Up The Swanee To Atlantis Part 1 by Mike Bridger CCH Principal
16 January 2026 | by Mike Bridger
This is the first of a four-part blog post, written by Mike Bridger, the Principal of the Bristol Contemporary College of Homeopathy. The original article first appeared in 'The Homoeopath' (No.68, Winter 1998,p.835-839). It is presented here with kind permission.
Mike Bridger demands - especially in teaching - a clear emphasis on the work of Hahnemann, Kent, etc. The modern tendency to subjective, speculative psychoprescribing inhibits the correct prescription and mixes up various, often esoteric kinds of therapies with homoeopathy.
Up The Swanee To Atlantis
Where no such Conflicts are detected then the practitioner invents one, and so our poor patient pays not for the remedy that matches their pathology, but the remedy that represents the lunacy of the practitioner.
There have been enormous developments in homoeopathy over the past twenty years. Our psychological understanding of remedies has expanded and continues to do so. Homoeopathic education has radically improved, with better courses being available to students and the development of improved educational standards. At the crucial grass-roots level there is more debate and discussion, and therefore a recognition that homoeopathy ought to be taken very seriously. However, as with all things, the more we branch out the more liable we are to lose touch with our roots. It is one thing to extend the boundaries of homoeopathic understanding, but quite another to forge ahead beyond our boundaries and fall over a precipice.
There is such a feast of new ideas and concepts on the market that we are in danger of producing practitioners who end up with the intellectual equivalent of the Ant Crud state1. Some of the meals on the table have been created more from a desire to be original and innovative than a desire to be nutritional. There are now more ways of looking at cases than there are channels on Sky T.V. and we could wander around from seminar to workshop for a new fix in the way kids wander around burger bars for a quick snack. There is an increasing gap between the creative and seductive world of teaching and seminars, and the hard world of practice. This is fine for those who have experience in practice and can take what they want and leave the rest; it is not so good for those, particularly students, who need help transforming the 2D world of theory and ideas into the 3D world of reality.
These systems and methods apparently devised to further our understanding of what we do in practice are becoming increasingly incomprehensible. Homoeopathy is becoming merged with myth, mysticism, magic, occultism, psychotherapy, religion and everything but what it actually is. Of course there are elements of all these things which do indeed overlap, but we need to be clear about the distinctions, otherwise we end up with a smudge. Homoeopathy is not abstract, but relates to the specific individuality of the patient and it is through specificity that the patient can be healed.
If we are not careful homoeopathy will move further away from a simple therapy into the realms of a sort of pseudo-occultism where only the initiates have access to otherwise hidden knowledge. We are already beginning to absorb a language that, at times, is little better than the Latin used by the allopaths and abhorred by Hahnemann. Of course any discipline has a tendency to develop its own abbreviations but the problem goes deeper. One of the characteristic symptoms of such trends is that nothing can be and mean what it simply is; it always has to mean something else. A symptom cannot stand for what it is - which is both cause and effect, and meaning inherent in itself - but it has to symbolise something else.
Once we start speaking in these kind of terms, whether it is from a metaphysical, psychotherapeutic, spiritual or other standpoint, we are moving into the realm of speculation. Such speculation becomes justified in terms of shapes, charts, colours, mythical gods and goddesses, etc., which is fine if it illustrates the homeopathic process, but not if it erodes our solid, if a little dry, foundations. The former is very poetic and seductive compared with the slog of studying the Organon, but it is of little use in our practice if we end up with an instant mash of bits of various therapies, converging into a vague new age stew. Our job is to heal.
...not to weave so-called systems from fancy ideas and hypotheses about the inner nature of the vital processes and the origin of diseases in the invisible interior of the organism…
Hahnemann was directing his warning to allopaths, but it's time we considered what he said in relation to our own profession. There is something profoundly simple about Hahnemann's homoeopathy. It is as if some homoeopaths cannot reside in the pastures of this simplicity but, with Sulphuric impatience, prefer to reside in a never-ending spaghetti of speculations under the banner of developing insight.
I do not use the word 'simplicity' lightly. It is extremely hard to be simple. Picasso ended his days drawing simple pictures. "Even a child could draw them" was the oft repeated cry of the critics. This, of course, was partly the point he was making, but it was a point made after years of grappling with technique and craftsmanship. We need to be sure we learn and teach, that true development springs from a thorough understanding of the basics. Otherwise, we are like a bunch of musicians who, while deluded that they can play a symphony at the Albert Hall, haven't bothered to learn their scales.
Check back in a fortnight’s time for the continuation of this controversial original article, in which Mike Bridger delves into the potential pitfalls and dangers of Homeopathic psycho-diagnosis, in Part 2 of “Up the Swanee to Atlantis”.
References:
1ANTIMONIUM CRUDUM. - Condensed Materia medica. - by Constantine Hering. - Presented by Médi-T. (n.d.). http://www.homeoint.org/books1/heringcondensed/a/ant-crud.htm
2Patil, B. K., & Gandhi, M. A. (2024). The Life and Legacy of Samuel Hahnemann: founder of homoeopathy and his medical philosophy. Cureus, 16(9), e70489. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.70489
3Wikipedia contributors. (2025). The organon of the healing art. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Organon_of_the_Healing_Art