While homeopathy had been around for more than 200 years, a serious use of homeopathic software is a question of the last 20 years at maximum. Despite the massive advantages of using the homeopathic software, there is still a great number of homeopathic practitioners who don't feel the need to invest their time and money into such kind of fancy.

The difference in practicing homeopathy in the modern days and a hundred years ago might not be obvious at first. Why should anyone waste their time learning to use a homeopathic software, if our predecessors could easily do without it? Or could they?

If you think about the invention of homeopathic repertory (such as Kent's repertory, to name the most famous one, although it was not the first), you can clearly see the incentive to organize the growing amount of information, which was quickly outgrowing the limits of human capacity. Since they did not have computers at the time, the information was organized into rubrics and corresponding remedies and published as a book, which was a fantastic thing to do, because it greatly enhanced and simplified the tedious process of finding the matching remedy for the patient's symptoms.

With repertories around, the life got easier for homeopaths, but still far from easy. Even with a repertory, the practitioner still needed to spend quite bit of time learning the structure of rubrics. Since repertory is basically a database of rubrics linked to remedies, its implementation in homeopathic software is pretty straightforward, with one essential difference ? in homeopathic software, you DON'T need to learn the structure of the repertory before you can use it. With powerful search functions available in homeopathic softwares, you can start using ANY repertory right now!

With the ability to locate the matching rubrics quickly and easily (good homeopathic software should also implement the use of synonyms and cross-references), you can make your evaluation in a time span of several minutes, which leaves you a plenty of time to study the case using several approaches, peek into materia medica for confirmation etc. If you would have to do the same manually (without any homeopathic software), it would take you several hours to do it properly and that's why very few practitioners do it. Experienced homeopaths who do not use any homeopathic software prescribe on keynotes or key symptoms for each remedy. But imagine this ? even if you knew a hundred keynotes for hundred remedies (I am quite confident they usually know no more than twenty per remedy), you are still hopelessly far to encompass tens of thousands of symptoms available in modern repertories.

The conclusion is obvious: if a homeopathic practitioner does not use any homeopathic software, even with a phenomenal memory, they are putting the largest part of homeopathic knowledge away and utilizing just that tiny fraction they can master. What a waste.

With widespread use of many suppressing drugs pharmaceutical industry produces, the cure is more difficult to achieve than it was a hundred years ago. It is therefore even more essential to base our prescriptions on solid foundations and without limitations of oversimplification required by non-computerized approach.