Then as far as repetition is concerned. Where you are using low potencies, you have to keep up your drug administration right throughout the course of the disease. You will probably find that you have to give more than one drug; your first drug modifies the picture and you then get indications for a second prescriptions, and possibly a third, before the crisis takes place.
Where you are using the higher potencies, it is advisable to continue the administration of the selected drug until the temperature has reached normal and has remained normal for at least six hours. Otherwise you will find the patient tends to get a further rise of temperature and will require a second course of medicine, possibly the same but possibly different, say, twenty-four hours later, whereas if you have kept up your administration for six hours after the temperature has become normal you do not, as a rule, get any relapse at all.
As regards the frequency of administration of the drug, in the average case, where you are using a low potency it is quite sufficient to give the drug about once in four hours; and, as far as I can see, there is no particular advantage in giving it more frequently. As far as the high potencies are concerned, I think it is wiser to give the drug every two hours, the reason being that you want a number of stimuli in a comparatively short period of time in order to obtain the crisis within twelve to twenty- four hours. So in ordinary practice if giving a low potency, one repeats four-hourly and is perfectly happy to go back in twenty- four hours, not expecting to have to change the drug or the potency, and expecting to find the patient more comfortable, without much change in temperature. In another twenty-four hours the temperature should be coming down, the patient obviously doing well, and all anxiety disappearing; possibly by then a fresh prescription will be required, but there will be nothing dramatic, and no reason to hurry.
Where you are using a high potency, you start off giving the drug every two hours, and you go back in six, twelve, or twenty – four hours. In six hours you ought to find the temperature coming down; in twelve hours it will probably be down to normal, and in twenty-four it certainly ought to be.
That is the difference of the two systems, but they are both effective. Many people advocate that at the start it is wiser to use low potencies until you acquire confidence in your drug selection, and then as you gain greater knowledge heighten the potency and shorten the interval, so that eventually you are treating all your cases with medium or high potency. Possibly it is a wise way to do. Personally, I think it is better to go out for the best right from the start, do the extra work required in order to get more accurate matching, and aim for an early crisis in every case.
It is sometimes said that certain drugs are effective in high potency and certain drugs only effective in low. I do not think this is so. The reason certain medicines have been found effective more commonly in low potency turns on the point of general similarity. Most of the drugs which are used exclusively in low potencies have not been fully proved; we have no knowledge of their finer differentiating points. we only have a knowledge of their cruder effects. So when you use one of these drugs in a higher potency you cannot accurately match the finer differentiating symptoms of the case. The higher you go, the more accurate the prescribing must be; in low potency a general similarity is enough to give an effect. Suppose you get a marked effect from a low potency, and later go high you will certainly get an effect. In that case it is worth while noting the finer points of the case and seeing if they crop up in the next case in which you think of giving that drug.
In the average case of pneumonia that you meet with there are three stages in the disease. There is first of all the stage of congestion, or invasion, in other words, the incipient stage in which you are in doubt whether you are going to tackle a pneumonia at all. Then there is the stage of frank consolidation, in which the patient is running a good temperature, and has obvious physical signs in the chest. And later there is the stage of resolution, in which the condition is beginning to clear up. If you consider these three stages from the ordinary clinical standpoint, the picture the patient presents is quite different in each stage, and for that reason your drug selection in each stage will be different, so from the homoeopathic prescribing point of view one tends to group pneumonias under the various stages. Firstly, one takes the group of drugs which would apply to the incipient pneumonia. secondly, one takes the group of drugs which would apply to the frankly developed pneumonia in a strong healthy person. Thirdly, one considers the pneumonia which is either of a more septic type or a straight pneumonia in a bad soil, such as an alcoholic, or again a creeping type of pneumonia or a frank broncho-pneumonia. Fourthly, one takes the group of drugs which would apply to the resolution stage of pneumonia, or the unresolved pneumonia which is not clearing up properly. So from the prescribing point of view you link up your drugs according to the clinical picture.
He wrote a number of books: Children's Types, Digestive Drugs, Pneumonias
Douglas Borland died November 29, 1960.