CKH CONGRES 1999: JAYESH SHAH
The seminar with Jayesh Shah in Leuven, Belgium on 10th and 11th of April 1999 can
be considered as a success. The CKH had the pleasure to welcome participants
from all over Belgium, France, the UK and Holland. Jayesh started with on overview
of hid evolution in thinking and practise, together with Rajan Sankaran, over
the last 20 years, staring with the first years of study, which he remembered
as being very boring. And the most boring of all were the endless commentaries
on the Organon of Hahnemann, where the students had to be dragged to. The teacher
even had to search for his students in the cafeteria and the toilets, where
they hided from him. So the student Shah meant at that time, homeopathic practise
had to be based on thorough knowledge of the Materia Medica. He studied Allen
Key Notes by heart and started his practise. One of the first cases was a child
with severe pemphigus, having all the symptoms of Mancinella. But to his astonishment:
no reaction on the remedy. This failure learned him the importance of theory
and philosophy. It became clear that success depended on a prescription on totality,
mind and generals most of all: on the most characteristic symptoms. The most
peculiar symptom can be either general or modality but in most cases it is the
mind.
Jayesh told the audience about the night he was waked up by a telephone call from Rajan
to discuss an exciting new idea. It appeared to him mind symptoms could be broken
up in components and in this way, 
sometimes by just one symptom clearly understood, the whole case could be solved. This idea was tried out in practise and led to the cure of the well known case of
the girl with severe headaches, cured by Tarentula.
Jayesh stressed the importance of unprejudiced observation and he said our so-called
knowledge of Materia Medica is our greatest prejudice. The inclination to fit
the patient in one of the remedies we know obscures our clarity. He also advised
to study the " classics" in order to have a firm base. The Organon is still
as valid today as ever. The fact homeopathy still exists is merely due to the
fundament , laid down by Hahnemann; He warned us all for theorizing. His cases
were illustrative: step by step he took the audience to the deepest feeling
of the patient. The most important is to develop a sensitivity for the rare
and the peculiar. He demonstrated the difference between 'do' and 'feel' symptoms.
With humour he showed that after every expression, there is a feeling that explains
it. All cases have a 'deepest feeling'; it depends on the homeopath whether
he can reach it or not.
