Homeopathic proving of Chocolate

Review

This book review is reprinted with permission from Homeopathic Links.

Reviewed by Lorraine Taylor

Chocolate, who hasn't succumbed to its delicious temptations? Reviewing this book from the very heart of chocolate country, I now know why I always eat tons of chocolate while sitting at the computer. As a big bomb comes up on my screen after doing hours of "unsaved" work - I always knew my computer didn't love me!

Jeremy Sherr is one of the few experts on provings in the homoeopathic world. Here he doesn't just present us with a list of dry symptoms, but tempts us right from the cover page with its pile of half eaten chocolate. I never realised chocolate had such an interesting history from the Mayan's through the Aztecs, to its arrival in Europe in 1528 Sherr takes us on a fascinating journey. He considers the health myths of chocolate and the idea of being "naughty" for nibbling chocolate. The biggest theme in the history of chocolate however, is its associations with love and romance. We give chocolates to our sweethearts, advertisements exploit its romantic associations, and psychologists see chocolate as an emotional substitute for love. Then low and behold we discover that chocolate contains the same biochemical (phenyletylamine) as that which the brain secretes in such "states of euphoria" as being in love!

"One cannot deny that chocolate is a very sensuous experience combining the senses of smell, taste and touch. It just melts in your mouth, gradually softening and enveloping the taste buds"... ahh, However, before you reach for that next bar of chocolate, let your taste buds consider this.

Since it is apparently impossible to prevent cockroaches from contaminating the vats in which chocolate is manufactured, the American Food and Drug Administration specify that up to 4% by weight of chocolate may legitimately contain "cockroach parts"!

Sherr has more anecdotal information and some fascinating reports from chocolate lovers before launching into the methodology and substance of the proving.

(A more detailed discussion of methodology will be published separately by Sherr in the near future.)

Surprisingly the theme of romantic love was not strongly represented in the proving but expressions often revolved around family issues and raising children, nourishment and breast feeding and motherly love. "The dichotomy between animal instinct and over-civilised behaviour is obvious throughout the proving". Sherr discusses this briefly by looking at the main remedies with desire for chocolate.

The book ends with a "chocolate repertory" and as Sherr says "I leave the rest to your own study and interpretation"... and digestion.

Homoeopathic Links - Summer 1994

This book review is reprinted with the permission of the Homeopathic Academy of Naturopathic Physicians

reviewed by lain Marrs

Jeremy Sherr, the director of this proving, has maintained the high standards of previous provings and publications. The quality of the work, the fullness of the information, the scrupulous attention to detail and to clarity, assure the prescriber of a fun grounding in the clinical use of this remedy. Chocolate (four years of work) joins Hydrogen (four years of work), Scorpion (two years of work), Neon, Germanium and Brassica. In an interview in the excellent new yearly journal, 'The American Homeopath,' (volume 1, 1994. pp 67-77), from which interview the reader can gather a good picture of his approach and his way of thinking, Sherr discusses provings:

There's the proving that you do in order to add another remedy to homeopathy, and there's the proving you do in order to experience the remedy and what it's about, like when people do a proving during a seminar. Now it's very interesting and very useful, and everybody gets to experience the remedy, so from that point of view [a seminar proving] is good. But it is incomplete because you just give a remedy, disregarding what stage of treatment the people are in, disregarding the stage of health of the people, disregarding proving management at Month One, Two, Three, etc. You have to be there and remain there if you take responsibility for a proving. I know that people can go through hell from a proving, from one dose. I've had people on Chocolate go through hell for a year and a half from one dose of Chocolate. So I think you have to take responsibility for your action. It's not a game. Hahnemann says in Paragraph 14 1, you should do a proving "with all the caution and care here enjoined" - those are his words.

So it's great to experience a proving collectively and to have it as a group, but we should consider the bigger picture. ... [We] can do a proving for posterity, a complete picture.... One well-proved remedy is worth many poorly proved remedies because you get the whole character, the whole totality, the whole meaning, and you can know that remedy and understand and use it. (pp. 74-75)

The proving of Chocolate lives up to these standards. Sherr gives precise details on how the proving was carried out, pharmaceutical preparation, clear explanation of the valuation of each symptom added and the requirements for addition, and a repertory of those symptoms (the latter provided by Dee Maclachlan PCH).

Introductory comments to the proving cover the botany, chemistry, myth (Aztec and Mexican), history, health issues and health myths, and the toxicology of chocolate; there is also an anecdotal section on the subject, of necessity much-forgotten by chocolate lovers, of cockroaches! Further, there are some excerpts from classroom discussions at Dynamis School seminars, the latter grouped under the following themes: Reason for Eating; Addiction; Breastfeeding; Kids; Wildness; Hoarding; and Miscellaneous Particular Symptoms. This aspect of the presentation offers experiential support for the information to be gleaned from the proving itself.

