Psora


Psora does not comprehend all non-venereal chronic sickness. It does not include occupational, deficiency, medicinal, unhygienic disturbances produced by their own peculiar causes….


The theory of psora grew out of Hahnemann’s efforts to understand and cure the tedious diseases common to humanity by examining humanity’s common experiences in the light of unprejudiced observation. Nothing was assumed. A multitude of common facts, regarding life, health and disease, were observed and tabulated relating to the experience of many chronically sick persons. Guided by these facts an understanding of chronic sickness was gained and a method of cure for chronic sickness was discovered.

The skin, in addition to being a protective covering for the body, is an external vital excretory organ. It participates, in a way not fully understood, in the vital activities of the internal organs. Its health is conditioned on the health of the internal organism. In turn the health of the organism is influenced by the state of function of the skin. A healthy skin on an unhealthy organism is inconceivable. And an unkept infected skin menaces the health of the organism. The skin is the only vital organ over which immediate care and attention can be exercised.

Infection may gain entrance to the internal organism through skin abrasions. And that is the route by which chronic sickness invades the organism. Chronic sickness comes to the skin to be eliminated in eruptions. Any interference with these eruptions interrupts the progress of the cure. A permanent suppression of the eruptions affects the internal organism with a permanent internal malady. Destroying the local manifestation does not drive the disease in, but does compel the disease to develop internal symptoms and manifestations. A malady so manifesting itself is incurable till the symptoms and manifestations itself is incurable till the symptoms and manifestations can again become local. This can be accomplished only by homoeopathic art, by the restoration of the eruption to its place on the skin. This fact gives rise to the formula “Disease gets well from within out.” Without the restoration of its primary lesion is no chronic sickness ever healed.

The primary lesion of psora is an itching eruption. Itch is a primary skin pathology and was at the time of the development of the theory of psora a common human experience and the common treatment of it was suppressive.

Besides his own observation of instances of internal diseased states following the suppression of the itch eruption Hahnemann reports recorded observations of one hundred different doctors. These doctors also note that the internal disease was healed, only if the eruptions were restored to their place of the skin.

Is it possible that one hundred doctors were mistaken? Hundreds of doctors in the past one hundred years have made similar observations. The discovery of the itch mite, as the exciting cause of itch, occasioned opposition to the theory of psora, but never discredited it in the minds of those who had employed their knowledge of psora to cure chronic sickness. One of the tragedies of science is the destruction of an old theory by a new fact but the newer fact that the mosquito carries malaria and the testes fly carries sleeping sickness may yet lend credence to the idea that the itch mite carries a chronic miasm. Itch is an experience from which the race has escaped only through improved conditions of living. But the race has not yet recovered from the consequences of bad conditions of living through thousands of generations. Moreover the principles of sickness applied to psora can be observed operating in any acute disease having an eruption as a part of its symptom complex.

Whatever criticism may be launched against the theory of psora, the remedy psorinum should silence when it is used strictly in accordance with the law of cure. Homoeopathy has always flung out its challenge, “Test its principles and its methods and publish the failures.”

Psora does not comprehend all non-venereal chronic sickness. It does not include occupational, deficiency, medicinal, unhygienic disturbances produced by their own peculiar causes. Psora is in a class by itself just as is syphilis. Psora sets up a condition of suboxidation inducing what is called the carbo-nitrogenoid state, a metabolism in which elimination is deficient. It perverts organ function made manifest in a multitude of symptoms present in those tedious states of sickness whose name is legion and whose cure can be accomplished by the restoration of eruptions that have been suppressed in millions of individuals through countless generations.

CA Baldwin
CA Baldwin