Is Therapeutics worth anything, or is it the ultimate goal for which medical effort is always striving?. The respect of humanity for the medical profession is based upon its ability to ameliorate or cure the various ailments that affect it. In former years this respect almost bordered upon veneration. The knowledge of the physician was considered to be almost supernatural, The medicine man practically ruled the tribe. Gradually with the advancement of civilization and culture, his influence has diminished, because much medical knowledge formerly possessed by him alone is now known by the general public.
There are some things which, if they were known and appreciated by the laity, would further detract from the physicians influence.
One of these is the condition of therapeutics which remains the same chaotic collection of medicaments from which a hit or miss choice is made in the selection of one for an individual patient.
It is true that the remedies change, some come and others are deleted, for there are fashions in medicine, even if they are known as fluctuations in medical science.
For example, in place of the old galenical preparations, if you have a case of heart disease to prescribe for you, you are confronted with the bromine, metaphyllin, quabain, salyrgan and a number of other modern remedies, but they are heart remedies with no special indications of adaptability to your patients case. It is a question which one to take,, so anyone is tried and if unsuccessful another follows.
This is the method employed since the time of Hippocrates, and all the advancement in medical science has not developed a method in therapeutics whereby drugs can be differentiated so that one can be selected that is suitable to an individual. The main reason for this is, that all through the history of therapeutics, the physicians knowledge of drug action has been confined to the action of drugs on the lower animals, such as frogs, rabbits, cats and dogs. There has been almost no knowledge (the exception being some poisoning cases) of the action of a drug upon a human being before it is given to a sick human being.
When this fact is brought to the attention of the laity it will still further detract from the estimation of the physicians knowledge and ability.
The old saying, “there is an exception to every rule,” applies to all that has been said, for there is a method by which you can select a drug to suit your individual case, and it involves knowledge of the action of a drug upon the human being, before it is given to a sick human being. This method is known as homoeopathy and a determined effort is being made to bring it to the attention of the public.
In the simplest terms, homoeopathy may be stated as follows: Almost 150 years ago Samuel Hahnemann, a poor German physician, who was also a brilliant linguist, to help his finances was engaged in translating a Scotch work on materia medica. When he came to Peruvian bark (from which quinine is made) he was struck with the fact that many of the healthy, robust men who were engaged in the collection of this bark, were taken sick with symptoms similar to those of intermittent fever, viz., chill, fever and sweat at intermittent periods.
Hahnemann thought this may be the reason that bark is the curative agent for this fever, and he extended his theory to account for the action of drugs in other diseases. In order to do this satisfactorily, he selected a certain number of healthy people to whom he gave a drug and carefully noted its action. This was called proving the drug. The provings were collected and compared, and when a patient appeared whose condition was similar to those produced by a drug in its proving, that drug was selected and given to the patient.
How was the selection made? In the first place its action upon the lower animals had probably been obtained, and it was known to have acted upon some organ or tissue of the frog or rabbit, etc., but this was insufficient as a number of other remedies act upon the same organs or tissues. The main reliance was upon the provings, for here only were the psychic or subjective symptoms to be found which distinguished the action of one remedy from another, just as in health they distinguish one person from another.
To illustrate, other things being equal, a patient with a pain running down the arm which was temporarily relieved by heat, might require arsenic while another with a similar pain that was made worse by heat but relieved by cold might respond to pulsatilla. Sensations of the heart or other parts of being tightly bound, etc. could not be expressed by the lower animals if they had been experienced by them.
This method of using drugs forms the exception to all former methods in therapeutics. It is frequently expressed by the formula Similia similibus curentur and it is the only means by which therapeutics can be rescued from its state of empiricism and placed upon a permanent basis.
So-called scientific physicians have long mixed several drugs in one prescription. They cannot tell how or why the prescription acted; they simply knew that it did act.
Can the Chinese Emperor be blamed who sent for twenty doctors and mixed their twenty prescriptions for his use?.
We have even heard of some so-called homoeopathic physicians who have mixed three or more homoeopathic remedies into a tablet. They do not know how or why the tablet acted, they simply know that it did act. They could have said the same had they prescribed Schencks Pulmonic Syrup, or Ayers Cherry Pectoral, and Jaynes Expectorant.
Such practitioners may be expert diagnosticians, pathologists, etc., but their influence on therapeutics is harmful as they are simply letting it remain as it has been through the ages, a chaotic mass respondent only to empiricism.
