The Herscu Module

Think like a Homeopath who has 20 years of clinical experience

  • Bring organization to your casetaking
  • Dramatically increase your success in prescribing
  • Learn materia medica in 10% of the time it normally takes
  • Develop a dynamic new understanding of your patients
  • Understand the underlying pattern or totality of the case's symptoms

Do you often ask the following questions?

How do I elicit information from the patient?
How do I compensate for errors in the Repertory?
How do I compensate for incomplete rubrics?
How do I know which repertorization method to use in any particular case?
How do I translate my patients' expressions into the Repertory's language?
How do I deal with polycrests and their overrepresentation in the Repertory?

The Herscu approach addresses all of these questions by providing a working model that helps resolve many of the apparent discrepancies and inconsistencies in our understanding of homeopathy.

The Herscu Module was developed in conjunction with Dr. Paul Herscu, [bio] author of The Homeopathic Treatment of Children - Pediatric Constitutional Types and Stramonium. This module helps to organize information received from the patient during the homeopathic interview.

Symptoms presented by a patient are oriented within a cycle of fundamental ideas or segments. Analyzing the segments leads to identifying the cycle that reveals the patient's pathology.

Materia medicas of the past are difficult for the modern-day homeopath, as the symptoms of the remedies are presented in an arbitrary and lengthy manner. Reading Hahnemann's Materia Medica Pura quickly reveals the difficulties of trying to memorize the symptoms of a remedy without understanding their underlying context or meaning.

Kent's Innovation

It was Kent, in his Lectures on Homeopathic Materia Medica, who first began to describe the symptoms of his patients in a larger pattern. Kent's descriptions provided the homeopath with the first pictures of our remedies.

Since then, homeopaths have been refining this process of grouping symptoms together into larger ideas or concepts. The Herscu Module has integrated these past approaches into a dynamic new model.

Understanding the Whole

The Herscu Module helps you to organize the symptoms of your patients by developing a dynamic and systematic understanding of the remedies. The analysis function displays those remedies featured most prominently in all the fundamental ideas or segments, even if they are not well represented in the rubrics of your case.

This allows the homeopathic practitioner to bypass many of the inherent limitations of the repertory by putting smaller remedies on an equal basis with polycrests. It also helps to overcome the fact that:

  1. There are errors in the repertory
  2. Rubrics are incomplete
  3. The multitude of repertorization methods often lead to different results

CYCLES and SEGMENTS, a new way of looking at things (from Stramonium)

Since, for Hahnemannian homeopaths, disease is a single entity, there must be a method of describing it, of seeing it as one disease, a method that would get rid of all the difficulties in analysis and prescribing.

I developed one such method of understanding homeopathy through the study of the cycles (or pattern) each remedy presents, and the segments (or sub-patterns) that run through the cycle.

In brief, I believe the patient pattern is what Hahnemann meant when he spoke about a totality of symptoms. By totality he did not simply mean the total number of symptoms, but rather the total pattern of the disease.

If we can look at a disease in this way, we will be better able to identify and isolate the main elements or basic ideas, which I call fundamental segments, within each of the remedies. That will allow us to recreate the chain of events showing the pattern that fits everything known about the patient.

I believe that every symptom a person expresses is an example of one of the fundamental segments operating in that person's cycle of disease.

In other words, a symptom does not stand alone. It has a relationship to other symptoms, which is one of the fundamental segments of the patient or remedy, and will show up over and over again in many places and many ways through various symptoms.

Some of these symptoms will be found in rubrics, some will not. That does not matter. It is the segment, the idea, that matters. The cycle itself is a flow of events that is composed of a number of fundamental segments.

Paul Herscu, ND

Learn more about the segments and cycles which form the foundation of the Herscu Module:

Paul Herscu has also initiated a proving site.
This allows proving directors to administrate their proving and to collect the data most easily afterwards.
The site hosts a database which can be edited on line. Come and look at this great tool!

Aphorism 7, The Organon, Samuel Hahnemann

So it is the totality of symptoms, the outer image expressing the inner essence of the disease, i.e., of the disturbed vital force, that must be the main, even the only, means by which the disease allows us to find the necessary remedy, the only one that can decide the appropriate choice.