To his surprise he developed fever. This caused him to wonder whether the substance in the Peruvian bark which producted fever in the healthy body were not the same as that which caused the disorders. If a drug produced in the human body something very similar to the disease to be cured, was it not legitimate to assume that the drug in question affected the organism in the particular tissues and organs that are attacked by the particular disease? Perhaps “the hair of the dog that bit you… similia similibus-which is the foundation of the homoeopathic principle of analogy.
It is supported by the so-called “fundamental law of biology,” formulated by the psychiatrist Arndt and the pharmacologist Schultz, according to which gentle stimulation rouses the vital processes, medium stimulation promotes them, strong stimulation retards them, and violent stimulation stops them altogether.
Since only very mild stimuli are supposed to help nature in her healing processes, this doctrine caused the introduction of the “homoeopathic doses” which have become proverbial, and it was this doctrine that was especially contested by academic medicine, by the allopaths. They found it difficult to agree that a substance might still be efficacious when it was so diluted that the prescription contained barely a molecule of it.
However, researches on a purely chemico-physiological basis of the most precise kind warm us to be on guard against such doubts. The ancient Greeks, when they invented the word sceptic, were thinking of people who kept their eyes open and not of those who shut their eyes to facts. One fact is that researches into the effects of a very greatly diluted solution of adrenalin have given the most surprising results.
Such a solution administered to the human bladder causes in to relax, and the effect of course grows less in proportion as the adrenalin is further diluted. When the dilution is so great that the dose contains only one five-thousandth part of a milligram the limit has been reached. Nevertheless, if the dilution is carried still further, as effect is again produced upon the bladder-but curiously enough, the reverse, and a dose containing only one ten-thousandth part of a milligram of adrenalin no longer causes the bladder to relax, but instead causes the muscle to contract.
In view of this undoubted fact, ridicule of homoeopathic doses may well be reconsidered. Those among the adherents of this doctrine who are not themselves fanatical should surely not be met with fanaticism.
Perhaps recognized medicine will have to learn the same lesson with regard to homoeopathy that it had to learn about another offshoot that is possibly also somewhat one-sided-so-called “natural healing,” which again has been better understood since the problems of the effects of stimuli have been more closely and intensively studied.
