The result of this intensive campaign has been that the old-established simple drugs, which have proved their value for thousands of years, have been abandoned for the latest and the most speculative, if not the most dangerous, treatments. A doctor who would prescribe plain sulphur, vegetable charcoal or a decoction of herbs would be considered a hopeless back number. The result has been that drugs are foisted on unfortunate patients, which have little or no value or are dangerous, and their use is abandoned after a few years when other worthless drugs are pressed upon doctors and patients.
Doctors have become distributing agents for the great drug houses and agents for the laboratories. Instead of treating a patient according to commonsense indications, a doctor sends the sick persons secretions and excretions etc. to the laboratory, and he is then told what to inject by an individual who has no medical experience and no knowledge of treatment. The result is deplorable. The most faulty and the most dangerous treatments are frequently given because they were recommended by a laboratory man.
Very frequently the weird disease discovered by laboratory tests has no existence in fact. I was consulted by a lady whose doctor had sent her to Ruthven Castle for a scientific diagnosis. She was detained three weeks, her bill came to L97, and she handed me a sheaf of X-ray pictures, reports and other documents. I asked her whether her diet had been enquired into. The answer was No.
According to Ruthven castle she was suffering from an extremely rare disease of the pancreas. As she took every day from 12-15 cups of tea “as blank as ink and as hot as hell” with six lumps of sugar in each cup, I forbade her taking boiling hot strong tea, put her on a diet, and there was rapid improvement.
Doctors make a great mistake in trying to diagnose textbook diseases in all their patients. Named diseases exist chiefly in the textbooks. Curiously enough, all of us die of some disease or other. In reality, most of us die of faulty living, of eating too much or too little, of eating the wrong things, of smoking too much, etc. Probably not a few of us die of faulty treatments.
May I most respectfully quote the saying of the great Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, who wrote “The sick man dies of his doctor”? Sydenham was not beloved by his contemporaries, because he was a great pioneer and was uncomfortably outspoken.
People do not die of diseases, but of faulty living in the majority of cases. You may die of dirt or of too many baths, too many cigars or too much condiment. A man with incurable heart disease came to me, and I had to explain to him: “You do not suffer from such and such a heart disease, but from too much mustard.” He took a tablespoonful of mustard a day. I forbade mustard and he recovered.
Scientific treatments are becoming more and more complicated. Teams of specialists are needed to diagnose a disease and to treat it. Scientific treatment means impersonal treatment, and it means treatment largely by laboratory men with laboratory products, with injections of which patients, being guided by a healthy instinct, have a horror. Their instinct tells them that these so-called scientific treatments are risky and avoidable, and that there ought to be a simple way of ascertaining their trouble and of treating it.
Hence ever-increasing numbers turn to laymen who endeavour to treat their cases with gentle means, such as diet, herbs, fasting, manipulation, etc. and they have often excellent results. Needless to say, many of the lay healers are incompetent, and I am glad that Sir Ernest Graham- Little has given us some glaring examples.
The fact that a doctor has passed his examinations and has been duly registered does by no means guarantee his ability to cure. Passing examinations is a very different thing from curing sick people. The former requires chiefly a good memory. The latter needs judgment and inborn qualifications. A healer, like a musician, a painter, a sculptor, is born not made. Hippocrates wrote that no one can become a good doctor unless he loves the art of healing and loves mankind.
As I said before, modern medicine is dominated by the surgeon and by the laboratory man. The people at large have a horror of surgery and injections. Many people feel, when going to a doctor, like animals who are taken to the vivisector. Yet there is a gentle, sure and extremely efficient art of healing which unfortunately is disdained by orthodox medicine. Homoeopathy was created about a hundred and fifty years ago by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, and it has been practised ever since by thousands of doctors who have passed all the orthodox examinations.
Homoeopathy is based on the principle that like cures like, that a drug in an infinitely small dose has the opposite effect of the same drug in a large dose. Opium in large doses produces drowsiness and constipation. In homoeopathic doses it is given in coma and for the most obstinate constipation. Ipecacuanha in large doses produces vomiting. In very small homoeopathic doses produces vomiting. In very small homoeopathic doses it cures that kind of nausea and vomiting which is accompanied by a clean tongue. Corrosive sublimate in large quantities for bleeding from the kidneys.
Strong coffee produces over-activity of the brain, can often be cured with coffee in doses of a millionth or a decillionth of a grain, and I have done so in many cases. A wealthy woman came to me in despair. By doctors orders she had taken Veronal in increasing doses for years, and it did not act any longer. As her trouble was due to over-activity of the brain, I prescribed for her Coffea tosta in infinitely small doses. After a week she wrote to me: “I have had the best nights I have had for years, but I am terrified. Your medicine is far more powerful than Veronal, so I have left it off”.
Thousands of people not only have a horror of the surgeons knife, subcutaneous injections and the use of questionable animal products, but they have a similar horror of animal experiments. This instinctive dislike is as much of a mystery to the hard- boiled medical man as is the disapproval of consumption of human flesh to the average cannibal. Animal experiments are objected to by thousands of people not only because of the cruelty involved, but also because of their unreliability and inconclusiveness.
Nowadays, it is considered scientific to make certain experiments on animals, and if animals react favourably identical experiments are made on human beings. This proceeding is not scientific and unsound, because rats, guinea-pigs and other animals react differently from human beings. The only truly scientific tests applicable to men consist in experiments made on human beings.
The superstructure of modern orthodox medicine is reared on the unsound basis of animal experimentation. Homoeopathy has afar sounder basis. It is based exclusively on experiments made on human beings, mainly doctors and medical students, male and female. One can produce intense suffering, illness and death in laboratory animals, but laboratory animals cannot tell us anything of the more delicate symptoms produced on them by these experiments.
There was a time when orthodox medicine followed a better way, when doctors experiments on themselves, and the most wonderful and the most tragic example of this experimentation was furnished by the man who is honoured every year by this society, the great John Hunter himself.
He wished to study the mysterious disease of syphilis, inoculated himself with syphilis, and died a horrible death after years of suffering. The greatness of Hunter was recognized only after his death. During his life, he was treated as a self-advertising quack. I am quite sure if Hunter were alive now he would highly approve of homoeopathy.
I contend that the Lay Cult of Health, far from having become injurious, is necessary for the people who do not wish to be injected, operated upon without need, and treated by a dehumanized medicine. The Lay Cult of Health is necessary for the doctors who, if the present methods continue, will lose their patients to lay healers. I consider that medicine has lost its way, and that at no time medicine has stood as low as it does now when it pretends to be scientific but when in reality it has become the tool of the laboratories, of the great drug houses and of the surgeons”.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.