Laterality

Laterality describes the tendency of a homeopathic remedy's symptoms to favour, begin on, or spread across a particular side of the body — right or left — together with the direction in which a complaint travels. It is one of the general characteristics used to distinguish remedies, standing alongside a modality as a factor that helps confirm or exclude a prescription. When a patient's illness settles consistently on one side, or crosses from one side to the other in a recognisable way, that fact alone narrows the field considerably.

In Practice

A number of remedies have earned a lasting reputation for sidedness in the materia medica. Lycopodium is the classic right-sided remedy: Boericke records that its complaints often run from right to left, and H. C. Allen lists right-sidedness among its leading features. Chelidonium, Bryonia, Belladonna, Apis and Sanguinaria are also predominantly right-sided — Sanguinaria for its right-sided headaches, Chelidonium for the pain under the right shoulder-blade that accompanies its liver picture.

The left side belongs to a different group. Lachesis is the great left-sided remedy, and its complaints characteristically begin on the left and move toward the right — the mirror image of Lycopodium. Spigelia, with its affinity for the left eye and the heart, along with Argentum nitricum and Cimicifuga, rounds out the commonly cited left-sided pictures.

The direction of travel can be as telling as the side itself. Lycopodium moves right to left; Lachesis moves left to right. Lac caninum is remembered for symptoms that wander from side to side, alternating between right and left from one day to the next — a feature so distinctive that it can decide a case on its own.

Used well, laterality behaves much like a keynote: a rapid pointer that directs further enquiry rather than a verdict on its own. Bœnninghausen treated the affected side as a general symptom that could be applied to the whole patient, not only to the local complaint. A careful practitioner still weighs it against the rest of the picture — a strongly right-sided sciatica does not by itself prescribe Lycopodium unless the mental, general and modality features agree.

Historical Context

The systematic use of laterality owes much to Clemens von Bœnninghausen, whose Therapeutic Pocketbook raised location and sides to the rank of generalisable characteristics that could be carried across a whole case. Kent later gave laterality its own rubrics in his Repertory, allowing the side of an affection to be repertorised like any other symptom. The keynote writers — H. C. Allen and Boericke among them — embedded sidedness in the leading features of the polychrests, which is how most students first meet the idea.

Related Terms

• Keynote — a highly characteristic feature that points to a remedy, of which laterality is often one
• Modality — a factor that makes symptoms better or worse; laterality is generalised across a case in much the same way
• Materia Medica — where each remedy's characteristic side is recorded

Learn More

• Materia Medica — study the right- and left-sided polychrests to see how sidedness is described in the source texts