Rajan Sankaran's State-based Prescribing

Dr. Rajan Sankaran was born on May 24, 1960, in Mumbai, India. Inspired by his father, Dr. P. Sankaran, Dr. Rajan graduated from the Bombay Homeopathic Medical College. In the 1990s Sankaran developed the idea of state-based prescribing, which he described in his books The Spirit of Homeopathy, The Substance of Homeopathy and The Synergy in Homoeopathy.

In the case of chronic diseases patient will manifest a wide range of symptoms. Homeopaths group them into three categories: The mental state – I am easily startled by the least noise. The general symptoms that characterize the patient as a whole – I feel cold in the morning, and the symptoms that are particular to a part of the body – My head hurts.

When going over successful cases Sankaran realized that he had far more success in the cases where he had prescribed on mental and general symptoms than in those where he had prescribed on particular symptoms.

This led him to recognize that disease is not characterized by local pathology – as it is with allopathic medicine – but by the general physical and psychological state of the patient. He understood that disease originates with a disturbance, shock or trauma – which he called the central disturbance. The central disturbance first affects the mental plane, then the general plane and finally the organs.

The next step was for Sankaran to realise that the mental state of the patient could not simply be determined from the mental symptoms, but rather in terms of something in the background that seemed to connect them.

He realized that the disease state was an attitude or a posture, which the patient had adopted for survival in a particular situation. It was this situation that linked all the symptoms of the mental state together.

If this posture persisted long after the original situation had ceased to exist, the patient would continue to perceive and react according to the original situation, resulting in constant stress to the organism, and aggravated pathology in the patient.

Therefore one can say that disease is a posture adopted by the organism to survive a falsely perceived situation. This posture puts the organism into a state of being.

In The Synergy in Homoeopathy Sankaran used an example of the remedy Fluoric acid – Some of its symptoms are: "Indifference to loved ones yet talks pleasantly with strangers", "Increased sexual desire", and "Lack of morality". These symptoms may seem to be unconnected at first sight, but when you have a situation of a man who is married to someone totally unsuited to him and he needs to break this marriage then these symptoms are appropriate in that situation. A single symptom of Fluoric acid is, "Delusion, marriage must dissolve”."