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Provings
Unit 15
Provings – Chapter 2 of 2 – Mani Norland

So, now let’s have a little bit more of a closer look at the provings at the School and this idea of group
provings, which is essentially the style of proving that we do at the School.

Here is a list of all the remedies that we’ve proved since 1993, starting with the kauri tree, those amazing,
beautiful trees that are native to New Zealand, then through to things like AIDS and lava and slate, falcon,
oak galls, positronium, all the way through to the more modern provings that we’ve done in recent years of
mole, lightning, meadowsweet, spectrolite, red campion and, very recently, sloth and then serotonin. Who
knows what this year will hold? Probably by the time you’ve watched this presentation there will be even
more provings on the School website, but that’s where we’re up to at the moment.

So, as I said, we do a group proving and usually at the School this is done with the third years, as the provers,
and it’s only done on the attendance course because, of course, it has to be very carefully held and
monitored – not an easy thing to do over distance. So, we tend to do it on the attendance course with the
third years and then the fourth years act as supervisors.

Here in this chart you can see all the different positions of the proving. You’ve got the provers themselves,
they’re on the left, then of course all their fellow provers, represented by the circle above. Every prover is told
that they need to have a homeopath and have the support of the homeopath during the proving. We
recommend that they have their case taken before they go into the proving, not to have a prescription, not
to have a remedy, but just so the homeopath knows where they’re up to at that point before they go into
the proving. Also, it works really well for the prover themselves because it’s like a mirror, they’re being able
to see themselves and see where they’re up to with their symptoms and what their pathology and life is
currently like before they go into the proving.

Then, moving to the side, to the right you’ve got the supervisors. In our case, the year four students will be
supervising the year three students, so every prover has a proving supervisor. They’re really there to look
after them along the way but also to help them to reflect and elicit symptoms and to make sure we get the
fullest, best possible picture from them. Of course, there are fellow supervisors, because it’s the whole
group, and also the supervisors need to have their homeopaths because occasionally supervisors can enter
into provings as well and start having symptoms themselves, if they’re susceptible, even though they
haven’t taken the substance. One of the phenomena of doing group provings is that there’s a sort of ‘field’,
the remedy action ‘field’ is bigger than just the group, and often bigger than just those people taking the

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 Unit 15: Provings – Chapter 2 of 2

remedy. Even if somebody in the proving, in the group, decides not to take the remedy, they still have to
have a supervisor, they still need to do a proving diary because there’s every chance they’ll still get swept up
in it and have proving symptoms. Yeah, there’s some bigger, kind of energetic, field at work there that’s not
fully understood yet, but we experience and see very clearly, through doing the provings. It’s fascinating
stuff.

Then you have the proving co-ordinator, so the person that’s kind of managing the day-to-day running of it
and checking the diaries and bringing everything together, and then the proving director, who’s kind of
overseeing the whole thing – so there’s usually two people overseeing the provings, certainly with the way
we do the group provings at School. At the moment, I’m in the proving director role and my brother, Luke,
is in the proving co-ordinator role. In the past that would have been Misha as the proving director and I
would have been the proving co-ordinator. Before that, it would have been Peter Fraser and Misha, so over
the years it’s been a different couple in charge, looking after those provings. And then all of that reports
back to the School and the core team. So it’s quite a ‘held’ structure, and it needs to be because they need to
be done carefully and accurately and with care and the provers need to be properly supported and looked
after.

The role of the proving co-ordinator is generally to make sure…they generally know what the substance is,
so they have that kind of extra view. The provers, the way we do it at the School, the provers don’t know
what the substance is, so they’re blinded from it. Very occasionally we have tried doing double-blinded
provings, where some provers take a placebo and some take the actual substance, but usually we don’t
worry about that now. We’ve tried it in the past and it’s not a sort of safety…..it’s not so much to do with
safety, it’s sort of to do with rigour, isn’t it? But, because of the size of the School and the community we’re
talking to, it’s not something that we’ve felt is necessary going forward. So, everybody has the choice of
taking the substance and everybody is blinded so they don’t know what they’re doing, apart from the
proving co-ordinator and the proving director. They’re there to basically lead the proving and co-ordinate
the proving and to take people through it and then they’re very much involved in the editing and the
pulling together of the proving at the end. So, they’re there for the whole journey.

Then you have the provers themselves. The idea is that they’re in basic good health, as healthy as we can be.
Of course, we all have something going on at some stage, but just to be in good health and in a position to
be able to take the substance and be sensitive and aware enough to be able to reflect and record the
symptoms, then they all go into the proving diary. They will, on a daily basis, be recording any symptoms
that come up. At the beginning that could be quite a lot and then, as they go on, it might slowly diminish.
Usually at the School the proving could be anything between 10 and 20 provers and then we would need
10 and 20 supervisors to look after them.

They would be recording the symptoms each day, using this format as listed on the screen here. So, they list
the day then the time, using a 24-hour clock, then the type of symptoms, then the categorise it as it would
go into the repertory, so which section in the repertory should the symptom go in, then they record the
actual symptom as best they can, in the fullest possible language. Then we ask them to summarise a key
word that they think best represents that symptom, the way that they experienced it. Those key words are
really helpful for us in analysing later.

