The symptoms of which a sick person complains, or which can be detected by a trained observer, are the result of the various reactions occurring in the tissues. they constitute “the outward and observable signs of the inward metabolic disturbance”.
Further, all the varying details of the symptoms are a highly individual matter. These personal, and often peculiar, details reveal what is of extreme importance, the way in which the particular sick individual is reacting at any given time.
Another aspect of Hahnemann’s clear thinking was his realisation of the folly and fallacy of routine prescribing by diagnostic label. In other words the uniqueness of the individual calls for treatment suited to the individual sufferer. It becomes a problem of dealing with a particular illness in a particular person.
The details of symptoms differ from one case to another although a common label may be attached. It is these details which are personal and particular, that are important homoeopathically, for a remedy must be sought which possesses similar symptoms in its materia medica picture.
Further, these symptoms are present in a particular person, and it has been found that there is often a correspondence between the characteristics of a drug and the constitutional and temperamental characteristics of the individual sufferer.
It can become possible, therefore, to suit a remedy not merely to the particular features of the symptoms but also to the particular type of the sick person. All this makes for an accuracy in prescribing that is absent from treatment by rote.
That this method of therapy does give results in the cure of disease and relief of suffering is a matter of history, of innumerable factual records. To explain just how it achieves this is not easy. Hahnemann did not find it easy, and simply stated that the “drug disease” over-came the “natural disease” when suitably matched, which, of course, did not explain anything.
As a result of modern research along biochemical and biophysical lines certain phenomena have been brought to light, such as resistance, immunity, allergy and other forms of tissue activity and reactivity.
Much still remains to be revealed as to what really does go on in the living body in health and disease. But the possibility of a rational and more intelligible explanation of the action of the similar remedy does seem to have come nearer.
Homoeopathic treatment is a much more specific and personal matter than mere routine prescribing by label, which is based on common symptoms without consideration of individual variability in response.
Homoeopathy is not a panacea for all human ills. There are conditions which call for specific treatment, medical or surgical, perhaps with urgency. But over a very wide range of illness this branch of the healing art can offer good prospect of relief of symptoms, and also restoration of health and well- being.
Historically there is ample evidence to prove the efficacy of homoeopathic treatment in disease, both acute and chronic. The correctly chosen remedy, rightly administered, provides a reliable means of achieving maximum benefit with a minimal amount of medicament and with a minimum of concomitant risk and distress.
It has been said that an idea is the work of one mind but it takes many men and many minds to test the idea and try it out in order to prove whether it is false or true. The idea of curing likes by likes as a practical procedure in the treatment of illness took shape in the mind of one young man.
Physicians and others in many countries have been trying it out for a period of nearly two centuries. As a method of practical therapeutics homoeopathy has not been found wanting.
