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

Table 2

Beliefs about the origins of intuition.

Subtheme: based on	Example
Knowledge	“Intuition is … based on knowledge that you’ve learned in a structured way.”
Clinical experience	“There must always be an element of art, intuition … past experience … I now have 20 yrs experience of how remedies work on people, what sort of people can benefit from a particular remedy.”
Embodied knowledge (knowledge and clinical experience)	“I do think it's what I’ve said, experience and knowledge, and I think listening to your inner processes about that.”
Personal experience (intrinsic intuition)	“Well the word “intuition” means self knowledge I guess. It's largely based on your own experiences, it's in you and it's what you’ve learned. Based on […] experiences that you may or may not have fully understood at the time.”
Unconscious merging of knowledge and personal experience	“Well basically intuition arises because you’ve got knowledge yourself … Intuition is the marriage of those two things; their information and my intrinsic knowledge, not conscious. Intuition is the unconscious realization of something that arises out of that. You don’t have intuition if you don’t have knowledge. If I don’t know a remedy, I am not going to “intuit” it.”