Homeopathic practitioner views of changes in patients undergoing constitutional treatment for chronic disease

Objectives: To identify areas that classical homeopathic practitioners would want to see evaluated in a patient self-report questionnaire sensitive to change during constitutional treatment. Design: Open-ended, written practitioner questionnaire, analyzed using inductive content analysis. Settings/Location: Two classical homeopathic meetings held in the western United States. Subjects: Homeopathic practitioners attending the above professional meetings and volunteering to complete the questionnaire in response to announcements prior to sessions. Data collection methods: Practitioners completed a demographic questionnaire and answered an open-ended question inquiring for changes about which to ask people undergoing classical homeopathic constitutional treatment. Results: The categories that the 38 homeopaths identified included changes in: (1) emotions; (2) mentation; (3) specific physical functioning; (4) general physical changes; (5) perception of self; (6) relationships; (7) spirituality; (8) lifestyle; (9) energy; (10) dream content and tone; (11) well-being; (12) perceptions by others; (13) life relationships; (14) a sense of freedom or feeling less "stuck"; (15) sleep; (16) coping; (17) ability to adapt; (18) creativity; and (19) recall of past experiences. Sixteen percent (16%) of participants added more in-depth description of the nature of changes across categories (i.e., a rhythmical process of innovation and flux). Conclusions: The findings are consistent with the systemic orientation of classical homeopathic philosophy to evaluate and treat the patient as a whole. Taken together, the results support the need for development of new, multidimensional outcome measures for clinical research in homeopathy beyond the disease-specific and health-related quality-of-life scales available from conventional medical research.