Shall I prescribe on the basis of the diagnosis ?.
Shall I prescribe according to the totality of symptoms ? dominant factor, ranking it as a single objective symptom; the other conclusion depends for guidance upon the diagnosis and, therefore, necessarily excludes symptoms to greater or less extent.
A patient once said to his physician, “I dont care about anything in medicine but diagnosis. I want a doctor who can tell me what is the matter. Thats all there is to it.” This man had never been very ill in his life, but he was fond of good round names of diseases. A few years later he was delayed is some important engineering on a large contract, by the combination of gout and sciatica. The consultant agreed with the attending physician in his diagnosis, and cheerfully asked the patient if the decision was satisfactory to him. “No!” he shouted, “what I want is relief!”.
Hahnemanns theory of chronic diseases has given us remedies which can claim to have brought about many cures (of cancers and malignant diseases). —ANTON NEBEL, M.D.
We approach our problems of pathology, through the knowledge of the power of remedies to construct, not through their power to destroy. Massive doses of drugs or even small doses of them administered on the antipathic or the heteropathic principle bear no resemblance whatever in their mission to the homoeopathic simillimum. The statistics of morality from heart disease, pneumonia, cancer, and tuberculosis leave no doubt in the mind as to the futility of a false approach.
Homoeopathy is mercifully prepared to control the inroads of disease from earliest inception. Provings illustrate the precise needs of the patient from the very beginnings of his disturbed health, when vitality gives delicate warnings of what is taking place.
This is most reassuring to the clinician, who is able to recognize the true correspondence between the symptoms belonging to the patient and those belonging to the remedy; for this correspondence is the most wonderful thing in all medicine. It is the one thing we are permitted to recognize and profit by without the self-imposed task–if, indeed, it were not arrogance–to solve its mystery and so give our mistaken exegesis primary place. Rather, we are permitted to watch that wonderful reaction of the organism back to health by an immutable law.
No real cure can take place without a strict particular treatment (individualization) of each case of disease.
–HAHNEMANN.
Requirements of science, art, and practical management having been met as completely as recognized, there still remains a fourth sense, so speak, which must be satisfied. It is the right spirit that must meet the problem. It is what raises a painter artist above the mediocre and gives him a distinction that insures superiority. And where is the quality of superiority more in demand than in the healing art !.
The principles taught by Hahnemann and Hering, and in later times by Dunham and Farrington, are as applicable now as they were when first promulgated and practiced.
—CHARLES MOHR, M.D.
Homoeopathy has suffered no more and no less from misapprehension than other matters of human importance. Indeed, considering the good it has wrought, it has doubtless met with more favor from all classes of people than the average popular consideration of any other topics.
At its introduction it was welcomed as a refuge from the objectionable features of dominating medicine, much as it is now, though it had not then to combat multifarious doctrines of imposed immunity, anaphylaxis, vaccine and serum treatment, crude preventative medicine, so-called, and various other movements and methods mistermed medical progress. In fact, its early history indicates there were more open minds and reasonable thinkers to examine and approve homoeopathy than could be expected, considering its novelty in all respects when compared with prevalent practice of recognized medicine.
In fact, there were perhaps more thinkers then than there are today. With all our so- called advance in the arts and sciences, the number of real thinkers is by no means large. Most men prefer not to think. Amusement is what is wanted. And so at the present time what is not understood at all or measured in any way is more readily accepted because some one else does the thinking and the deciding. Bodies are submitted for mutilation of organs, or their extirpation, for the introduction of virus that in many cases is warranted to prevent future illness from disease to which the subject may never be exposed.
And so on ad infinitum. And so with all this brilliant array of glamorous untruth the mildness and comfort of homoeopathy makes no particular appeal in comparison. However, this is only one and the worst side of the truthful picture. There are families, generation of which have kept close to homoeopathy not only with loyalty and with appreciation, but also with a keen knowledge of it to their own interest and advantage.
The inquiry seems to be entirely pertinent as to what takes place eventually when a condition is wrongly treated. It is possible to relieve a local discomfort, sometimes quickly, and at the same time implant wrong tendencies that later crop out into serious disturbance. It is not only necessary to determine what agent will give relief, but also what agent will leave no bad after-effects. It may be safely said that the majority of miscalled cures by wrong methods culminate in disorder worse than the initial one, and this ought to teach anybody that prescribing must be done on the highest and best principle, never experimentally or hit-or-miss.
