Background
Developed in the late 18th century by German physician Samuel Hahnemann, homeopathy is a system of medicine based on the ‘like cures like’ principle. It uses doses of tiny quantities of substances believed to have triggered an ailment in an individual, to trigger the body’s protective response and cure the ailment. It claims to promote holistic well-being in an individual.
It is believed to be followed in over 100 countries by around 350,000 physicians and as many lay therapists.
Homeopathy places emphasis on personalized treatment, often including time, location, and circumstances of the occurrence while selecting a cure. The cure or prescription is based on the experience of the practitioner and consultation with a repertory of homeopathic knowledge that is usually in the form of a book of reference listing symptoms and successful cures for treating those symptoms.
The homeopathic database has been built over 200 years and is based on a system of ‘drug provings.’ Unlike allopathy, homeopathic drug trials are done on healthy people by administering a dose of a substance believed to trigger a reaction, and then noting down the symptoms carefully. Healing results also find a mention in this database. The entirety of all symptoms of a remedy from a trial and cure becomes ‘materia medica,’ or, the body of collected knowledge about the healing properties of a substance. Modern medical education texts now prefer the use of the term ‘pharmacology.’
Allen Enzyclopedia 1874
There are believed to be about 75 such tomes that are reliable in existence at this point in time. No single work is understood to contain more than 40% of all possible records.
Consulting one single work in itself is a matter of great effort on part of a practitioner as these ‘provings’ have been recorded without a satisfactory system of referencing. Each practitioner, thus, relies on no more than one such journal for treating people seeking cures for their ailments. In effect, no practitioner uses more than 40% of the available homeopathic database to understand and treat his/ her patients.
This is a sub-optimal scenario inimical to the case of homeopathy, already accused of not being scientific enough. There has been no known prior effort at combining these various sources into one.
What is the problem?
Around 500,000 symptoms have thus far been recorded through these ‘provings.’
However, the primary challenge is that these trials and healings are scattered over numerous works known as ‘sources,’ with each source contains the symptom lists of several remedies in alphabetical order.
However, the primary challenge is that these trials and healings are scattered over numerous works known as ‘sources,’ with each source contains the symptom lists of several remedies in alphabetical order.
- 1. Hahnemann Materia medica pura 1830
- 2. Hahnemann Chronic Diseases 1835
- 3. Lippe textbook
A movement takes shape
Dr. Carl Rudolf Klinkenberg, a specialist in general medicine since 1993, took it upon himself to redress the situation. He promoted the idea with practitioners and in several conferences, seminars and meetings. Everyone liked the idea and many even wanted to develop such a program. They could never start this project and it always remained a dream.
Not one to be denied, Dr. Carl Rudolf dared to dream and has been successful in enlisting funding support from the government and other private bodies to support this initiative.
He had initially tried with various German developers and Companies but has repeatedly failed. He set out searching for a suitable technology partner globally. Among the selection tasks was the resolution of a computer problem. Invited to participate in the selection process, Alegra Labs was able to solve the problem in 48 hours. And work on the project started. No end date has been defined as the scope is very large.
The goal is to create a complete reference work for physicians and alternative practitioners, which unites all important sources. This creates a practical benefit for the health of people worldwide.
A solution takes shape
The target ‘materia medica,’ or combined reference work, is being created directly from the numerous sources. These are chronologically matched and processed in the database. Projects with similar objectives have failed in the past, primarily due to a lack of solutions for processing the millions of data.
Alegra Labs works with an intelligent, self-learning system in which the symptoms can be added, corrected, re-weighted and the attitudes and settings can be adjusted at any time. This flexibility in processing makes it modular, expandable and therefore sustainable.
Hence, an editing programme SymCom was built, which works in an interactive, web-based work environment. The name SymCom stands for symptom recording and comparison. SymCom is designed for large amounts of data and is able to efficiently evaluate a large mass of source material. Symcom does not compare entire books, but the individual remedies contained in the books with each other.
The program has a powerful text comparison algorithm with the ability to compare the symptoms in a transparent manner. It successively compares older sources with more recent sources. It compares a remedy source by source with each other (75 sources in total), starting with the oldest sources. By doing this, the origin symptoms are filtered out.
It also:
- Filters out symptoms that are repeated in later sources because they were only copied
- Filters out symptoms that were added by later authors, thus expanding the reference work
- Recognizes symptoms that were rated higher by later authors because they had since been proven in practice
Every detail is stored independently and verifiably by the software from the editor. The result is complete transparency of sources – for the first time in the history of homeopathy.
What do we get?
A reference work that combines all important sources from 215 years of homeopathy in one single work. This increases the reliability and safety of drug selection for acute and chronic diseases in daily practice.