Psora – 3



How difficult it is, and how seldom will the best antipsoric treatment do anything to relieve such unfortunates!

By far the most frequent excitement of the slumbering psora into chronic disease, and the most frequent aggravation of chronic ailments already existing, are caused by grief and vexation.

Uninterrupted grief and vexation very soon increase even the smallest traces of a slumbering psora into more severe symptoms, and they then develop these into an outbreak of all imaginable chronic sufferings more certainly and more frequently than all other injurious influences operating on the human organism in an average human life; while these two agencies just as surely and frequently, augment ailments already existing.

As the good physician will be pleased when he can enliven and keep from ennui the mind of a patient, in order to advance a cure which is not encumbered with such obstructions, he will in such a case feel more than ever the duty incumbent upon him to do all within the power of his influence on the patient and on his relatives and surroundings, in order to relieve him of grief and vexation. This will and must be a chief end of his care and neighborly love.

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But if the relations of the patient cannot be improved in this respect, and if he has not sufficient philosophy, religion and power over himself to bear patiently and with equanimity all the sufferings and afflictions for which he is not to blame, and which it is not in his power to change; if grief and vexation continually beat in upon him, and it is out of the power of the physician to effect a lasting removal of these most active destroyers of life, he had better give up the treament* and leave the patient to his fate, for even the most masterly management of the case with the remedies that are the most exquisite and the best adapted to the bodily ailment will avail nothing, nothing at all, with a chronic patient thus exposed to continual sorrow and vexation, and in whom the vital economy is being destroyed by continuous assaults on the mind. The continuation of the fairest edifice is foolish, when the foundation is being daily undermined, even if but gradually, by the play of the waves.

Almost as near, and often nearer yet, to insurability are the chronic diseases, especially with great and rich men, who for some years, besides the use of mineral baths, have passed through the hands of various, often of many, allopathic physicians, who have tried on them one after another all the fashionable modes of cure, the remedies which are so boastingly lauded in England, France and Italy, – all strongly acting mixtures. By so many unsuitable medicines, which are injurious by their violence and their frequent repetition in large doses, the psora which always lies within, even if not combined with syphilis, becomes every year more incurable, as do also the chronic ailments springing from it; and after the continuation of such irrational medical assaults on the organism for several years it becomes almost quite incurable. It cannot well be decided, since these things take place in the dark, whether these heroic unhomoeopathic doses have added, as may be suspected, new ailments to the original disease, which ailments through the largeness of the doses and their frequent repetition have now become lasting and as it were chronic, or whether through abuse there has resulted a crippling of the different faculties of the organism, i.e., those of irritability, of sensation and of reproduction, and so (probably from both causes) there has arisen the monster of various ailments, fused into one another, which can no longer be rationally viewed as a simple natural ailment. In short, this many-sided disharmony and perversion of parts and of forces most indispensable to life present a chaos of ailments which the homoeopathic physician should not lightly declare curable.

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(* Unless the patient should have little or no cause for his grief and sorrow, or hardly any incitement from without to vexation, and in consequence would need more particularly to be treated with respect to his mental disorder, by means of the antipsoric remedies, which are at the same time suited to the rest of his chronic disease. Such cases are not only curable, but often even easily curable.)

(Every time the baths are used, even when the water is not in itself unsuitable to the ailment, they are to be considered as the use of large doses often repeated of one and the same violently acting medicine, the violent operation of which can seldom be salutary, and must often result in the aggravation of the morbid state, yea, even to the patient’s utter destruction.)

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By such treatments, which are incapable of curing the original disease, but are exhausting and debilitating, the aggravation of the psora is not only hastened from within, but new artificial and threatening ailments are generated by such delusive allopathic cures, so that the vital force, thus attacked from two sides, often is unable to escape.

If in such cases the sad consequences of these indirect assaults of the old methods of cure were dynamic disturbances only, they would surely either disappear of themselves when the treatment is discontinued, or they ought at least to be extinguished again effectively through homoeopathic medicines. But this is not at all the case; they do not yield. Very likely by these indirect, continuous and repeated assaults on the sensitive, irritable fiber by such injudicious medicinal disease-potencies, which are given in large doses frequently repeated, the vital force is obliged to meet this attack and to endeavor either to dynamically change these tender internal organs which are assaulted so mercilessly, or to reconstruct them materially so as to make them unassailable to such violent attacks, and thus to protect and shield the organism from general destruction. Thus, e.g., this force, which instinctively preserves life, beneficially shields the fine sensitive skin of the hand with a callous covering of hard, horny skin in persons with whom the skin is exposed to frequent injuries during hard labor whereby the skin is injured by hard, scratching materials or by corroding substances. So also in a long continued allopathic treatment, which has no true healing power with respect to the disease, no direct pathic (homoeopathic) relation to the parts and processes concerned in the chronic disease, but internally assaults other delicate parts and organs of the body, in such cases the vital force, in order to protect the whole from destruction, dynamically and organically transmutes these fine organs; i.e., either makes them inactive or paralyzes them, or dulls their sensitiveness, or makes them altogether callous. On the one side the most tender fiber is abnormally thickened or hardened, and the more vigorous fibers consumed or annihilated – thus there arise artificially, adventitious organisms, malformations and degenerations, which at postmortem examinations are cunningly ascribed to the malignancy of the original disease. Such an internal state is not infrequent, and is in many cases incurable. Only where there are still sufficient vital powers in a body not too much bowed down by age (but where under an allopathic regime do we not find the powers wasted?) under favorable external circumstances, the vital force dynamically freed from its original disease by the careful homoeopathic (antipsoric) treatment of a practiced physician, may succeed in gradually reasserting itself, and in gradually absorbing and transforming those (often numerous) adventitious secondary formations which it was compelled to form. Such a transformation is, however, only possible to a still energetic vital force, which has been in great part set free from its psora. Only however, under favorable external circumstances, and after the lapse of a considerable time and usually in only an imperfect manner, does the vital force succeed in this almost creative endeavor. Experience proves daily that the more zealously the allopath puts into practice in chronic disease his perverse destructive art (often with great care, industry and persistence), the more he ruins his patients in health and life.

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How can perversions, introduced into patients in this manner frequently for years, be transformed in a short time into health even by the best, i.e., the true method of cure, which has never assumed to itself the power of directly influencing organic defects?

The physician has to meet in such cases no natural, simple psoric disease. He can therefore promise an improvement only after a long period of time, but never a full restoration, even if the vital powers are not (as is so frequently the case) altogether wasted; for where this is the case, he would feel compelled to desist from treatment even at the first glance. First the many chronic medicinal diseases which pass over the fluctuating state of health must gradually be removed (perhaps during a several months’ stay in the country almost without medicine); or they must depart as of themselves through the activity of the vital force, when the antipsoric treatment has to some degree begun, with an improved manner of living and a regulated diet. For who could find remedies for all these ailments artificially produced by a confused mass of strong unsuitable medicines? The vital force must first absorb and reform what it has compulsorily deformed, before the true healer will in time see again before him a partially cleared malady similar to the original one, and which he will then be able to combat.*

Samuel Hahnemann
Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) was the founder of Homoeopathy. He is called the Father of Experimental Pharmacology because he was the first physician to prepare medicines in a specialized way; proving them on healthy human beings, to determine how the medicines acted to cure diseases.

Hahnemann's three major publications chart the development of homeopathy. In the Organon of Medicine, we see the fundamentals laid out. Materia Medica Pura records the exact symptoms of the remedy provings. In his book, The Chronic Diseases, Their Peculiar Nature and Their Homoeopathic Cure, he showed us how natural diseases become chronic in nature when suppressed by improper treatment.