Every good mechanic knows the importance of timing in your cats engine. If the cylinders do not synchronize there is loss of power. In diplomacy timing is of the most vital importance. To philosophers, as well as to athletes, rhythm, which is really timing, is paramount. A beginner in homoeopathic prescribing may take his case magnificently hut may have no sense for chronology, for the sequence of cause and event. Always put dates opposite the illnesses, operations or catastrophes in the patients history.
After a while you get a sixth sense of how one thing follows another, you see the life of the patient and even of his forebears and progeny as an organic whole. try to connect the ills to which he is heir with seasons, periodicity, time, meteorological phases. Learn to sense how each little man swings in or out of the master rhythms of the universe.
This same perception of timing applies to the physical examination. It is not sufficient that a mans heart shows no gross organic disturbance on an electrocardiograph, one must with more senses than we give ourselves credit for enter into the rhythm of his pulse, his breathing. We must understand the metabolic rhythms of eating, digestion and elimination and use such means as will help us determine where the lag is or where the spurt in physiology. We must realize how tiny a change in phase or current or magnetic field may have an apparently disproportionate counterpart in health and harmony.
We must somehow pervade the patient with a sense of the necessity of order and rhythm, then we are ready to come to the giving of our healing agent, the similar remedy. An old professor of mine used to say that curing is like peeling an onion, you must begin at the top layer; and it is a sound principle of homoeopathy that, in an untreated case which requires an acute prescription, the most recent symptoms are the guide to the remedy that you should start with.
When you have taken a chronic case from birth on, you should be able to see what remedy this human being needed as an infant, as a child, at puberty, in young adulthood, in maturity and age. At some time in the complete cure of a personality you may, as it were work back to the basic remedy needed or element lacking many years before, but if you give this substance prematurely you will put your timing off. Only the nosodes can be given with profit, either first or intercurrently, as timing regulators. To borrow a botanical analogy, the nosodes are like the genus and the remedy the species.
The most perilous moment in any homoeopathic cure is that of the second prescription. If you cut in in zeal or panic before your first dose has run its course to the full, you will mix up your case. On the other hand, if you wait too long, you will lose valuable time and may alienate your patient. The expert homoeopath should be able to “smell” when a repetition, change of potency or another remedy is indicated and should have the character not to be stampeded or misled by the disease, the patient, the family, the consultant, the nurse or the family retainers!.
Remember your cardinal principles: Never repeat a remedy when the patient himself is improving. Never change a remedy when the symptoms are following Herings law of cure in the reverse order of the symptoms. Never change your remedy when a discharge or eruption follows the administration.
But there is more to timing than just repetition or change. One can almost include potency selection under timing. The patients vitality is a rhythm and his pathology or suppressions are obstacles. A homoeopathic cure is something of a steeplechase; clock your remedies and your potencies and may the best timing win.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK.
DISCUSSION.
DR. A.H. GRIMMER [Chicago, Ill.]: I hate to be talking all the time, but I dont like a paper like this to go by without saying something. Dr. Hubbard has given us in this nice little paper not only something of value to homoeopathy and homoeopathic prescribing, but also she has touched on the very things that move the cosmos. Everything is done in timing. We have seasons, and even the Wisest Man in the world said there is a time for this and a time for that, a time to laugh and a time to weep, and so forth and so on, and I suppose Dr. Hubbard has come across now with the idea that there is a time to cure.
DR. HARVEY FARRINGTON [Chicago, Ill.]: I agree with Dr. Grimmer. It seems to me that the doctor is certainly capable of writing a paper like this, when she comes here right at the crucial moment. That is timing!.
A number of years ago there was a book entitled Man, the Unknown, and in that book the author made many wise statements, and one of them was that disease is not a n entity; it is a condition. Disease is very much a personal affair. It moves by mans internal timing. There are many diseases in our patients. We often hear it said that homoeopathy is slow, but those who do not think are likely to judge form appearances.
Homoeopathy is like lightning when it comes to a critical moment in an acute case, where death is imminent. In the chronic case, however, there is so much being done beneath the surface that the ordinary observer thinks that the remedy is not acting, and very often the doctor himself thinks the same thing, and makes a great mistake in repeating his remedy too soon, or giving another.
