Whether you like it or not the computer age is upon us and is going to play a significantly bigger part in our lives in the very near future, than it does today. Homoeopaths are exposed to so much new information that a software package must be a serious consideration for anyone who is interested in having a busy practice. Using a computer doesn’t take anything away from the art of homoeopathy, it simply helps with the laborious bit! Once we have taken a case, analysed it and are ready to choose our rubrics, then Cara Professional is invaluable. I can’t imagine many practitioners would do a thorough repertorisation without a computer. With Cara Professional you have the choice of repertorising 36 different ways very quickly. Cara not only speeds up the process but it widens the choice of remedies available, the small remedies that sometimes get ignored can be upgraded so they stand a chance of being seen!

I have often heard students say, “I won’t buy a programme until I have qualified” or “I want to learn to use the books first” I don’t understand this because there is nothing you can do in a book that you can’t do on the computer (In browse mode you can view any page of any repertory or MM and read it like a book), however there are many things that you can do on a computer that would be totally impractical to do with books, if you are that addicted to books then there's nothing to stop you using both.

What follows are some ways in which Cara can greatly aid in your learning process:

Searching materia medica
You can search all materia medicas simultaneously. By simply typing in a key word like ‘miasm’, Cara Professional will find every reference to this in every book. Incidentally you can create rubrics from your MM search. There is a lot of information in MM that hasn’t been translated into the repertories.

Comparing remedies
You can compare up to ten remedies, choosing any chapter (or all chapters) of the repertory. So you could, for example, compare the mind symptoms of Scorpion and Anacardium or alternatively you could compare the liver symptoms of Cheldonium and Lycopium.

Reversed repertory
You can look at all symptoms that are represented under each remedy as they appear in the Combined repertory, so you could look at all repertory entries (or choose any chapter) for Lac Caninum, for example. This helps when we have a new remedy in the repertory but no information in MM, because we can learn the remedy by viewing all it’s repertory entries.

Grouping Remedies
You can achieve this in both the repertory and MM. In the repertory you can filter out all remedies apart from the specified group, for example, you can repertorise your symptoms just using the ‘Muriaticum’ remedies. It’s also possible to repertorise using any line on the periodic table, remove polycrests or choose remedies that relate to any of the miasms. In the MM you can look at what remedies are in specific groups, for example you could look at what remedies are in the spider and insect classification.

Thematic search
This is Dr Mirrilli’s work; he has created a repertory that links symptoms back to a core theme. So for example, if you click on ‘Betrayed’ you get thirteen symptoms that relate to that symptom, one of which is ‘Delusions wife is faithless’ This gives you ideas of what rubrics to choose in cases that have a theme running through them.

Advancements in homoeopathy
There are many new ideas that have been introduced to the homeopathy community over the past few years. We have incorporated many features for students and practitioners to be able to utilise these new ideas. Jan Scholten suggested that by understanding different aspect of minerals we could attribute certain traits to that family of remedies, as I mentioned above, you can filter out all remedies other than the family you want use in your repertorisation. A couple of new ideas that are receiving a lot of attention at present are: making SUPER rubrics (combining sub rubrics to make one big one), you can do this on Cara Professional. Another idea is to group remedies into families that I have mentioned above in ‘grouping remedies’. Our technical department are looking at new features and developments to incorporate the next version of Cara Professional to keep it as contemporary as possible without taking away any of the basic features, we believe the user should have the choice of a variety of facilities and should be able to choose when they do/don’t use them.

Other advantages of having Cara Professional as a student
The other good reasons for buying before qualifying are: You won’t have duplicated all your books (in both hard copy and computer form), if you are going to be mobile and have a lap-top computer then adding books to your computer adds no additional weight. You will also be competent with the best tool you could hope for in practice and can put your energy into building your practice.

> Repertories
> Cara Professional Library Options
> Using Cara Professional as a learning tool
> Why have books in electronic form
> Trading-in Cara for Isis