How difficult it is to find the simillimum for a certain disease. This has been the experience of every homoeopathic physician, and is especially true when we deal with an old chronic illness which has been through all the branches of scientific medicine, treated with many different remedies and methods–or maltreated.
Such patients often confront us with the Latin name of their trouble, and a dissertation on pathologic-anatomic knowledge as if they were going to pass their state board examination. This is often a hard nut to crack.
In examining our materia medica or a symptom codex, which are absolutely necessary for consultation, we run across a string of symptoms which need sifting. We especially find graduations which one can not distinguish in concrete cases.
That one can differentiate between roaring, singing, whistling, thundering, etc., in head noises, is self evident, and it is unquestionable that certain remedies cause a sharply defined category of such sounds, e.g. that one rumbles, the other tinkles, etc. This is easily explained according to which part of the inner ear or central nervous system receives the action from the remedy being proved.
In Jahrs Symptoms Codex we find: rumbling as from water. I do not understand this, the rumbling sometimes created in water pipes when under high pressure has nothing specific, and yet, only Nitric acid, has this symptom and no other kind, for which perhaps a dozen or more remedies are classified. Millefolium causes “a noise as from a bat” in the ear. Under rushing and buzzing we do find these same remedies. In all there are 77 varieties of ear noises. I do not deny that there are that many, but no two human beings use the same designation for what they hear. If such absurdities of our materia medica are not deleted, it will be difficult to convince a person of the kernel of our art.
However, I will not condemn the large number of subjective symptoms, which may-look ridiculous and worthless at first. In the choice of a remedy we must attach value to general symptoms; they undoubtedly give an important hint, which is a great help especially in chronic diseases. The patients moods are surely a result of his bodily condition, and they vary according to which organ is disturbed. Since we do not know too much as to which organ is responsible for certain mental symptoms, we must be satisfied with the symptoms presented and accept them as expressions of, to us, unidentified causes.
They are valuable to us when we know a remedy which in the proving has produced a similar state. I do not consider our conclusions too bold when we presuppose in both instances that the same organ disturbance has caused the same symptoms. Fallacious reasoning is, of course, possible, hence we must take into consideration the other action spheres and symptoms of the remedy for a correct remedy choice. We limit the recommendation of a certain symptom as characteristic for the choice of a medicine by demanding that other symptoms also are found in this remedy, and then that symptom is indicative.
That is why characteristic symptoms are so valuable for remedy choice. It is only to be deplored that so many of them are scattered in our literature and not sufficiently sifted. Many a characteristicum owes its recommendation only to a single observation where certainly the remedy thus indicated cured promptly. But who warrants that even that symptom was the characteristicum? Perhaps it was only a side issue, and the correct remedy chosen on something entirely different.
Characteristics must have proved themselves as such in numerous instances in order to become universally recognized.
That many symptoms strike us as absurd and ridiculous should not keep us from considering them as long as they are constant proving symptoms. When a remedy under proving always produces certain symptoms, ideas, thoughts, moods, then unquestionably that points to very settled actions of it on definite organs or organ parts.
While examining our patients we often hear related subjective observations with such precision and clarity, that we like to find a remedy which has that “nonsense” in its proving. I have often looked in our materia medica for a certain subjective symptom of which the chronically sick complained in a vivid and well marked manner–not based on hysteria–and not found it under the millions of registered symptoms. Often such an expression of disease can point unmistakably to the simillimum. Permit me to report a medical history briefly which DR. AMEKE related to me.
While practicing in Wurzburg he treated a boy for pneumonia which had become chronic. Numerous physicians had taken care of him unsuccessfully and so did Dr. Ameke. No remedy seemed to help, and to the mother he confirmed the unfavorable prognosis given by the other physicians. One day the mother said that perhaps all was futile, but could nothing be done for that awful soapy taste of which the boy complained.
Ameke gave Iodum. He heard nothing further about the patient for a long time (he lived far away) until the mother after some months showed up in the office regarding some other trouble. Ameke inquired about her son, expecting to hear he had succumbed to his sickness. But the mother said: “Yes doctor, that last medicine cured him, and now he is well and happy, attending school.”.
My deceased father was led to Thuja through the symptom: “PERSPIRING OF UNCOVERED PARTS,” and thereby cured a case of VOLVULUS which already had fecal vomiting. Without questions we need the subjective as well as objective symptoms for successful therapy. Since animal experimentations give us only the latter, and those only from toxic doses, rarely from small doses even when given for a long time, they are of little value for us.
At the most such experiments can give us a hint as to grouping related remedies which act predominantly on certain organs. But for differential remedy diagnosis we absolutely need precise subjective information about the how of the action, the associated conditions and secondary actions. Thus we always have to resort to “symptom covering.”.
Naturally those symptoms are the most valuable which have been made more precise by experience, or which have proved a strict action sphere. Symptoms are undoubtedly always the expression of certain pathological conditions; the “why” which science has generally failed to explain. When a rheumatic pain, not prominent by location nor character, is one time relieved by motion, the next aggravated by motion, that is a condition which I do not think has been explained physiologically.
But we homoeopathists know, that in the first case Bryonia is indicated, in the other Rhus toxicodendron IF OTHER SYMPTOMS DO NOT DEMAND A DIFFERENT REMEDY. When at one time moist air and cloudy weather relieves, the next time the opposite: warm dry air with sunshine help, then we recognize the fact that we have met these conditions not once, but innumerable times. To which anatomical- pathological differences of diseased organs this is due, we do not know, the scientific exponents have not yet had time or perhaps have not found it possible to explain. We have to be satisfied with “symptom covering” in order to help the poor sufferer, and we know the indicated remedies.
If we have been accused of acting as automations, then we can conditionally admit our guilt, we are only human, and that which has been found reliable a hundred times, may not leave us in the lurch. And if we are sneered at as “symptom coverers” that does not trouble us. Explain to us the symptoms in their pathologic and physiologic peculiarity, and we shall apply different names to these phenomena of nature.
