DRUG PROVING
THE FOUNDATION OF THE SCIENCE AND ART OF HOMOEOPATHY
The first and succeeding symptoms of departure from normal health by the exhibition of a single potion of the remedy to be proved will be a guide for the administration of that remedy in a case that has developed from those early initial symptoms.
Hahnemann states in his Organon, concerning drugs: “In order to perform a cure, it is necessary that drugs should possess the power of producing in the human body an artificial disease most similar to that which is to be cured”.
–F. A. BOERICKE, M.D.
Modern medicine has a very wide and a very definite aim. This aim is to understand fully the causes of disease, the exact vital disturbance, and the precise effects of therapeutic agents.
But the mystery of medicine is real, though it has been exaggerated. No extent of laboratory technique and demonstration can do away with a certain mystery that attaches itself to vital processes. Therefore medicine will remain forever an art. The art is practiced in the scientific spirit.
We take to the laboratory for examination and study many specimens obtained from the patient himself. The analysis may tell all there is to know about his material condition. Whereupon a diagnosis is established, and the aetiology confirmed, Perhaps a curative agent is revealed, and duly accepted.
Then there is a class of cases in which the routine is not as productive. There are patients who have had this attention repeated at different times for as many different attacks of illness. In a sense ill health has been cumulative. Now one diagnostic appellation will not suffice. It is a chronic case, and there are many diagnoses, whatever may have been the first or later aetiology. There has been a succession or a sequence of disturbances here and there throughout the organism (loosely speaking) and the tissues affected have not returned to the normal.
Still another class of cases seeks cure. This third class is a very large one. These patients are not only afflicted with bodily and material ailments that may be discussed in laboratory terms; they have multiple ills that seem to belong to an immaterial cause. Just as the neurasthenic suffers from a multitude of distresses representing no tangible morbid basis, so these sufferers are manifestly ill of such distuned, latent, but inherent forces, that the coarser methods of diagnosis are inadequate.
Without doubt the greatest factor against success in these cases is failure to grasp the true aetiology. Indeed it is impossible to grasp it until it is dug for, and often tiresome digging is unrewarded. Instead of the nugget, nothing but debris.
One significant reason for this is that the worst chronic cases have a history, either covered or confessed, of protracted drugging. It has been the patent medicine or the acceptable prescription depended on and so repeated without authority, or a favorite “tonic” that has been consumed ad libitum.
Knowledge of drug effects, tonic, tolerated, and reactionary, informs us of the results to be expected from such habits. Furthermore, we know in detail of a finer-line syndrome manifested by sensitive patients who are peculiarly susceptible to a given medicine. Attention is being repeatedly called to the untoward effects of drugs on sensitive organisms, and the conclusion advanced that such are due to personal idiosyncrasy. If so, are such human beings more numerous than formerly ? And, if so, why ?.
The local irritating effect of standard solutions of phenol and mercuric chloride, systematic poisoning from the use of hair washes, throat washes, and skin lotions, dermatitis from chloral and the bromides, the diarrhoeas of ferrum, and the ear and eye disorders from quinine are a few random illustrations of crude causation which are recognized sometimes. When they occur unrecognized or when, in fact, other subtler effects of the drug persist unseen, the consequences are far more disastrous. As an instance, there are babies who are reared on cathartics; they develop into chronic adult patients. In these circumstances the exact cause of a condition may appear inscrutable.
But ever to be reckoned with is the fact that all medicinal substances–and their number is legion–will produce effects when introduced into the body. When they are unwisely administered the result is disorder. If repeatedly continued disease results.
Drugs can be administered properly and safely only on the basis of initial, primary, cumulative, and chronic action. The toxic action may be known, but it is not sufficient. Sudden death is only one kind of death. There are many other kinds. And the cause are none the less sure because unknown. The newly discovered forms of radiant energy are just as destructive in the hands of the tyro as they are useful under the control of him sufficiently learned and skilled in their employment.
The mixed and complicated cases of sickness that present themselves at hospital clinics and to the general practitioner or the specialists are due in large proportion to the chronic impress of one or more drugs improperly exhibited or intemperately used. This state of affairs is the more serious for the reason that its origin is not always obvious at first, neither can it be discovered without patient and persistent analysis. All the principles of homoeopathy offer emancipation from such conditions.
The great and distinguishing characteristic of Hahnemann was that he was a marvellous observer; and just as we excel in observing we shall become successful practitioners.
–A. P. BOWIE, M.D.
Homoeopathy deals with the human organism as if it were in itself exactly what it is, the most perfect healing laboratory in the world. It esteems this laboratory as one in which no abuses may be tolerated, no experiments of hazard condoned. This laboratory that invites and responds to homoeopathy offers to the ear of science the accumulated results of its learning and its art as measured in the scale of human vitality and function. The laboratory of homoeopathy offers to medicine a stable means of determining remedial values.
Preventive medicine worthy a name is exact homoeopathy at the very first sign of disorder. So-called preventive medicine that depends on hygiene and sanitation is hardly an approach to its title as demanded by medical science and practice.
The mother who rears her children well and sees that their faces, hands, and bodies are kept clean has made no tax on medical science; nor is medical science the sole creditor in the matter of sanitation, proper systems of water and milk supply, and all the cleanly habits of the public incumbent on ordinary civilization. These things belong naturally to other departments of economics. They are not medicine at all. They do remind medicine that the sick of all stages still await healing. There has been altogether too much shirking by medicine of her scientific duty to heal the sick.
Our remedies are constant in their work in the provings; they repeatedly produce their own pathogenesis; they in turn remove only their own kind; no science is more accurate nor more constant.
—ALFRED PULFORD, M.D.
To use animals (for provings) will not accomplish the objects, for drugs act differently upon animals and mankind.
—E. B. NASH, M.D.
Students of homoeopathy must learn that drug-proving is a science. As such its mission and end is not to produce cases of nephritis, sarcoma or leprosy. The science of drug proving must be conducted by scientists of broader view. It is not our arbitrarily bestowed names of disorders that we want to live up to; it is rather to determine and record exactly the effect of a medicine on the whole organism or single individual provers.
It is not majorities that count in science and neither is it the majority of provers that decides the values of a medicinal substance. The one person most susceptible to the medicine may exhibit delicate reactions that belong to that particular remedy which will become of inestimable value in future prescribing. So delicate and important are the human responses to what affect the whole system.
Human beings are endowed with qualities and functions that differ often widely as between individuals. Personal characteristics go a long way toward making society interesting, brilliant, and progressive in the important progressions in and elements of life. And these characteristics are always to be reckoned with when the health of the individual is under examination, and when disorder of any kind has become apparent in the physical organism. For no trait of the system, physical, nervous, or mental is to be overlooked or slighted in the examination of the patient.
No greater mark of distinction can be placed upon the escutcheon of Hahnemann than the number of cures effected of chronic disease by his system of medicine, which for centuries on centuries have been considered perfectly incurable.
—THOMAS SKINNER, M.D.
When, after years of investigation, Hahnemann described the chronic disease forces, he stated broadly and most comprehensively the problems of heredity and diathesis. His teaching as to the profoundly serious phases of chronic ill health, and their curability under proper medicine, completely refuses the general assumption today of the incurability of patients afflicted with chronic disease, conception of what should be learned of the patient in any illness as outlined in his scheme is invaluable.
