MD (Homoeopathy) — a map of the seven specialities and the paper they share

The postgraduate degree in homoeopathy — MD (Hom.), Doctor of Medicine in Homoeopathy — is governed today by the NCH (Homoeopathy Post-Graduate Degree Course) Regulations, 2024. They were notified in March 2024, took effect on 21 March 2024, and replaced the M.D.(Hom.) Regulations of 1989. Alongside them, the National Commission for Homoeopathy has issued a Competency Based Dynamic Curriculum for MD (Homoeopathy), which applies from the 2024-25 batch onward. This page is a map of that curriculum: how the course is shaped, what every scholar shares, and the seven specialities among which a scholar chooses.

**The shape of the course.** The degree runs three years in two parts. Part I lasts roughly eighteen months, and in it the scholar works as a Junior Resident; Part II follows, as a Senior Resident. Two requirements sit outside the papers: a research paper, and certification in Basic Cardiac Life Support. Both are mandatory under the 2024 Regulations.

**Part I — the fundamentals, in three papers.** Every speciality opens the same way, though each in its own words. Paper 1 is the fundamentals of the speciality itself: the foundations of Materia Medica, of Homoeopathic Philosophy, of Repertory and Case Taking, and so on. Paper 2 is a bridge, and its direction depends on the speciality. For the four subjects that grow out of homoeopathy’s own disciplines — Materia Medica, Organon, Repertory, Pharmacy — Paper 2 is the Fundamentals of Clinical Medicine, taught in relation to that subject: evidence-based practice, a basic clinical approach built at the bedside, the cardinal manifestations of disease, nutrition, and the interpretation of laboratory and radiological investigations. For the three clinical specialities — Practice of Medicine, Paediatrics, Psychiatry — the bridge runs the other way: Paper 2 is the Fundamentals of Homoeopathy in that clinical field, a sequence of concepts from the Hahnemannian understanding of man, health and disease through susceptibility, suppression and miasm, totality, the similar and the simillimum, to therapeutic management.

**Paper 3 — the paper every scholar sits.** Research Methodology and Biostatistics is common to all seven specialities. Its fifteen modules run in a clear order:

– the foundations of homoeopathic research, structured and continuous literature review, and the research process and proposal writing;
– quantitative, qualitative and mixed research designs, each framed for homoeopathic research;
– the documentation of evidence, and ethics in homoeopathic research;
– the basic concepts of biostatistics — data types, collection and sorting; population, sample, sampling techniques and sample size; descriptive statistics and probability; inferential statistics;
– software and AI tools for research data management and analysis, and, last, communicating research findings.

Read beside the mandatory research paper, this is the part of the course that asks every scholar, whatever the speciality, to become someone who can produce evidence as well as read it.

**Part II — the speciality in depth.** The second part is two papers in the chosen speciality alone, and here the seven diverge completely. The CBDC lists exactly seven speciality subjects for Part II:

1. **Homoeopathic Materia Medica** — the study of medicines, from the history of materia medica before Hahnemann to the construction of drug pictures, group and comparative study, and the medicines on the curriculum’s list.
2. **Organon of Medicine and Homoeopathic Philosophy** — logic, susceptibility, semiology, remedy reaction and the second prescription, suppression and palliation, and the modern philosophies read beside Hahnemann.
3. **Homoeopathic Repertory and Case Taking** — the evolution, plan, construction and application of repertories, clinical, post-Kentian, regional and software-based.
4. **Homoeopathic Pharmacy** — prescription and dispensing, laboratory methods, drug law, standardisation, pharmacognosy, pharmacovigilance, industrial and hospital pharmacy.
5. **Practice of Medicine** — system-based disease in the first Part II paper; infection, metabolism, genetics, geriatrics, critical care, emergency medicine and the national health programmes in the second.
6. **Paediatrics** — from the mother–neonate unit and growth and development through each system of the child’s body to emergency paediatrics and critical care.
7. **Psychiatry** — the clinical states of psychiatry studied with homoeopathic case taking and classification, through to community psychiatry, forensic psychiatry and the Mental Health Act 2017.

Each has its own room on this platform, and each room opens with an orientation to its speciality like this one.

**How the two degrees meet.** Four of the seven are subjects a BHMS graduate already knows by name: Materia Medica, Organon and Repertory run through all four professional years, and Pharmacy is taught in the first. Practice of Medicine runs from the second year to the fourth. Paediatrics has no same-named subject in the BHMS tables, and Psychiatry’s nearest undergraduate ancestor is the first-year course in Fundamentals of Psychology in relation to Homoeopathy. The MD is therefore, for most scholars, a return to a familiar subject at a new depth — and for two of the specialities, the first time the subject stands on its own.

**What the university examines.** The curriculum is the Commission’s; the examination is the university’s. In Uttar Pradesh, MGGAU’s MD main-examination notice for the 2021-22 batch (exams in July 2024) set papers in the same seven specialities, plus two common papers: Research Methodology and Medical Statistics, and Advanced Teaching of Fundamentals of Homeopathy. That batch entered before the 2024 curriculum, so the notice shows the structure as the university was examining it then; the CBDC is the map for batches from 2024-25.

**Where MD is taught in this network.** Among the twelve Uttar Pradesh colleges this platform is built around, four show an MD programme on their own websites: SNHMC Lucknow, Pt. JLN HMC Kanpur (with fifteen postgraduate seats), State LBS HMC Prayagraj, and Naiminath HMC Agra. Bakson HMC, Greater Noida, is reported by secondary sources, but its own site could not be reached to confirm. Most of these sites do not list their specialities; each college’s own page carries what we have been able to verify.

**A question left open.** The Commission’s MD page now also publishes curriculum documents for Community Medicine and for Dermatology. Neither appears in the archived list of seven Part II specialities, and until the Commission’s list itself changes, this platform keeps seven rooms. When the record is clear, the map will follow it.

The rooms fill as pieces are written — orientations first, then study notes that follow the CBDC module by module. A quiet room is simply one whose turn has not yet come.