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Miccant & CARA - History

In 1982 David Witko developed a personal interest in homeopathy and started attending public lectures and seminars to gain knowledge of this exciting subject. At the time he was working as a computer software designer in the city of London for a major retail bank.

At a meeting of the Hahnemann Society, a leading consultant, Dr Michael Jenkins, from the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital gave a lecture which explained new developments in homoeopathy. One of these new developments was the imminent availability of low cost personal computers. David’s interest was immediately fired and he discussed this matter with Dr Jenkins. Shortly thereafter they together started a project at the RLHH to design and build a computer software program to allow homoeopaths easier access to the repertory.

By 1984 the program had developed into something that ran in MSDOS and was quite useful. It was given the name CARA, which stands for Computer Assisted Repertory Analysis, an ideal choice because the name CARA also means ‘Friendly’. Considerable effort was spent adding repertory data from Kent’s Repertory into the system and volunteers from the hospital spent long hours keying data into the system. But by 1986 only a small portion of Kent was actually input.

At this point David moved away from London and the project with the RLHH effectively stopped. Other homoeopathic programs became available and the RLHH became discouraged with the amount of time and effort that would be required to bring CARA up to the same standard. At this point Dr Jenkins agreed that David could take CARA as a product and develop it himself. A company (4-Front Computers) was established and considerable sums of money were invested by David and his business partners into completing the loading of data from Kent’s Repertory and improving the software interface.

By 1998 CARA was being sold commercially although costs of both the hardware and software were still high…too high for the average homoeopath to afford. Consequently by 1989 David’s business partners decided that continued investment was not viable and 4-Front was closed down.

David retained the support of customers of CARA as he did not want to leave them unassisted at that time. Miccant Ltd was formed for this purpose. With the passing of time David was surprised that homoeopaths would still enquire after the program, no doubt because of the attractive price compared to the competition who were charging thousands of pounds at that time.

Towards the end of 1990 David observed that the new Microsoft Windows environment was starting to offer the kind of graphical environment previously only available to users of Apple Computers. In 1991 he decided to create a software program that would run in this environment. David approached

John Stevenson, an experienced software engineer, to jointly develop the program.

Their efforts were rewarded in September 1992 when the new program was released at the Society of Homoeopaths, UK conference. It was the first homoeopathic system to be released for Microsoft Windows. The name CARA was retained for commercial purposes, although the new program was in reality, a completely different program than the original CARA.

CARA v1, as it was called, made an enormous impact throughout the English speaking world and quickly established itself as one of the leading programs. As competitors followed the move towards Microsoft Windows, a newer version of CARA was developed and released in January 1994 to help maintain CARA’s lead in the use of Windows technology. In this version, numbered 2, CARA introduced the concept of repertorising by Families of remedies and Classification of remedies. Also released with version 2 was the Homeopathic Medical Repertory by Robin Murphy.

Since v2 was released in 1994 several upgrades to the system have been made available, the most notable being the recent v2.6 which also offered the possibility of working with the Complete Repertory.

During 1996 Miccant also released their materia medica searching program SIMILIA as a companion program to CARA.

In 1998 Miccant released another major upgrade of CARA which is called CARA Professional . This version takes advantage of the Windows 95/98 environment. It offers many additional features specific only to Cara including full multi-media capability as well as several innovative new features.

CARA is available throughout the world and is supported by an extensive network of agents who market and support the program locally.

Now there is an Evaluation CD that will run for 60 days with a sub-set of books.

As a world-wide company Miccant is active on the Internet - their Web site is :www.miccant.co.uk