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This book review is reprinted from Volume 24, Autumn 2011 edition of Homoeopathic Links with permission from Homeopathic Links.
Homeolinks Publishers Reviewed by Francis Treuherz, United Kingdom I have long ago realised what an adventurous mind sits inside Joe Rozencwajg, a real polyglot and polymath, a combination of the practical with the scholarly. He has lived in Belgium. Israel, South Africa, and New Zealand; he has studied more schools of medical thought than I have ever heard of; he has written about gemmotherapy, organopathy drainage and detoxification, about the Fibonacci series applied to potency and now the relationship between Chinese medicine and homeopathy. I wonder if this time he has overreached himself and his readers, or is it just me?When I was faced with a choice some 35 years ago between Western homeopathy and Eastern acupuncture I could not get my European brain around traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). I had arrived as a patient at my alternative medical practice one day for a homeopathy follow-up for my chronic condition, with an acute earache, having ridden there on my bike in a cold wind. The pain in my ear vanished under the benign but scary influence of some needles. Then my homeopathic treatment continued in the usual manner; I stuck with the homeopathy. Joe has maybe coined a term, "homeosiniatry" but I am not sure that the two can be fused. We know that there are many names for the "human energy", which we call the dynamis or vital force, and the Chinese call "chi". We can maybe reach into this energy with our potencies; they use needles and moxa. If the law of the direction of cure is a universal law then it should be observable in Chinese treatment. Books have been written which attempt to link surface anatomy to both locations for inserting needles and therapeutics of homeopathic medicines. Dr. Joe has looked deep inside both schools and, for example, tried to look at aspects of Ying and Yang, and the elements, and heat and cold, dry and wet, as possible rubrics. To see these rubrics systematically he has used MacRepertory in an extremely creative way. A large part of this slim volume is given over to a homeosiniatric or TCM repertory. He has some short lists of possible remedies for Yin, for Yang, heat or fire, earth, metal, water, wind. I know that some colleagues like Jeremy Sherr, who has studied both schools, can inform their homeopathy with insights from the east. I have studied this book a few times now and I cannot make the leap. I do not criticise Dr. Joe for this, and I urge you to make the effort and study the book. It is far simpler in its approach than the French tomes I have tackled, by Roger de la Fuye (Traite d'Acupuncture 1955) or Jean-Claude Duboise (Homoeopathie et mideeine Chmoise 1998). Dr. Joe concludes that the next step may be to harness the subtle diagnostics of tongue, pulses and more of TCM, and compare them with our own methods. I concur and urge him to include a test for Hering's Law. I look forward to the next volume.
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