A multicenter, observational, homoeopathic clinical verification study of Cynodon dactylon revealing symptom prevalence in a cohort of 340 patients

Context: Clinical verification is an ongoing research program of the Council that verified many rare homoeopathic drugs. Aim: This study was carried out to clinically verify the "symptomatology" of Cynodon dactylon and to ascertain the prevalence of symptoms in the "improved" and "not improved" groups. Materials and Methods: The study was a multicenter, open, observational study. A total of 462 patients were enrolled after matching with the available symptom, compendium of the drug, and eligibility criteria in seven units/institutes of the Council. The medicine was prescribed in 6C, 30C, 200C and 1M potencies as per the need of each patient, following homoeopathic principles and the protocol developed by the Council. The collected data were presented in terms of descriptive statistics. Prevalence of the symptoms in the responding and nonresponding population was compared using Chi-square test or Fisher′s exact test, as appropriate. Results: A total of 340 complete cases were analyzed; male/female was 204/136; mean age was 29.7 years. There were "clinical successes" in 274 (80.6%) cases and "failures" in 66 (19.4%), judged subjectively by the physicians. A minimum of two prescriptions was considered for pick-listing each symptom as per protocol. The number of symptoms verified was as follows: proving symptoms (n = 43), symptoms from other literature (n = 10), and new clinical observations (n = 57). Conclusions: A total of 53 recorded symptoms were verified and 57 new clinical symptoms were identified. Further replication and estimation of likelihood ratio in general practice settings are crucial for confirmatory inclusion of the symptoms in homoeopathic literature.