Some points regarding 'scientific data.' An error by Allen is perpetuated in the passage reproduced on page 20. Allen states that the physiological effects of caffeine, them and theobromine are identical. Though theobromine, caffeine and theophylline are all xanthine alkoids, caffeine, a potent stimulant of the central nervous system, increases sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep) whereas, according to experiments by Dorfman and Jarvik, theobromine does not (Jonathan Ott: The Cacahuatl Eater; Natural Products Co., Vashon, WA, 1985; p 8 1). It is the theobromine, and not the caffeine, to which chocoholics are often assumed to be addicted, as Jeremy Sherr states (P. 11).

Secondly he mentions that recent scientific research indicates that chocolate does not produce obesity. A study by Quershi on the psychology of the chronically obese found indeed that a liking for chocolate candy (as opposed to other sweets like cakes) was in fact a good indicator for the obese person's ability to lose weight, as were also the amount of food taken at breakfast, and being married (p. 67, Ott, op. cit).

Thirdly, Sherr cites a report by Liebowitz and Klein which stated that the rejected lover suffers a number of symptoms due to the lack of B-phenethylamin, a condition the writers called 'hysteroid dysphoria.' Their reasoning was as that the jilted lover therefore turns to chocolate to make up the shortfall of this biochemical. However, this report was based on data which subsequent research has shown to overestimate drastically the presence of this biochemical. Further, and much more importantly for homeopaths, as Sherr points out, the proving itself does not support the idea of romantic love as a theme of Chocolate. What better confirmation that the best correction of 'scientific' research, and the data thereby produced, is the homeopathic proving: objectivity lies not in the scientific experiments of the laboratory but with the experiences, the phenomenology, of the well proven remedy.

Turning to the larger issues involved Jeremy Sherr, departing from his previous practice, cautiously adds some comments "regarding some of the threads running through this proving" (p. 21). One central aspect seemed to revolve around family issues often in connection with nourishing and raising children. In modem human civilization the process of raising the young has been stretched beyond its natural boundaries, often in isolation from a supportive community or 'extended family'... this evolution appears to be in contrast to our animal instinct of expelling the young as soon as they can fend for themselves. ...

This dichotomy between animal instinct and over-civilized behavior is obvious throughout the proving. (p.22)

He further positions Chocolate by citing Sepia and Phosphorus, both with indifference and aversion to family with chocolate the drug of choice. Lyssin and Carcinosin also both desire chocolate, the former as a mad dog, and the latter as an over-civilized, suppressed and over-conforming individual.

Earlier, Mexican legend is cited (p. 13) that has as themes the following: leaving society for a lost paradise and finding the children of the sun god, the plumed serpent; Quetzalcoatl's inebriation with, and inspiration from, the liquor to be made from cacao beans (i.e., cacahuatl: the -atl suffix being Aztec for 'water,' meaning either that the plant was juicy, associated with water or used in a potion); and the gathering of disciples to teach the civilised arts of agriculture, astronomy and medicine. this is further impetus for a representation of the themes of Chocolate by two sets of opposites, - that is, four poles: the two poles of animal and overconformist/over-civilized represent desiring or rejecting civilization in one's self, while the two poles of over-parenting or under-parenting children represent the desire to, and the aversion from, taking a civilizing role towards others, whether children or dependents. It is worthwhile distinguishing the two because, in one direction, the focus is the attitude towards one's own socialization and in the other, the attitude is to do with socializing others. Contemporary experience within Western culture implies a difficulty with moving in between, or combining, these two continua, - the development of the self and the nurturing of others. At the socio-pathological extreme, for example, there can be imagined an equivalence of one pole, the focus upon self, as a right, with the man, and of the other pole, the nurturing of others, as a responsibility, with the female. 'Me contemporary relevance of Chocolate may wen be that it is these socio-biological delusions which are 'up for grabs,' that is, being put into question,- with the resultant uncertainty and confusion over roles.

This preliminary schema offers four types of imbalance, which would blend together, perhaps like the preferences for dark and milk chocolate that are met by the varied range of chocolate products ("Thoughts about the 'veneer of civilization' ... a layer of learned social behavior lifting and detaching from a basis that is thick, dark, solid, instinctual animal." Prover 15, 30 minutes after a 30c dose of Chocolate, p 67, my italics; this beautiful symptom renders sociology in the language of a chocolate ad). The four extremes would consist of:- an obsessing closeness toward one's children; an aversion to parenting one's children; a desire to rid oneself of all socialization as a human being and to express something outside civilized norms, thus an aversion to the cilized; and, finally, a desire to identify oneself as purely and only civilized.

In Aztec culture, chocolate was the basic potion for medicinal formulas; this can be compared with the situation in the European Middle Ages, when the use of gold in medicines was prevalent because it, too, was that society's most valuable substance. That which is most valued within the body politic is taken as the basis of that which is to be offered to the individual body: a crude law of similars. Jeremy Sherr and the Dynamis School offer one of our current society's most valued substances in a well-edited, homeopathically rigorous proving, a remedy that catches the heartbeat of our contemporary situation ... Once again, this is not counterfeit, it is real homeopathic gold (or chocolate, according to taste). Now while we can all agree to forget about the cockroachesin the basement, something that does still linger, with a strange aftertaste, is the question of the hedgehogs overhead...

SIMILLIMUM / Fall 1994 Volume VII No. 3