I glanced at my Daily Telegraph for January 10th, 1934, page 7, and read of the “Dangers of New Drugs” by Sir W. Willcox, with a sub-title, “Risks of Death from Overdose”. Willcox speaks of an ever-lengthening list and names twenty-six such death risks of orthodox medicine, naively adding “drug addiction is not really a vice but a disease”. I ask, what is there in a name? Please remember this is orthodoxy being condemned by a titled orthodox physician.
Such warnings are not necessary with homoeopathy. If homoeopathy uttered such statements about its drugs and treatments the Law and Public Opinion would end homoeopathy in a week and somebody would probably go it jail for mal-practice or homicide. But the vested interests of orthodox medicine are protected.
Many drug diseases are discovered in patients coming to homoeopathic doctors after they have run the gamut of many orthodox practitioners. Such patients constitute the bulk of all chronic cases falling into our hands as a last chance of getting away from the disease of eternal drugging.
The strong drugs have so over-shot their mark that they have created far-reaching drug diseases, as stated by Sir William Willcox. At first many diseases are very hard of diagnosis. As a rule orthodox doctors do not trace such effects to their true cause, not being as wise as Willcox. We homoeopaths know better.
As to difficult and faulty diagnoses, I may state here that the late Sir William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine, Oxford University, has said that ” about 45 per cent. of difficult cases are wrongly diagnosed”, and further, Dr. Richard Cabot, head of Harvard University of Medicine has gone Osler 10 per cent. better, or worse, saying that ” 55 per cent. of all difficult cases are wrongly diagnosed notwithstanding all the well-known instruments of precision”.
Such wrong diagnoses have only been discovered at post-mortems which is not interesting to the late lamented, though shocking for their relatives. So after all, the homoeopaths have some grounds for prescribing on symptoms instead of doing so with a difficult diagnosis as sole guide. It is safer for the patient. An iconoclast should have a superior alternative to offer.
Whilst the orthodox doctor depends entirely on a broad diagnosis as a basis for his pet prescription for the disease-name, the homoeopath depends more on the patients own symptoms, as related to the doctor, and the more peculiar those verbal expressions of pain and discomfort are the more surely the homoeopathic attendant, professional or lay, is able to select the curative remedy quite independent of the name of the disease.
The fashionable stock remedies for the disease names called “specifics” by them are eternally changing, showing the groping minds during passing years. This change is not to be considered as advance in science. There is such a thing as bewilderment in this craze for something new and to be hoped for as better.
Homoeopathy on the other hand rests on the rock foundation of a basic law of nature, Similia. That the homoeopaths do not always cure depends on the human equation, but our law, Similia, i unchangeable and reliable. Up to a certain point it is so simple that the laity can work, and have worked, wonders in cures.
Judging by the standard works doctors are wedded to strong doses of medicine and they flirt with a hypodermic syringe aiming to make drugs act more quickly, but this method is unwise for several reasons, one of which is that the drug is placed beyond the normal safeguards of the body to be found in the mouth and stomach.
That some orthodox leaders do occasionally wake up to their medical dangers is shown by Willcoxs article. The brain is injured by their Bromides, the heart by their pain-killers and fever-breakers, and various organs of elimination are continually being damaged beyond their power of repair. If they, as a school of medicine, were all of one mind and in agreement as to the exact drugs and dosage it would be another matter and one worthy of our study, but orthodox doctors are far from being in accord in the treatment of any disease.
Reviewing rheumatism, in their hands, amongst the scores of drugs recommended by ordinary doctors one ever comes across the pain-killers given for momentary relief but which are not in any sense curative or harmless. Their Salicylates and Antipyretics hold fashionable sway, but at the same time they admit these have their damaging reactions.
Their second mistake is when they have recourse to compound mixtures. Evidently they are thrown together with some hope that if one drug does not cure perhaps some of the others may. Some drugs are added as correctives to the known dangers of certain of the others in such combinations. These shot-gun prescription are made by the profession as brain-savers to avoid the trouble of thinking the matter out to a conclusion.
