What are provings and how to find them

When I first started studying homeopathy, teachers of mine kept talking about how amazing provings were, that we should always use them when differentiating remedies, that provings were the things you should always base a prescription on, etc etc.  I was consistently told to look “in the provings” for the best data on our remedies.  But there was a problem.  I didn’t know where these supposed “gems” were.  I asked a teacher where to find them once and he started laughing.  Then he realized I was serious and his jaw dropped and he quickly changed the subject.  He never answered me, and I spent at least the next year not knowing where they were, or how to find them.  So for all the people out there who may be harboring the apparently dumb question I had back then, here is the answer. The answer is unfortunately less satisfying than I expected (and in my defense, not at all obvious).

What are provings:

Provings are essentially homeopathic drug trials.  The word “proving” is from the German word “prüfung” meaning “test” or trial.  So really these are trials that investigate the properties of medicines.

Unlike the drug trials we are accustomed to these days, these trials are conducted on (relatively) healthy people.  These test subjects take a substance and take note of everything they feel or notice (head pain, palpitations, anxiety, modalities like worse when waking up, or better after drinking cold water, etc).  The point is to record every possible change the drug can create in a human body.  Therefore, provings are done on as many people, of as many different backgrounds, as possible.  The symptoms are then written up and published in materia medicas.

Does that mean materia medicas are all full of proving symptoms?

No!  In materia medicas, information on drugs is also from toxicological reports and cured cases. In other words, if someone died of an accidental arsenic overdose, and a doctor writes it up, materia medicas will have the symptoms described in the doctor’s write up.  If a homeopath cures a case with arsenic, the symptoms cured by arsenic will be put in a materia medica.  However, provings are often considered the most important symptoms in a materia medica.

Why are they so coveted?

Provings are more thorough than cured cases or toxicology.  In a toxicological report, you might just read “vomiting of bile”.  In a proving, you would get much more data like “sensation of heat in the head, followed by nausea felt in the larynx, ending in vomiting of bile which relieves the nausea” (I made that up; it’s not a real symptom).  In homeopathy, that detailed symptom is much more helpful than the simple “vomiting of bile”.  So these proving symptoms are coveted.

Cured cases are a bit tricky and controversial.  Some people argue that it’s perfectly valid to include them in materia medicas, other people don’t think we can assume that just because something got better after a prescription of mercury for example, we should include it as an indication for mercury.  It’s possibly a one-off or coincidence. I will leave it to you to decide. 

Toxicological data is still very important; for ethical reasons we can’t overtly “poison” someone with something in a proving. Therefore, some of the more horrendous physical symptoms like convulsions, hemorrhages, some hallucinations or psychoses, can only be known by looking at toxicology reports.

So where are they?

Everywhere!  But they aren’t labelled! Like I said above, proving symptoms are put into materia medicas. But so are toxicological symptoms and sometimes cured cases (it depends on the materia medica author). Most authors do not cite where the symptoms come from; they just put them all together.

Hahnemann is the exception. He labelled where all the symptoms in his Materia Medica Pura and Chronic Diseases come from. Therefore, if you want to know whether a symptom is a proving symptom as opposed to a toxicological or cured symptom, you really can only look at Hahnemann’s Materia Medica Pura or Hahnemann’s Chronic Diseases. Allen’s Encyclopedia supposedly only contains proving and toxicological data; he copied Hahnemann’s work (but didn’t cite the sources like Hahnemann did) and added other proving symptoms that appeared after Hahnemann.  Most other materia medicas will include cured cases or are “keynote” kinds of materia medicas, where the author picks out the symptoms they think are most helpful for a prescription.  The symptoms may be cured cases, toxicological, provings, or a combination of the three. 

So unfortunately, the ultimate answer to the question “where are these provings compiled” is “everywhere”.  They are in every single materia medica we have.  And yet nowhere, except in Hahnemann’s works, are they labelled as such.  In retrospect, I think most of my teachers had been saying that we should all read Hahnemann, because they (like most people) believed that Hahnemann only included provings in his materia medicas.  We should read Hahnemann because his data is incredibly accurate, but don’t confuse reading Hahnemann’s materia medicas with reading provings.  He included a lot of toxicological data and a few cured symptoms.  But we should also remember why the proving symptoms are important – we get more details.  But it does not necessarily follow that they are more or less dependable than other types of symptoms.