Here is a picture of a proving diary. A lot of students use a notebook but at the end of the day we need it all
digitally, so we provide an Excel template and then they complete it digitally. At the end we cut and paste all
of the templates together for the analysis, which I’ll come on to.

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 Unit 15: Provings – Chapter 2 of 2

We also use CLAMS as a tool for eliciting the fullest possible symptom from the provers. You should be
familiar with CLAMS by now; so looking at the concomitant, the symptom itself and any other things that
appear, any other symptoms that appear with or around it, or may affect or influence each other; the
location of the symptom – where is it located in the body and where did it move to or from? Then the
aetiology, so the cause of the symptom – what do they think is the cause of it? Where did it start and move
to? Was it mental, emotional, physical? Was there a particular thing that reignited the symptom, or did
something happen in their life to trigger the symptom? Then the ‘M’ stands for ‘modalities’, so what makes
it better or worse. And then ‘S’ is for ‘sensation’ – so what’s the sensation in the symptom? So, really kind of
getting yourself back into it and thinking about the original feeling and sensation that came with the
symptom. If you use CLAMS then that helps to open up the symptom and broaden it out, so we get the
fullest possible description in the proving diary. That’s what the proving supervisor is there to help them
with.

The proving supervisor is somebody they will meet before the proving starts. They can have a bit of a chat,
get to experience the prover in their kind of ‘base’ state. And then, as they go into the proving, as I say, they
would have that daily conversation and maybe that would go to every other day and every third day and
then once a week as the proving symptoms subside. They may well use CLAMS to question the prover, to
make sure that we’ve got the fullest possible symptom, but they’re also there to support and help, if
needed. Then, obviously, if there are any symptoms that they’re alarmed about then they would contact the
proving co-ordinator or proving director. So, the whole network is there.

Usually, the proving at the School runs for 2 to 3 months. So, we would discuss it in September, start in
October, run through November and then bring to a close in December, in time for Christmas. Then the
proving has a closing ceremony, to try and bring the symptoms to an end and then the work of starting to
edit the proving begins. Here you would get all the proving diaries, completed and finished from the
provers. You cut and paste them into one massive document with, quite often, thousands of symptoms.
Then you treat them as one person, so nobody’s got their names on their symptoms, it’s all completely
anonymous and then you start looking for themes and patterns, for repetition, for similar imagery coming
up, for similar pathology and colours and…..any kinds of patterns. It’s really like taking the case but you’re
taking the case of the proving diary, the master diary, as one.

Then out of that comes all of the symptoms, themes and groups that get written up and you have to
analyse and categorise each symptom. I have an example here. A prover could write: “Another rather
monotonous day, I found myself looking out of the window at work and wishing I was somewhere hot and
sunny. My head has been itchy again and I notice that when I itch my scalp it’s quite scaly and dry. Several
times I have noticed that I am bored by this itch.” Then, if we look at how that could be picked apart and
put into the repertory, you would end up with ‘mind, monotony, mind desires to travel, mind desires to
escape, mind desires to be somewhere hot and sunny, mind scalp itching, mind scalp dry, mind scalp scales’.
Lots of very small, little rubrics.

Or another way to do it, which might be more accurate, certainly in terms of the proving because it would
link much more strongly to the original proving symptom, would be to say ‘mind, monotony, desires to
travel with’ or ‘head, scalp, itchy, ennui, boredom with’. There you can just begin to see how you turn the
proving language, symptom language, into repertory language, which of course you’re used to doing –
you’ve done that loads, but just by way of an example.

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 Unit 15: Provings – Chapter 2 of 2

Then the proving would get written up into a full, which hopefully you’ve been onto the School website,
you’ve been to the provings area and you’ve looked at the many provings and downloaded these .pdfs that
we send out free of charge. Here is a picture of the badger document. This was some 44 pages long and
that included all the taxonomy information, the introduction, information about the provers and the dates
and the substance and where it was found and so on and then looking at the folklore and astrology and
possible miasms, information about kingdom, mappa mundi. Then, of course, the proving themes and all
the proving symptoms, Kent’s hierarchy, the physical pathology and the possible rubrics that could be linked
to the proving. So, it’s a big piece of work and it usually takes the School many months to complete a
proving – even sometimes a whole year.

Then it’s ready for publishing, which is great, so then it could go into the repertories. We create all the
rubrics, we put it on the website, we send it and all the rubrics to the software companies, so they can
integrate it into their online computer repertories so that homeopaths and students that have the software
can find the remedies and use the remedies and then over time it gets introduced into the materia medica.
Of course, we inform the pharmacies of this remedy, so that they can run it up and have it available in
pharmacy form, so it can start to be used in clinical application. That’s how it makes its way through to the
patients.

I hope that gives you a bit of insight into provings. Thank you for sticking with me. I hope that was
interesting and I hope you’ve learned more about the process and understood how it works and why it
works and how we elicit the information and that it is an in-depth, a rigorous process, using humans,
healthy humans to elicit the symptoms and to create the remedy pictures.

Yeah, it’s an amazing tool. It’s the beauty of like cures like. Maybe one day you will do a proving, which
would be a fantastic gift back to the homeopathic community and a great thing to be involved it.

Thank you very much for watching and good luck with your studies and see you again, yeah?

Bye now.

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