Paediatrics in MD (Homoeopathy) — the child as a whole, from the mother–neonate unit onward

Paediatrics is one of two MD specialities that a BHMS graduate has never met as a subject of its own. Materia Medica, Organon, Repertory, Pharmacy and Practice of Medicine all have same-named courses in the BHMS tables; Paediatrics does not. The MD speciality in Paediatrics therefore builds the field from its foundations — the child’s growth, development and nutrition first, then the child’s body system by system — and asks throughout how homoeopathic principle applies to a patient who is still developing. It is one of the seven Part II specialities of the NCH Competency Based Dynamic Curriculum for MD (Homoeopathy), from the 2024-25 batch, and MGGAU examines it as a distinct MD paper.

The course runs three years under the 2024 Post-Graduate Regulations: Part I, about eighteen months, as a Junior Resident, and Part II as a Senior Resident.

A note on the source before the map. For two of its three speciality papers, the Commission’s document names the modules and places competency tables beneath them, without separate lists of topics. Our sheet does not transcribe competency tables, so for those papers this page gives module names only. The middle paper, on homoeopathy in paediatrics, is spelt out in detail, and this page follows it more closely.

**Part I, Paper 1 — Fundamentals of Paediatrics.** Thirteen modules. Three lay the foundations: the application of the basic medical sciences to homoeopathic paediatrics; the fundamentals of growth and development; and the fundamentals of nutrition. The remaining ten are each a clinical approach to a set of altered functions, integrated with homoeopathic management: the functions of the neonate; fever; growth and development; nutrition; and the respiratory, gastrointestinal, cardiac and circulatory, excretory, haematological and neurological functions.

**Part I, Paper 2 — Fundamentals of Homoeopathy in Paediatrics.** Ten modules, the same sequence of concepts the clinical specialities share, each turned toward the child.

– **Man, vital force and environment.** Health, disease, causation and vital force; the evolution of disease from predisposition through disposition and diathesis to disease; the principles of growth and development applied to the study of paediatric materia medica, repertory and the Organon; the mission and knowledge of the physician; the Hahnemannian concept of man and its extension by Kent, Boenninghausen and Boger; and the philosophical basis of the three original repertories — Kent’s, the Therapeutic Pocket Book and Boger’s Boenninghausen’s Characteristic Repertory.
– **Dynamism, recovery and cure.** Vital force in health and in the genesis of disease; the difference between recovery and cure; pseudo-chronic disease; the mental and physical factors that act as obstacles to cure, and their removal; and the role of miasm.
– **Artificial disease and the portrait of disease.** Drug proving; recording artificial and natural disease; creating their portraits and the art of matching them; the portraits of polychrest remedies at the levels of mind, physical generals and particulars.
– **Unprejudiced observation and case taking.** Hahnemann’s guidelines and a standardised case record; the unprejudiced physician, demonstrated at the bedside through the interaction of physician and patient.
– **Symptomatology.** The value of a symptom; individualisation and generalisation according to Kent and Boenninghausen, and how each shaped their repertories; deriving group characteristics from individual drug symptoms.
– **Susceptibility, and acute and chronic disease.** The parameters of susceptibility in the neonatal and paediatric age group; classification of disease, by Hahnemann and by modern medicine, applied to scope and limitations; and the regional repertories as aids.
– **Suppression, miasms and vaccinations in paediatrics; totality; the similar and the simillimum** — three modules the source gives at chapter level only.
– **Therapeutic management.** Kent’s twelve observations for assessing the response to a remedy and the second prescription; the knowledge of disease and investigation needed to assess that response; remedy relationships; patient education about the disease; and ancillary measures — diet, exercise, yoga, relaxation and supplements.

**Part I, Paper 3** is the Research Methodology and Biostatistics paper common to all seven specialities.

**Part II, Papers 1 and 2 — Paediatrics.** Nineteen modules, each titled as a homoeopathic approach to its field. They begin with the mother–neonate unit, embryology and neonatology; move through disorders of growth and development, of nutrition, and of fluid and electrolyte balance; take community paediatrics, infectious diseases and child psychiatry; then go system by system — respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and hepatobiliary, nervous, renal, endocrine, musculoskeletal and rheumatological, and skin — with haematology and oncology, and immunology and allergy, alongside; and they close with paediatric surgical diseases, and with advanced homoeopathic paediatrics, emergency paediatrics and critical care.

The source names these modules and gives their content as competency tables. Until those tables are transcribed, this page cannot say more about what each module teaches, and it does not try.

**Who this speciality forms.** The curriculum describes a physician for children who holds two things together: the clinical knowledge of paediatrics, from the newborn to emergency and critical care, and a homoeopathic understanding of the child as a developing person in an environment. The weight it gives to growth, development, nutrition and patient education — and to scope and limitation in its classification of disease — marks it as a speciality of careful judgement.

**What this room will hold.** Study notes following the CBDC modules: orientations to growth, development and nutrition as the curriculum frames them, pieces on the ten homoeopathic concepts as Part I Paper 2 turns them toward the child, and notes on the repertories the curriculum names as aids. They will be written as study of the curriculum, never as advice about any child’s health. Everything here carries the MD tag and the Paediatrics category, so it also stands on the Paediatrics topic in Homoeopathy Knowledge.