But here again at least one of the leaders has voiced in no uncertain terms the danger to the patient in these words. “What is known of the action of any one drug when given alone may be totally changed in the body when combined with other drugs.” So spake brave Sir Clifford Allbutt, Regius Professor of Physics, Cambridge University, and we homoeopaths quite agree with him on this point. Such shot-gun prescriptions lead from great to greater uncertainty.
I have a book in my library which lists the very variable stock prescriptions for all diseases which are used at some twenty London Hospitals and Colleges. These are arranged for ready reference when hurriedly treating all classes of disease.
No two of these institutions agree on the same proportions of drugs to be used for any disease as classified by diagnosis, illustrating better than argument that there is much uncertainty amongst prescribers at large.
If in any disease one of these listed prescriptions be right, it follows that all the others must be wrong, yet these stock prescriptions are given out daily to thousands of sick people within the sound of Bow Bells of London town. These stock mixtures are undoubtedly dogma to their own cliques. Such ready reckoner prescribing is totally impossible with any followers of homoeopathy.
The above shows that orthodox doctors prescribe for the name of the disease, for the diagnosis, in fact, and now to prove that they use dangerously strong drugs. I copy verbatim from one of their works on my desk. “Salicylic acid is very popular for rheumatism; it is antiseptic and powerfully antipyretic (fever breaking). It is specific for acute rheumatism.
Salicylic acid as a preservative in food has been stated to be injurious for three reasons. (1) It interferes with the digestive processes. (2) After absorption it is apt injure the general health. (3) That is is an irritant and apt to injure the mucous membranes of the stomach and intestinal canal.” The laity should know of these three dangerous attributes of this specific and fashionable allopathic medicine in this disease, as this identical food preservative is found in countless prescriptions.
One more mention of orthodox methods of finding their medicines and then for our homoeopathic comparisons and differentiations., which are wilfully ignored by the allopathic school as a whole, to your loss and injury.
Some years before the War the daily press, ever at the beck and call of science in general, and Harley Street in particular. heralded a “New Cure For Rheumatism”, which was inexact in all particulars, and funnier than the average punch. Briefly, for this disease the patient was advised by Harley Street to allow several angry honey bees to sting him or her in the region of the worst pain when cure was promised.
The press was honourable enough; it was eager to help the nation and rib it of this prevalent and distressing. But the orthodox specialist had given wrong information, grotesquely so from a homoeopathic viewpoint. Thus this new cure and specific was soon scrapped and lost sight of. It failed to cure the masses though it probably accidentally cured some 3 or 4 per cent. of the sufferers, whose rheumatisms were “similar” to the drug picture.
Now the homoeopaths used this identical honey bee medicine (Apis mellifica), or the actual poison of same (Apium virus) as early as 1850, but we knew and recorded the limit of its sphere of usefulness. We found that it would cure but one particular type of rheumatism which furnished its peculiar personal symptoms. Perhaps that Harley Street man was a golfer and thought he could make a birdie by stealing a homoeopathic half-truth without honourable mention of the source of his information.
It is also quite possible that he received the tip from his country-bred housekeeper. I shall explain this valuable medicine in a moment, showing its precise and only sphere of curative action and why it will fail if not prescribed on the exact lines of Similia. I shall offer this tip free to Harley Street and all orthodox doctors, hoping that they will learn the lesson for your benefit.
In this analysis of rheumatism I will show how the patient can diagnose quite as well as any professional, and though he may not be able to prescribe on orthodox lines he can do so perfectly with homoeopathy after reading this. The peculiar verbal expressions of suffering, as uttered by the patients, point exactly to the remedy required for a cure. Note the great difference of symptoms not to be confounded, yet all are cases of rheumatism, and learn why the stock prescriptions of allopathy cannot cure when based on the common diagnosis “rheumatism”.
