A comment made at that time was this: “Any man who can talk like that knows no more about Homoeopathy than a praying parrot knows about theology.” That was uttered in heat, but quite calm I quote it now as a very just comment.
Another quotation: we had in the London Homoeopathic Hospital a doctor trained in Germany, knowing nothing about Homoeopathy. He came here as resident, and while he was here he was called on by a homoeopathic physician who also was trained in Germany, and the visitor said to the resident, “You know, it is a pity that London teaches the high potencies,” and following on that he invited him to attend a series of lectures elsewhere. Well, the gentlest thing to say about that is this, that the poor devil was educated in Germany!.
What do we mean by low potency and high potency? By low potency do we mean the decimals, and by high potency the centesimals? If you make that distinction then there are going to be discussions about high high potencies and low low potencies, and no end of it. On what indications do you select a low potency or a high potency? And there, ladies and gentlemen, I think the right answer is in a quotation from memory from our Presidents Inaugural Address:.
“If the patient does not present very full indications for the remedy that is used, the remedy will be more effective in low potency than in high”.
My own stud of this question has brought this conclusion: if a remedy is given in high potency to patient who has no indications for that remedy, the dose does nothing at all; but if your patient presents rich indications for the remedy and that remedy is given in material dose or in low potency, the patient will suffer aggravation of his symptoms such as to make him ungrateful and distrustful.
DISCUSSION.
Dr. C. E. WHEELER said that the questions could be fairly succinctly answered. Potency was the result of a process through which any substance could be put. It could be carried through various stages. Power he took to be the quality which was, they imagined, enhanced, if not altogether developed by the process of potentization. As regards high and low, he could well remember when 30 and downwards was regarded as a low potency. Now 12 and downwards would be rather thought of as low, and 30 as the beginning of what might be called high. Hahnemann satisfied himself of the truth of Homoeopathy on material, if small doses.
For the first ten years of his practice he was giving such doses, and he did not discover the meaning of potentization until he had practised Homoeopathy roughly for that time and had made his first communication on the subject. He thought that Dr. Tyler did show him a quotation indicating that Hahnemann was aware that followers of his had carried potentization beyond 30, though he himself thought 30 was the best potency. There was no indication that he himself used potencies beyond that. He was in the habit of using 30 as his habitual one.
With regard to the other potencies, he had read somewhere in one of the Lives of Hahnemann that his medicine case after his death did contain some drugs in potencies other than 30. That not in the least improbable. After all, he introduced that idea of the plus potency at the very end of his life, and was always experimenting.
On the selection of potencies, he himself had given up thinking in terms of high and low. For him there was for every case an optimum potency, if he could find it, just as there was an optimum drug. He did not believe that it was always high or always low. If one stared with the idea that there was an optimum potency if one could find it, one would have a freer mind.
As for the first choice, according to his own instinct, the more of an end result the case was and the more one had something approximating or more than approximating to tissue change. the more inclined he was to think that low potencies would do better than high. But there were endless exceptions to that rule, and a good deal depended on the sensitiveness of the patient. Certainly with a very thick skinned person, a person rather unresponsive, one could go as high as one pleased. A vast amount of experiment was required before a principle could be laid down in any dogmatic way governing high or low. If patients seemed to respond particularly well to a certain range the doctor was inclined to begin with that the next time.
He himself believed, as a second rule, that what he called dilution in time was more important than dilution in space, and the old low potencies would have done better even in chronic diseases if they had been given the same chance in time as the potency dose. One of the most remarkable cures of a chronic disease that he had seen of recent years not one of his own cases was effected in nine months by four doses of Sulphur in the third potencies.
It was ended with a 30. It so happened that that particular potency had tuned in rightly to that patients needs and was for her the optimum or pretty near to it. If one could once bring oneself to trust the effectiveness of ones drug, he was quite sure that there was a variation of dose which might usefully be employed.
Dr. Fergie-Woods said that, as to what was a high potency and what a low, one way of looking at it war to take the point at which nothing further could be found by known scientific methods. That was about the sixth potency. From that point of view, he would say that up to the sixth were low potencies, and beyond that high. It was still matter, of course, but matter in a form which could only be detected by special instruments such as the emanometer and by the ordinary physical tests.
How was one to decide whether to give a high potency or a low potency? Dr. Wheeler had given most of the points on that. Three cardinal factors were: (1) The remedy, (2) The stage of the disease, (3) The patient. With a very sensitive patient of artistic type, one should start low, because such a patient was subject to aggravations started if one with a high potency. As for the nature of the disease, when there was more organic change a lower potency should be given to avoid excessive reaction.
As for the remedy, there were certain ones with which he always started low, no matter what the nature of the case, partly because those remedies, he had learned, were specially suited to the very sensitive type. Two of them were Phosphorus and Lachesis. When he got either of those remedies indicated he started no higher than the twelfth.
Dr. Le Hunte Cooper said Dr. Rorkes “points” necessarily involved “the relative value” of Homoeopathy, and the older methods which was of very great importance at the present time.
Dr. Rorke had chosen his points very well. because they were the very ones on which homoeopaths branched out from the Old School.
The danger of Homoeopathic being ignored by the dictatorial proposals of the Beveridge plan, and its very existence being imperiled, made it incumbent upon them to emphasize the greater efficacy of their methods in dealing with disease. At the present time, the medical world is obsessed with the various “Sulphanilamide” preparations, which deal with disease conditions purely from the antiseptic, and anti-bacterial point of view, and it is danger of overlooking the fact that the most scientific way of combating disease is to strengthen the bodily resistance to it, which Homoeopathy alone can achieve effectively.
The word “potency” must call up in the uninitiated medical mind something very different from the Homoeopathic conception, for homoeopaths do not regard the “power” of a remedy as dependent on the amount of physiological disturbance it can evoke, but on its effectiveness in stimulating the body resistance to disease factors.
The usual professional concept of giving “the maximum quantity of a remedy short of poisoning the patient is translated by us into giving “the quantity of the remedy which best brings out its curative effect.”.
In a plea for “simplifying prescribing” made, when President of the British Homoeopathic Society (as it then was) he. Dr. Cooper, had dealt with the “potency question” as it appealed to him. This was based on some years work with unit doses of mother tinctures, and various potencies, and he had no reason for changing the conclusions he then arrived at.
First, it must be recognized that their aim was to “cure,” that is “to rid the system of all evidence of ill-health, so that this did not return when treatment was stopped.” To achieve this it was necessary to allow sufficient time for reactive forces set free by the remedy to act, before repeating the remedial stimulus, otherwise the results obtained were mainly palliative. Recoveries under antiseptics, or bactericides, could not be regarded as “cure”. It was well known that crude substances, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, too frequently repeated, could not cure; but they could do so, in appropriate circumstances, if the doses were repeated at sufficiently long intervals. His own fathers work proved this conclusively, at any rate in the case of the vegetable kingdom.
