SOME EMERGENCIES OF GENERAL PRACTICE
Reproduced from The British Homoeopathic journal, March 1946.
It should be seem that for most of us life comes in phases. For our generation there was the period before the First World War, then the phase of the war, followed by the period between the wars, and then the phase of the second world War. These are common to all but there are also phases peculiar to each of us. I am now looking back over the period when I was actively engaged in the work of the Hospital and the teaching carried on there. Thinking of my early days and the difficulties then confronting me I wondered if in any way I could help those starting out on the same road. As a result, I am tempted to offer you this paper on some of the emergencies confronting the beginner in homoeopathic general practice.
I think emergencies are one of one’s greatest difficulties when beginning to practice Homoeopathy. In an acute emergency one has to do something immediately; we cannot spend time hunting for a drug.
All these emergency cases fall roughly into two main groups- the patient who is dying, and the patient who is in great pain. You sometimes get the two combined. there is a third problem-Is the case medical or surgical?-and that is always at the back of one’s mind. Here it is your general medical skill that comes in; in the other two types it is a question of homoeopathic knowledge. So it is the dangerous case and the case of acute pain that I want to consider here.
In the first instance you will find that the matching of acute pain is much the more difficult; the cases of acute danger are much easier to tackle. The dangerous cases usually resolve themselves into a question of cardiac failure in one form or another.
I think from the homoeopathic standpoint one can tackle these cases of incipient cardiac failure very satisfactorily.
The simplest way to group the dangerous cases from a drug point of view is to look on look on them under three headings: I. the cases with acute cardiac failure; 2, the case in which there is a gradual cardiac failure with a tendency to dilation; and 3, the case of acute cardiac attack of the anginous type.
He wrote a number of books: Children's Types, Digestive Drugs, Pneumonias
Douglas Borland died November 29, 1960.