosis, read that entry too. If you don’t have a diagnosis and your symptoms don’t have an entry, skip to the General Remedy Finder, below.
- Carefully read the entry that mostly closely corresponds to the symptoms you have observed. It may advise you to give first aid or to see your doctor within 2 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours or as soon as convenient or to consult a professional homeopath. However, if home homeopathic treatment seems appropriate, select the remedy which most closely matches the symptoms.
- If none of the remedies given seems quite right or if you consider other symptoms to be equally or even more important than those described, this is where the General Remedy Finder becomes useful; see below.
The General Remedy Finder can be used in two ways;
- to help you decide between the different homeopathic remedies recommended in the ailments and diseases section, provided you are sure of the diagnosis.
- To help you find remedies for symptoms which are at variance with normal appearance and functioning, or which reflect a low level of vitality, but which do not yet add up to any specific ailment or disease.
Click on the Treatments bottle and hover your mouse over the words ‘Remedy Finder’. A drop down menu appears with further drop down menus, which you can use to navigate to the symptoms you noted down in step 1. Click on the symptom to save it in your search box; a list of possible remedies for that symptom appears underneath. As you add more symptoms, the list of remedies will be refined and the choices in the drop-down menus are narrowed to fit the remaining remedy pictures.
- If there are two or more possible remedies, click on the Treatments bottle to find a list of all remedies and see whether it gives constitutional indications for any of the ones you are considering; they are given for the 60 most commonly used remedies. Ideally, to provoke the greatest healing, a remedy should match the physical symptoms, the mental symptoms and the constitution of the person concerned. Therefore the remedy on your shortlist that most closely matches the general constitution of the person will be the most effective.
- If you are still uncertain as to what to do, consult a professional homeopath.
