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Volume 106 Number 2
56 AJHM Summer 2013
Reviewed by Richard Moskowitz, M.D.
Hyatt Regency Hotel, Chicago, February 8-10, 2013
Predictive Homeopathy
Seminar Presented by Karl Robinson, M.D. andMax Jenny, M.D.
With Additional Material by Irene Sebastian, M.D.
Seminar Report
L
ong in the planning, but the event largely improvised
at the last minute, this seminar was devoted to the
work of the esteemed Indian homeopath, Dr. Prafull Vijay-
akar, of Mumbai; and it proved to be informative, memo-
rable, and inspiring in almost every detail, by no means the
least of which was that it happened at all. Before leaving
India for the seminar, Dr. Vijayakar fell seriously ill, and
Dr. Sebastian, AIH President, had little choice but to call it
off, leaving over sixty paid registrants to cancel their travel
and hotel reservations, and pledging to refund their tuition
fees as well, portending a major financial disaster for the
organization. Into that worst-case scenario stepped Karl
Robinson, MD, a long-time student of Vijayakar, who had
proposed and helped organize the seminar to begin with,
and now volunteered to substitute for him, and persuaded
Max Jenny, MD, a fellow-student from Germany, to assist
with his own library of video cases.
In the end, over thirty people showed up, roughly half of
the original total; and a large percentage of them donated
part or all of their prepaid registration fees. As an added
bonus, Dr. Sebastian contributed some material from her
own recent study with PV, as she and Dr. Robinson liked
to refer to him. In short, the greatest miracle of all was the
seminar itself, which featured not only allopathic doses of
superb teaching, and the novel thrust of Vijayakar’s thought
and style, but also the active participation and seasoned
comments of the attendees, including a goodly number of
veteran prescribers who came from far away, both to learn
and catch up with old friends. In short, against all odds,
this last-minute effort provided a lot of what seminars are
supposed to be about: a time for getting away to take a step
back from and gain a fresh perspective on what we do all
the time, in the company of teachers and colleagues of like
mind.
Rather than adhering to any uniform, monolithic, one-size-
fits-all system, Vijayakar’s approach seemed refreshingly
nuanced and eclectic; what Karl, Max, and Irene gave us
was a collection of intriguing bits and pieces, little gems of
Materia medica
study,
repertorization, miasmatic analysis,
and case management, gleaned from years of experience
and literally thousands of cases, many involving serious
and even life-threatening pathology, precisely the kind
that we as medical doctors have been especially trained
to care for, but that as American homeopaths, in an era
when homeopathic medical practice has been so neatly
marginalized, we lack sufficient experience with to be able
to help consistently enough to persuade the legions of our
brethren.
What tied them all together was his methodology, which
was likewise nothing sensationally new or fancy, but
simply a carefully worked-out application of the good, old-
fashioned fundamentals that all homeopaths continually
grapple with at every level. For me, one that stood out
was PV’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Repertory, of the
rubrics it contains as well as their actual or literal meaning,
together with his ingenious way of translating observed
appearances and behaviors into its language, a nitty-gritty
challenge that bedevils us all on a daily basis.
Inevitably I was reminded of my own experience in
Mumbai over fifteen years ago, while visiting a clinic for
the indigent, where we saw fifty or sixty cases in a morning.
As the senior doctor was interviewing patients, the dozen
or so young students in the back of the room, most in their
late teens or early twenties, were chattering away loudly
and even rudely calling out the rubrics that corresponded to