Case Analysis and Case Management

In 2011, the Canadian Academy of Homeopathy (CAH) began to offer a new series of courses entitled Case Analysis and Case Management (CACM) to satisfy the demand of the ones who had completed a 500-hour course (Advanced Chronic Prescribing) or Essentials in Acute and Chronic Prescribing, which is an incredibly comprehensive seven-day overview of the entire study and practice of homeopathy within an understanding of the practice of medicine in general. What students need most to supplement the training received in these two courses is clinical internship. As the CAH doesn’t have a clinical teaching facility, aside from providing preceptorship opportunities at our clinic in Montreal, the series Case Analysis and Management is providing a different but still a quite valuable approach for improving one’s clinical skills, including,

All these clinical topics are explored in depth with both paper and live cases. Case Analysis and Case Management is composed of five five-day courses (I-V). One difficult or unresolved case is taken live and analyzed in class during each one of these five courses.

This series of courses should therefore be a challenge to practitioners’ knowledge of homeopathy specifically and medicine in general. One’s prescribing skills should greatly improve by deepening understanding of the more subtle aspects of practice.

Some of the specific objectives of this series of courses are to exercise perspicacity, shrewdness and sagacity, which connotes keen awareness, sound judgment and resourcefulness.

Perspicacity is the capacity to assess situations or circumstances shrewdly and to draw sound conclusions. To be perspicacious implies penetration and clear-sightedness. The more you exercise the sense of what is most striking in a case, the more you will develop perspicacity.

Shrewdness is characterized by keen awareness, sharp intelligence, and often a sense of the practical.

Sagacity connotes prudence, discernment, and farsightedness.

The ultimate goal in case analysis is to be able to develop an accurate genius of the disease being addressed and finding its corresponding simillimum in reliable materia medica and prescribing it in the optimal posology. The degree of difficulty increases as we progress through each of these five courses.

The course is challenging, even for the more advanced practitioners who may sometimes think that they have found the simillimum at once in a particular case, even without searching the repertory and MM, and whom will be asked to differentiate their choice with other closely indicated remedies.

As we are always working with incomplete cases, which will especially be apparent in a number of shorter cases presented, and as the MM will always remain incomplete, even for our most used of our remedies, we have to become very resourceful and pay great attention to paragraphs 162 and 164 of the Organon. You will have to learn working your case around this ongoing difficulty.

This series of courses should vastly help practitioners to hone their clinical skills as they develops greater understanding of how to take apart cases and understand which symptoms are truly relevant in finding the remedy, learn to better interpret patients' symptoms into the language of the repertory, learn to properly apply the fundamental rules of posology in difficult cases, and better comprehend and manage patients' responses to remedies.

In Case Analysis and Case Management I and II, we briefly review the basis of case analysis and go over a number of short cases, each illustrating a particular difficulty of practice, such as a case with two dissimilar diseases; how to conduct differential materia medica between two well-indicated remedies; the dilemma of a clear indication of a well-known remedy when it is not known to have the lesion presented by the patient; the respective valuation of older versus more recent symptoms; the prescriptions of little known-remedies.

In the first two days of CACM I and II, we direct our attention towards emergency and acute cases, while in the second part we deal more with chronic cases. In this way we are able to go over many short cases and thus multiplying the number of clinical situations requiring decision-making. The long chronic cases are also useful especially for long-term case management. For instance, we spend almost one day on one single chronic case.

We also discussed when the specific contra-indications of well-known remedies, as well as learning to read between lines and to extent or stretch the proving or patients’ symptoms in order to cast a broader net.

The main goal of CACM III, IV and V is to provide greater opportunities to improve one’s prescribing skills through the study of long chronic cases that are particularly useful for the long-term case management and decision-making necessary to cure our difficult to cure chronic patients. I have chosen for these three courses cases said to be incurable, including cases with schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy, polymyositis, prostate cancer, Hodgkin disease and two boys with brain cancer. In particular, we will follow the recovery of two patients with Parkinson disease treated over a period of 6 and 3 years. We will review close to 80 follow-ups in one of these cases, where each these follow-up demands decision making in terms of posology or finding complementary remedies. One of the goals in these very long cases is to quickly arrive at choosing the optimal posology at every visit, which can be a difficult task.

You will notice in these long chronic cases how recovery is proportional to how close this optimal posology has been obtained. It becomes apparent how recovery in these difficult cases is dose related.

This course is geared for more advanced practitioners.

See the links below for the registration forms of our DVD Courses, and all ordering instructions.

About André Saine

Dean of the Canadian Academy of Homeopathy, Dr. André Saine (bio) is a graduate of National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon and has been the Dean of the Canadian Academy of Homeopathy since 1986. He has taught homeopathy extensively in North America and Europe for over 25 years to health care professionals.