Physicia ns' Motivations for Specialization in Homeopathy

Abstract: Homeopathy is a medical practice that has groen steadily in our country, both in the public and private sectors of health assistance. Neverthless, the knowledge about the profile of the homeopathic professional and the characteristics of its practice is very scarce. In 1998 the Homeopathic Doctors Profile Project was started with the purpose of providing information about this issue. Yhis paper presentes part of the results obtained form this Project, whose main goals were: to understand the reasons that lead a physician to look for homeopathic specialization to identify the aspects of the physician’s professional practice that changed after he concluded his homeopathic specialization to describe the professional relationship between homeopathic and non homeopathic physicians. The investigation was conducted in two differebt phases. In the first phase, 110 homeopathic physicians graduated between 1988 and 1998, selected at random from diferente states of the Union and who had participated in the Brazilian Congresso n Homeopathy in 1998, were submitted to a semi-structured questionnaire. In the second phase, a similar questionnaire was distributed by five diferente homeopathic educational institutions among all of their graduates, resulting in a sample of 285 physicians who answered the questionnaire. In the third phase, eleven homepaths were selected for being interviewed, in order to elucidate some subjects suggested by the previous phases. The results herewith presented show that the physicians looked for homeopathic practice for diferentes reasons, mainly dissatisfaction with the results obtained in their medical practice, the kind of approach to the patient and his disease offered by this practice, and the lack of resources for dealing with certain complaints. Other reasons foud were the search for medical practice that considers the induvidual as a whole and the fact of once having observed good results obtained with homeopathic medicine in relatives, other patients or even in self medication.