The Use of Intuition in Homeopathic Clinical Decision Making: An Interpretative Phenomenological Study

Table 1

How homeopaths recognize and describe intuition.

Subtheme	Example
Descriptions of intuitions	Intuition is more of a felt sense … more a sort of gut-feeling.” “The picture will come to me; a wholeness will come to me. And that's intuition … it's almost as though it's a kind of visual felt sense.” “That's another thing that you get an inkling about, or I get an inkling about, is how much I can question someone … so I’m quite sensitive about it … I don’t usually get that wrong really, usually I know how far I can go with someone.”
Recognizing intuition (a) Awareness of intuition depends on the practitioner's level of sensitivity	“I am very conscious of it because I’m using it as a tool to understand what's going on. I think that it's a level of sensitivity … it's something that everybody has … we all have gut-feelings, inklings, call it intuition, and I think what that is based on is experience and knowledge … I think that often people will have a kind of semi-awareness of it, some people are very aware of it, some people are very unaware of it. […] you know it's quite a heightened state of being focused on what someone's saying, you kind of train yourself to be even more aware so it's like you’re in a higher level on sensitivity.”
(b) Based on interpreting non verbal behavior: reading between the lines	“You get a kind of inkling that something, you know there is more to just the bladder problem from the way that she's talking and the things that she mentions, maybe her body language.”
(c) Based on a feeling—gestalt intuition	“Intuition is that sense that you know what remedy someone needs.”
Happens very rapidly: cognitive inference	“Something comes in when you’re with a patient, something comes in to your head, like a little light I suppose, something tells you they might need that remedy.”