Hyderabad-Deccan.
For some time I have been sorely puzzled and despondent about our lack of clinical progress in Homoeopathy. It seems as if we are basking in the sunshine and the glory of the early pioneers who blazed a trail to put Homoeopathy on the map. But most of them belonged to the past generation. The present generation has thrown up hardly one of giant intellect or calibre to keep up our art at high pressure.
I am wondering what that is due to. I well remember my teacher. Ulenhuth, telling us what the great Behring told him: “Ulenhuth, when we started some years ago, we made a famous discovery almost every day in our bacteriology. Now knowledge has grown so vast that there is very little new to discover, except after much searching.” I wonder whether our knowledge of Homoeopathy has reached the limits of the ultimate; or whether we have stagnated because Allopathy has made such gigantic strides, building up mountains of isolated facts in such plethora that they cannot be used or co-ordinated.
Before me lies a price list of medical journals running into several pages. As usual, it hails from the U.S.A., since no other country can afford so many medical specialities, such expensive specialised medical journals, and so many shiny household gadgets.
Against this impressive and stupendous array of Allopathic journals, there are only two American Journals, to my knowledge, in Homoeopathy which are struggling to remain alive. An excellent journal, one like the Pacific Coast Journal of Homoeopathy had to close down. What is the reason for our lack of progress? As an allopath I am patiently and painfully wading through a large number of their journals to see where exactly the allopaths have made a break through to some definite law of cure.
As far I can see they have been merely gilding the lily with a tremendous amount of technical detail, meticulous exactness, and conscientious check up of results, all of which I am forced to admire and approve of. Yet, as an Allopath, I am all at sea if I refuse to be merely a rule-of-thumb follower of Allopathic practice. As an average, well-trained allopath, I am confused with the mass of specialised development that is taking place daily, which hardly a general practitioner can apply in his daily practice, and which hardly one of my poor patients can afford to pay for without going into insolvency.
Just recently two of my friends, who had been hitting the U.S., thought they might just drop into one of the big clinics for a general checkup. One got into the Mayo Clinic and was presented with a bill for 1600 Dollars for a two days stay and the other paid 750 dollars in a single day for diagnosis of his asthma which he brought back to India intact and as strong as ever. Only two years ago I was taught by Parke Davis and Co, and not by the University pharmacologists, that over two million injections of Mapharsen have proved that that is the drug of choice for the treatment of Syphilis of every Tom, Dick and Harry.
Today the Romansky peanut oil and bees-wax impregnated with Penicillin is the last word. Not to inject an ampule costing Rupees 48 each daily for ten days would be unscientific and criminal. At the same time it is gently hinted that one should be careful not to rouse a Henxheimer or Artus phenomena and quite a number of severe reactions that may involve the nervous and cardio-vascular systems. The term “Biological Cure” is shelved since KOLMER has frankly doubted whether a biological cure is possible.
What is more, recently, I have the admission of one of the leading venereologists of India that, like the heavy mercurials and organical arsenicals, Penicillin and the Sulfa drugs hinder or destroy the natural defensive mechanism in the organism. They have also had to admit that these bacteriostats and anti-biotics hinder phagocytosis; so that often the dead bacteria act as foreign bodies and favour the formation of abscesses; for instance, in lobar pneumonias. I have had such cases. Yet with all their faults, I am constrained to praise the efforts of the allopaths to check up their results continually.
Do we do the same thing with our science of Homoeopathy? Is it that we are bound to fail in our investigations because, in contradistinction to the Allopath who deals with the ponderables, we come in our attempts face to face with two immeasurable and permanent mysteries Man, the unknown, and Life which we cannot know except its manifestations? Must it a always mean that Hahnemann was right when he said that we cannot know the processes of a mans illness except through the language expressed in symptoms of ill-health?
A hundred and fifty years after Hahnemann had said it in as clear and simple form as possible I find it being repeated today by THEWLIS: “In the pre – disease period there are no specific symptoms, except a feeling of ill-health, weariness and inexplicable fatigue, and sometimes not even that. The consciousness of ill-health is the only preclinical sign given by the patient. Each clue achieves its significance only in relation to the whole. The data obtained after a thorough study provide a synthetic pattern which is enlightening. It is the organism as a whole that must be studied.”.
“The Goal of preclinical medicine is the study and interpretation of pre-clinical states, disease soils, pre- disease, constitutional factors, conditioning periods, and disease tendencies. Through a study of pre-clinical states a synthetic diagnosis is obtained, an analysis of disease- tendencies is made, and probabilities weighed. Pre-clinical therapy attacks the disease “soil” long before the symptom stage is reached. Unfortunately, when Roentgenographic studies or blood tests show up disease, it is often too late for successful intervention”.
I ask: Is this unconscious Hahnemannism? And if one were to follow the elaborate technique of DR. THEWLIS. there is not a single hospital in India, or even in Great Britain can carry out these instructions in all their detail, leave alone the general practitioner and his poverty stricken patients in India. And when we remember that of all medical activity 87 p.c. is general medicine, one can imagine the disastrous state of the allopathic general practitioner who has to follow a line of activity which becomes more and more complicated from day to day.
In short, allopathic science has become a sort of Frankenstein monster whose appetite is whetted all the sharper, the more it eats. When it comes to therapeutics of internal medicine, the colossus with the feet of clay Allopathy, has, according to a recent Medical Letter of the U.S.O.W.I., not more than seven drugs of proved merit, and altogether 14 of secondary value for all the ills the flesh is heir to. Yet, can I always afford to do without the aid of their diagnostic technique? I have been so badly let down several times merely by the symptomatic that I have been forced to resort to allopathic organic assessment in order to know what is curable and what is not.
These are the problems that are worrying me and, may be, others who cannot accept the dictum that the similia is the one and only law of cure in every case. I am always suspicious when I get cases of relay vomiting of long duration. Detailed history will always show that some years previous, duodenitis or duodenal ulcer symptoms were present. They disappear and sour relay vomiting set in with emaciation, and “the stomach seems to develop an ability to select foods that it wishes to eject; and food taken in recently is retained and the food ingested previously is thrown out” (Jousset).
In most cases there is a pyloro-stenosis either benign or malignant, and I have not seen Ornithogalum. Phosphorus or any drug selected under the similimum prevail against it. A barium meal screening will tell me that my drugs are of no use. At least I have failed very badly, may be due to my incomplete mastery of the similimum. Only recently I have been using Thiosinamin 2x and I cannot say what the results will be.
YET WONDERS HAPPEN. And I have seen them happen. There are two young women alive today who were brought to me with all the clear-cut symptoms of abdominal tuberculosis. Both had incessant vomiting, the hectic temperature, the great emaciation due to inanition, the doughy abdomen like a band showing the matting of the omentum. Neither of them could retain even a drop of liquid. Both craved for ice; both had diarrhoea on lying on the left side; and Phosphorus, Abrotanum and Magnesia mur cured them completely when the allopathic prognosis seemed grave.
I had a case of an old Mohammedan who had clear cavitation in the left lung and a type of cough which gave me only Hepar Sulf in repertorization. I have been warned that Hepar sulf is dangerous in pulmonary phthisis. Yet, one single dose of Hepar Sulf 200 cured his cough and sacrificed the cavity and he is alive today.
I had a case of a contractor who was thrown out of hospital with the diagnosis of cancer of the liver. The edge was hard and the surface knobbed. I never dreamt that Ptelea trifoliata 30, merely on the peculiar symptoms, would make the hard liver disappear. Perhaps the diagnosis was wrong.
