First and foremost, Homeopathic HouseCall has been designed to help people find remedies for acute and first-aid conditions. Complaints like these — injuries, infections and indispositions — are fairly easy to treat homeopathically without years of specialized training and clinical experience. Because these conditions come on quickly, they also respond quickly to a good remedy.
We have observed time and again that effective homeopathy at home can prevent trips to the emergency room, keeping down the costs of family health care and avoiding the potential side effects of strong medications.
With this as our mission, we focused on the types of complaints that tend to be unexpected, short-term, easy to treat homeopathically and can be safely treated at home. (Chronic conditions like eczema, allergies and long-term degenerative diseases require complicated analysis and detailed case management that make them unsuitable for home prescribing.)
So, we started with the first homeopathic acute-care book ever published: Dr. Constantine Hering's The Homoeopathic Domestic Physician. First published in 1835, the Domestic Physician saw seven editions, and its structure and content are still relevant today. For many decades, this book of first-aid and acute remedies accompanied 19th-century Americans as they braved the Oregon Trail or the streets of New York.
For Homeopathic HouseCall, we removed some conditions that are not encountered in home practice anymore (postpartum infection, for example), and added important remedies that we felt would be indicated in the most commonly seen acute-care situations.
Conditions we don't cover
Any condition that would normally require hours of case taking and analysis, or any condition that requires frequent physician follow-ups and careful case management, is outside the scope of Homeopathic HouseCall. These are conditions that should be handled by a trained, experienced homeopath, and there are already professional software packages for such work.
There are other things that we do not list as conditions simply because they are more accurately seen as symptoms of conditions. Take fever, for example. Fever commonly occurs with complaints that are already listed in Homeopathic HouseCall, such as influenza, urinary tract infections and sore throats. Fevers that occur outside of an acute condition (known as "idiopathic fever") can be signs of more complicated disease that needs to be seen by a homeopath.
So, if you're looking to treat someone with a fever, simply type "fever" into the search bar when you start a HouseCall. The conditions that include fevers will come up. Choose the one that applies, answer the questions, and you'll get a list of remedies to consider.
Remedies you can find
For our acute-care tool to be useful, we also needed to limit the number of homeopathic remedies someone would be required to own. Our remedies needed to be available to the general public (no nosodes or pharmacodes) and not too obscure.
However, we made our remedy offering extensive (105 of them) so that, practically speaking, we did not have to limit the acute conditions we covered. (Dr. Hering’s book had 66 remedies.)
Will there be more conditions covered?
The HomeoAide team plans to add some conditions to Homeopathic HouseCall. There are some acute complaints that we feel are already covered by the remedies we have included, complaints that we can add without making people buy more remedies.
Sometimes, we simply need to give complaints like idiopathic fever some extra consideration, perhaps figure out how to encourage people strongly enough to go see a doctor if their complaint does not resolve quickly.
We look forward to offering you more features soon. If you have specific suggestions for acute conditions you feel we should cover in Homeopathic HouseCall, please use our Contact Us form to send us a note.