The prescriber should not only ask what is eaten and drunk. He should ascertain the way in which the food is cooked. Overlong cooking of vegetables and stews destroys the vitamins. Simmering for countless hours will make the food more palatable, but will ruin it. The addition of soda or bicarbonate of soda to the water in which vegetables are cooked destroys the vitamins.
That this is almost everybodys trouble is shown by the enormous quantities of pills that are swallowed. Only recently one dispensing company gave in its yearly report a glowing story of its increased sales and local chemists confirm the opinion that pills and other aids to relieve constipation are in constant demand. Furthermore, every practitioner is struck with the number of patients who complain of the necessity of taking purgatives.
Burnett again used it frequently in case of weakness and bruised feeling in the muscles after an attack of gout. Now to go back to the statement that Bellis as a remedial agent in tumours caused by blows or knocks. Some may deny that tumours are caused by blows, but I have come across several cases. I remember a doctor friends of mine, who knocked his knee inadvertently against an open drawer of his desk.
Phosphorus, one of our greatest chest remedies, is very frequently needed to simplify and clear up a case of pneumonia. It is especially useful in the hepatization stage. When Phosphorus is indicated there is a great deal of pain in the chest, weakness, constriction, tightness, a tight cough ; and the cough is worse from lying on the lift side. The patient holds the chest with his hands during the cough as in Bryonia.
To sum up, Rhus is a chilly medicine. The patient wants to be warm. He is worse when he begins to move and better when he has warmed up his stiff muscles and joints with exercise. Restlessness is the natural result of this condition. A stiff rheumatic patient very sensitive to change of weather and damp stormy weather. A great skin remedy in a Rhus patient.
This is Homoeopathy and it embraces the only curative law thus far known in medicine. Its principals cannot be blotted out ; they may be exploited under another name. Still these same principles constitute the only curative measures known outside of the homoeopathic remedies. I refer to the vaccines, serum and allergic remedies which are homoeopathic in principle whether they go under that name or not.
When he came to me he looked extremely frail, and he had been very depressed by the fact that an attempt to escape the rigour of the English winter had been a failure, because on his return form Jamaica he had been attacked by influenza, which had left him very weak. He loved England, loved his country place, loved shooting, and did not like to go abroad.
Pulsatilla was given at once. She was 49 years of age, born in India. As a baby her mother gave quinine and brandy as a prophylactic for malaria. At 8 years of age she commenced to vomit about every eight or nine days, and been subject to this for 41 years. When she came to me her case was chronic, having to take to her bed for one day per week. The vomit was mainly also neuritis in the right hip.